Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism

Radical Cosmopolitics

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

Amy Allen, General Editor

New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen

Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee

The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara

Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero

Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser

Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth

States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones

Democracy in What State? Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek

Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller

The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst

The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova

The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr

Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa

Radical Cosmopolitics

The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism

James D. Ingram

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53641-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ingram, James D., 1972–

Radical cosmopolitics : the ethics and politics of democratic universalism /

James D. Ingram.

pages cm — (New directions in critical theory)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16110-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Cosmopolitanism. 2. Cosmopolitanism—Philosophy. I. Title

JZ1308.1464     2013

306.2—dc23          2013002293

Jacket design: Noah Arlow

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Cosmopolitan Revival and Its Reversals

From Cosmopolitanism to Cosmopolitics

Cosmopolitanism as a Problem in Practical Philosophy

Kantian Conundrums and a Critical-Democratic Alternative

PART 1. COSMOPOLITANISM FROM THE TOP DOWN

1. Universalism in History

A Short History of Western Cosmopolitanisms

A Fin de Siècle Renaissance

2. Cosmopolitanism in Ethics: Tensions of the Universal

The Problem of the Human: Anthropological Universalism

From the Standpoint of Redemption: Procedural Universalism

3. Cosmopolitism in Politics: Realizing the Universal

Achieving Perpetual Peace: Right, Progress, Publicity

Cosmopolitan Democracy, Cosmopolitical Dilemmas

PART 2. COSMOPOLITICS FROM THE BOTTOM UP

4. Rethinking Ethical Cosmopolitanism: From Universalism to Universalization

Universalism as the Critique of False Universals

The Measure of Equality

5. Rethinking Political Cosmopolitanism: From Democracy to Democratization

Democracy as Political Action

Democratic Universalism as Cosmopolitics

6. Cosmopolitics in Practice: The Politics of Human Rights

Human Rights Politics as Implementation

Human Rights Politics as Democratic Action

Conclusion

Three Realisms and Their Lessons

A Realism of Possibility

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like all attempts to say something about the universal, this book grew out of particular times, places, and conversations. Along the way I have been assisted in ways large and small, direct and indirect, by many people, only a small fraction of whom I can recognize here.

This book was first written as a dissertation at the New School for Social Research. I want to thank my advisors Jay Bernstein and Andreas Kalyvas and especially my supervisor, Nancy Fraser, for her tough questions, timely suggestions, and her wisdom and patience in allowing me to find my own way. I want to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for supporting the early stages of my doctoral research and the New School for Social Research for its Arnold Brecht dissertation fellowship. I want to thank my New School political theory comrades, especially Kyra Holland, Adam Lupel, Mariela Vargova, and ernesto Verdeja, for their solidarity, as well as my writing companions at Butler Library, especially Alex Gourevitch and Ian Zuckerman, for their fellowship and comments on various drafts. I owe an incalculable debt to Gil Anidjar, Nauman Naqvi, and above all Nermeen Shaikh for their friendship, support, and intellectual stimulation over many years.

I want to thank the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), as well as my sponsor at Potsdam University, Christoph Menke, for making possible an extended stay in Berlin, where the general outlines of this project took shape. Thanks to Rahel Jaeggi, Ina Kerner, Hartmut Rosa, and Martin Saar for making me feel intellectually at home in Berlin; to Arnd Pollmann for listening to my first sketch of the argument (and then suggesting that I write on Hegel instead); and to Robin Celikates and Felix Koch for many years of conversation and feedback on various ideas and eventually drafts.

In my postgraduate years, I want to thank my colleagues at the University of Oregon, especially Joe Lowndes and Priscilla Yamin, for their warm welcome. I have been very fortunate to find a congenial academic home at McMaster University, where I want to thank Robert O’Brien, Tony Porter, Peter Nyers, Peter Hallberg, John Seaman, and Catherine Frost. In returning to Toronto, I was lucky to join friends who are also valued interlocutors and readers, notably Phil Triadafilopoulos and Inder Marwah, as well as no doubt my longest-standing Gesprächspartnerin, my sister Susan. I owe a particular debt to Sylwia Chrostowska, without whose support and critical suggestions this book would not have attained its present form.

In the final stretches of this project I benefited from three exceptional opportunities. The first was a workshop on Cosmopolitanism and Postcolonialism at the University of Warwick, for which I am grateful to Gurminder Bhambra, Robert Fine, and John Holmwood. The second was a summer with the University of Frankfurt’s Justitia Amplificata group. My thanks to Rainer Forst, Stefan Gosepath, and those at the center for their invitation and for creating such a rich academic environment. The third was a workshop by the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal. I want to thank the participants, Delphine Abadie, Ryoa Chung, Jacob Levy, Dominique Leydet, Will Roberts, Hasana Sharpe, and especially Arash Abizadeh and Pablo Gilabert for their hospitality and intellectual generosity.

I am grateful to Amy Allen for finding a place for this book in her series and to her and Wendy Lochner of Columbia University Press for persevering through the publication process. Wendy found three excellent anonymous reviewers whom I thank for challenging me from three very different perspectives. Thanks to Tony Porter, Charlotte Yates, and the McMaster Arts Research Board for their last-minute support. Thanks finally to Susan Pensak for her sensitive editing, to her and Christine Dunbar for the seeing the book through to completion, and to Noah Arlow for his wonderful image. Parts of chapter 6 appeared as What Is a ‘Right to Have Rights’? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights, American Political Science Review 102, no. 4 (2008): 401–416. They appear here with permission.

I dedicate this book to my parents.

Introduction

THE COSMOPOLITAN REVIVAL AND ITS REVERSALS

Throughout its long history the idea of cosmopolitanism has never known such success as in the last two decades. We can postulate four reasons for this. The first was a widespread sense, captured in the word globalization, that the accelerating movements of people, money, goods, technologies, images, and ideas beyond national frontiers had crossed a threshold. Nearly all observers perceived a qualitative change in the way and the extent to which people related to, affected, and depended on one another across borders: the world seemed to be becoming more global—interconnected, interdependent, and, in this sense, unified. The second, closely related reason for cosmopolitanism’s appeal was what seemed like an inexorable rise of multilateralism, international coordination, and global governance. This trend had been widely remarked on earlier under the heading of complex interdependence, but it now emerged as a dominant trend. The third reason, in a sense setting the stage for the first two, was the end of Cold War geopolitical dualism. Even if the euphoria of 1989 faded with the proliferation of new conflicts and inequalities, it remained the case that the world was no longer divided along a single axis. And, emerging from this, was, fourth, the rise of human rights and democracy as a universal language of political justification. While this too began earlier, be it in the 1970s with the Helsinki Accords or even as early as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it peaked in the 1990s. Everyone everywhere now seemed to appeal to the same values, which decisively shunted aside those of socialism and Third World liberation. As on the geopolitical front, competing universalisms (state socialism and liberal capitalism) gave way to one (democracy and human rights), juxtaposed, if at all, to particularistic challengers whose claims were strictly local. The result was an optimism across broad swaths of the commentariat not seen since the end of World War II. Even many of those who were reluctant to see triumph of American-led capitalist liberal-democracy as the end of history nevertheless saw reason for hope in redirecting globalization toward more progressive ends.

All this can seem slightly unreal as we settle into the twenty-first century, when it might seem that the fin de siècle cosmopolitan tide has turned. Whereas just a few years ago cosmopolitanism connoted multilateralism, cooperation, and consensus, today the term seems more ambiguous. Of course, the financial bubble on which the more naive globalization boosterism of the nineties floated has burst and burst again, but it is above all in the political realm that the situation has changed beyond recognition. Although the centrality of the United States to the globalism of the nineties did not escape critical commentators, its full significance only seems to have become clear when the hyperpower shrugged off this role—or radically reconceived it—in favor of self-reliance and muscular unilateralism. This development, in turn, threatened to throw the only universalistic political project left standing after the collapse of actually existing socialism into confusion if not disrepute. Even among their proponents, there had already been talk of human rights and democracy as civilizationally specific values, born of, uniquely suited to, and likely to remain for some time confined to the advanced countries. Radical critics, meanwhile, had always suspected this language of being ideological. Both tendencies were reinforced as these values were invoked to defend what was discussed even by some of its supporters as a renewed imperialism. The discourse’s apparent hypocrisy became a rallying point in parts of the world aggrieved at the hegemon’s naked indifference to their dignity, autonomy, and interests, while, partly in response to this turn, the fissures between different branches of capitalist liberal democracy—notably within the divided West—widened.

These developments opened up fault lines within what had previously appeared a more or less unified, if plural, field of progressive cosmopolitanism. The fates of three tendencies in particular bear mention:

•     Some intellectuals and politicians who rallied around the universal values of human rights and democracy and its leading late-nineties expression, humanitarian intervention, found themselves defending these same values in the form of a reinvigorated Anglo-American imperialism. The effortless transition of many who advocated liberal cosmopolitanism in the 1990s to the self-conscious defense of empire lite in the 2000s—from Tony Blair to Michael Ignatieff—reflects the discomfiting fact that it was not the central values and arguments that changed, only their breadth of reference.

•     Meanwhile, social-democratic cosmopolitanism, represented, for example, by Jürgen Habermas, David Held, and Mary Kaldor, and based largely on hopes for international law and multilateral institutions, found its resonance increasingly limited to Europe, at odds not only with its traditional Atlantic partner but also with Europeans’ growing determination to erect walls against the extra-European world. Even as they clung to their Kantian hopes, it became more and more difficult for cosmopolitans of the center-left to connect their designs with any observable trends, and they downscaled their globalism first to European regionalism, then to a desperate defense of Europe’s social-democratic potential even as it threatened to collapse.

•     Finally, the nascent bottom-up, left cosmopolitanism born in the jungles of Chiapas, the streets of Seattle, and the plazas of Porto Alegre appeared to have lost much of its momentum. In part this was because of its absorption into the global movement against the US-led war, in part because it all but disappeared from the Western media in the years immediately after 9/11. If flashes of democratic political energy continued to appear, from the electoral successes of the Latin American left to the Arab Spring, they seemed to represent a rejection of the main trends of globalization at least as much as its possible expressions.

In all three cases, then, what seemed like a universalistic advocacy of democracy and human rights was revealed to be all too particular in its conception, its social-political bases, and its effects.

If one consequence of these developments was to scramble the geopolitical-ideological matrix in which cosmopolitan visions had perhaps been too easily discerned, another was to refute the idea that cosmopolitanism be understood simply as the working out of (the progressive side of) the tendencies of late modernity. To this extent, one option commonly taken up even by critical commentators in the late nineties has now been definitely ruled out: the notion that the realization of the cosmopolitan ideal could be imagined in terms of convergence, as a vanishing point at which the gradual enlightenment of the powerful and the rightful claims of the powerless, the reform potentials of international institutions and the problems to which they had to respond, would someday meet. Unlike in the 1990s, when cosmopolitans could find at least intimations of their designs in the words and actions of the powerful, today a democratic, egalitarian universalism can only be conceived as counterhegemonic. And, if we are to learn from and profit by the reversals of the recent past, then it seems to make sense to construct such a new universalism precisely out of a critique of what was self-defeating in the earlier cosmopolitanism.

In this book I try to rethink the emancipatory idea of cosmopolitanism in light of this constellation, in a way that is cognizant not only of the challenges to progressive universalism but also of the endless lures for which it has fallen—of which the liberal-capitalist globalism of the 1990s or the revived civilizationalism of the 2000s were only the latest. I want to absorb the lesson that cosmopolitanism is only ever contextual and conjunctural, that it always responds to particular challenges, constraints, and possibilities, but, at the same time, that it can be defined by the stubborn will to preserve universalistic aspirations. I propose to do this by reimagining cosmopolitanism as first and foremost a politics. There is a large literature—arguably as old as the genre itself, but whose paradigmatic modern figure is Immanuel Kant—that approaches cosmopolitanism in terms of the principles and institutions required for peace and justice on a global scale. This literature reflects a pervasive and largely taken-for-granted division of labor between ethics and politics: first we decide by means of ethics what we should aim at, then we turn to politics to accomplish it. I believe this approach is mistaken, that it does not and cannot work, that it results in a pervasive unreality concerning both ethics and politics, and, as so spectacularly in the early years of the new century, that it ends up undermining the very ideals it seeks to advance.

This book tries to offer an alternative. Instead of pursuing cosmopolitanism first in ethics and then in politics, I seek to treat the ethical and the political together. Instead of approaching cosmopolitanism first in theory and then in practice, I seek a theory of its practice. For cosmopolitan ethics, this means a shift from the search for universal values on the basis of which particular judgments can be made to locating these values in the particular conflicts through which universals are articulated. And it requires seeing cosmopolitan politics not as a series of steps toward a goal that defines the enterprise as a whole, but rather as located in the contestatory practices that make up those steps. What follows from this is a conception of cosmopolitanism as a politics of freedom and equality, one that is critical, reflexive, democratic, and squarely in line with the Enlightenment ideal—although, as will emerge, at some distance from its more familiar versions. This conception emerges primarily through a consideration of how cosmopolitanism as it is usually understood goes astray, so that much of the book is given over to showing how and why it must be radically reformulated. The book’s first half is accordingly devoted to exploring the ambiguities and contradictions, first of cosmopolitanism in general, then of the specifically modern version we find in Kant and his followers. The second half then seeks to develop an alternative by rethinking cosmopolitanism as what I call a critical-democratic politics of universalization, finally illustrating this approach by using it to rethink the politics of human rights.

FROM COSMOPOLITANISM TO COSMOPOLITICS

Since its invention some twenty-five hundred years ago, cosmopolitanism has come and gone repeatedly in Western thought and can be discovered in other intellectual traditions as well.¹ While the meaning of the term has varied considerably, its central proposition, embedded in its etymology, is that one is, or can and should be, a citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism thus expresses the fact, possibility, or imperative of a certain universality, an actual or potential oneness of humankind. At the same time, as the word’s second half indicates, it has never ceased to be a political idea. It points out, recommends, or demands that one is or should be not merely part of the world or some larger whole (the kosmos)—a child of the universe or some such notion—but its citizen (politĕs), a Weltbürger.² Here we encounter the idea’s central difficulty: citizenship and politics itself sprang from the ground of the polis, a much smaller unit than the world, at a time when the world had not yet been compassed. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, nobody can be a citizen of the world as he is the citizen of his country.³ The world is not, never has been, and shows no immediate prospect of coming to be organized such that one could be a citizen of it in any straightforward way. The question posed by cosmopolitanism, then, is the following: what is the meaning of this insistence on the political nature of our relation to humanity or the world as whole—an insistence that, despite its myriad difficulties, has persisted over two and a half millennia? And how should we understand it today?

A brief survey of the idea’s history, which I undertake in the first half of chapter 1, leaves us with no dearth of options. Should we understand cosmopolitanism as it seems to have been meant by its (imputed) inventor, Diogenes the Cynic—that is, negatively, as a denial of the exclusivity and binding nature of all memberships smaller than humanity and, in particular, the specifically political ones of city, empire, kingdom, or state? Should we understand it as a sort of metaphor, one positing that we are all members of some virtual political realm above and beyond the polis? As an ethical ideal, an attitude or way of life distinguished by its openness to all the world’s cultures and peoples and a refusal to be enclosed within any of them? As an expression of moral universalism, of the idea that all human beings are subject to a single moral code or that all of them—including the most distant—deserve our consideration and respect? Or as a practical imperative, a demand for universal institutions that would enable us to be world citizens in something approaching the full sense of the word? And therefore as a political project, a task to be pursued by political means (whatever we take these to be)?

This book focuses on the last four of these meanings, which together map the frontiers of moral-ethical and political cosmopolitanism. Before turning to this critical and reconstructive task, there are important lessons to be learned from the idea’s history. As the roster of options just invoked and chapter 1 make clear, one thing this history shows is that the nature and implications of cosmopolitanism never go without saying. Cosmopolitanisms, like universalisms, have been moral and political, but also religious, cultural, economic, etc.—in each case conceived against a historically specific matrix of social, ethical, cultural, and institutional conditions that these very qualifiers only very roughly and anachronistically approximate. Another thing this review shows is the manifest failure of every cosmopolitanism to date to live up to its universal vocation. As Timothy Brennan puts it: If we wished to capture the essence of cosmopolitanism in a single formula, it would be this. It is a discourse of the universal that is inherently local—a locality that’s always surreptitiously imperial.⁴ All ethical and political visions that have aspired to universality have ended up betraying it. Cosmopolitanism has been intimately tied to world-spanning empires and proselytizing religions; it has been carried by a stubborn elitism that runs from its classical origins to today’s globe-trotting elites; it has inspired and justified many of history’s most devastating projects, from holy war through colonialism and Communism to capitalist globalization.

Yet it is equally clear that, despite all these disappointments and reversals, universalistic aspirations persist—in large part, I will argue, because experience has shown that perversions of the universal are most effectively fought on the ground of the universal. Between a panorama of the cosmopolitan tradition and a close reading of a recent debate that revived it as a response to globalization, then, chapter 1 tries to outline the generic character of cosmopolitanism. I want to insist that while cosmopolitanisms, like universalisms, are always particular, there is a logic that unites them. Although each cosmopolitanism arises within and against a particular context, what all of them share is a way of relating to these contexts. What Diogenes the Cynic has in common with Cicero, Saint Paul with Kant, Marx with Martha Nussbaum, in other words, is not best pursued at the level of the content of their respective ideas, though there are naturally points of overlap as well as differences. It is rather the kind of interruption they introduce into their respective discursive and political situations. Cosmopolitanism, I propose, can to this extent be generally identified by its formal features, by the way it differs from and the kinds of objections it makes against what is. It is—to anticipate—a way of posing specific, local, morally and practically motivated challenges to particular denials of the logic of universality.

This is the key to how I think about universalism in this book. The universal, I argue, cannot be articulated directly. It is better conceived as a particular kind of disruption of and challenge to existing ideas, institutions, and allegiances. Cosmopolitanism, on the view I put forth here, should not be understood in terms of its content, as a blueprint, a roadmap, or a design, but as an ideal and a project. It is an ideal that can be and has been invoked from a wide range of historical, social, political, and cultural locations, each time reflecting those specificities while also seeking to transcend them. Its unity therefore lies in the form or direction of these attempts, in their efforts to transcend rather than in the precise aim of transcendence, in the valence of their seeking more than in what specifically is sought. Moreover, the cosmopolitan impulse to universalization gives rise to a political demand and therefore also a project: to overcome the obstacles to realizing the equal freedom and dignity of every human being everywhere. I argue that we can best affirm cosmopolitanism today as a critical politics of universalization, a practice that asserts universal values against what denies them here and now. It is such a cosmopolitics, rather than another utopian vision or doctrine of cosmopolitanism, that I seek to articulate here.

I am not the first to propose a shift from cosmopolitanism to cosmopolitics. Daniele Archibugi, for instance, uses the latter term to point out that the scope of politics has long been global: ‘Cosmopolitics’ already exists, but it is still confined to too narrow a group of institutions, as the protests of new mass movements continually remind us.⁵ What remains, for him, as for many cosmopolitan moral and political theorists, is to figure out how this politics can be made to serve justice. Bruce Robbins employs the term to call attention to the fact that universalism is a domain of contested politics, a field of diverse and highly particular struggles that must be understood not as universal reason in disguise, but as one on a series of scales, as an area both within and beyond the nation (and yet falling short of ‘humanity’) that is inhabited by a variety of cosmopolitanisms.⁶ For him as for many in the cultural sciences, the theoretical task is to map the diversity of these manifestations and the possible relations between them. Étienne Tassin uses the term cosmopolitics to characterize the politics of a common world, understood as a reorientation of political actions conducted within various public spaces yet aiming at the world.⁷ He thus joins many political theorists in reminding us that although this politics goes on within a global horizon, it is always irreducibly local. And for Jacques Derrida the term indicates that, although fueled by universalistic aspirations, cosmopolitanism must play out in the world of dilemmas and hard choices, from cultural and institutional starting points and with philosophical and political tools that are never equal to its aspirations. As he put it in the title (lost in translation) of a 1996 lecture, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!⁸ cosmopolitans often (though not always) have a country and with it a particular place in and way of looking at the world. They aspire to, but can never occupy, the place of the universal. Thus, like the French revolutionaries to whom the rallying call Encore un effort! (Try again!) was famously addressed, they can only do so by constantly renewing their efforts, all the while knowing that those efforts may be perverted.⁹

COSMOPOLITANISM AS A PROBLEM IN PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

While I want ultimately to locate cosmopolitanisms in the world of political practice, in a paradox appreciated by Derrida no less than by other central figures in this study—Arendt and Marx, Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, even Kant himself—I seek to articulate it in theoretical terms. As I have indicated, the cosmopolitanism I consider here is a discourse in normative practical philosophy, the subfield of practical philosophy (reflection on action) that considers what we should do.¹⁰ Within this realm, it is conventional to distinguish between two different types of inquiry: ethics and morality, on the one hand, and politics, on the other. Ethics and moral theory take up questions of individual life and action, the good life, permissible and impermissible action, duties and obligations, and so on.¹¹ Political theory, by contrast, takes up questions of collective life and action, justice and order, freedom and authority, legitimacy and power, etc. While analytically the moral-ethical and the political can be distinguished, when we consider the practical domain from a normative point of view, in terms of what we ought to do, they turn out to be deeply intertwined. Good or right actions might be necessary to—or, alternatively, in tension with—achieving a just society; a just society might be regarded as the precondition or measure of a good life or right action. The moral-ethical and the political condition and impinge on one another. Analytically, however, they can be distinguished: morality and ethics concern individual life and action; politics concerns collective life and action.

If I dwell on this distinction, it is because the relation between the moral-ethical and the political—and moral-ethical and political theory—will be central to my concerns. Cosmopolitanism begins as a moral-ethical position. As such, it insists that we take everyone else into account, regardless of whether we happen to share a political (social, cultural, etc.) community with them. How precisely we should do this, what exactly it is that is to be extended to everyone, varies according to one’s moral-ethical perspective. It can be charity or benevolence, assistance or solidarity, consideration or respect, concern or regard—whatever expresses moral-ethical attention within a given framework. What counts, and what unites moral-ethical cosmopolitanisms, is their scope: they are universal. On this point the differences between cosmopolitan moral-ethical frameworks—between Peter Singer’s utilitarianism, Onora O’Neill’s Kantianism, or Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelianism¹²—are less significant than what they have in common: the principle that culture, creed, sex, age, and, above all, political membership cannot justify a failure to grant another human being full moral attention, concern, or respect. In this, cosmopolitan ethics often has an air of platitude, since a hallmark—on some accounts, a defining characteristic—of morality is generality. We do not say, Do unto others… Maximize the happiness of the greatest number… or "Respect the humanity of every person… unless they carry a different passport (or none at all), speak another language, or live more than a certain distance away." Moral-ethical cosmopolitanism is simply affirmation of the elementary inclusiveness of the moral universe. For this reason, it generally takes the form of pointing out arbitrary limitations on the scope of our moral concern, which ordinarily have not been registered as limitations prior to being pointed out.

Political cosmopolitanism is a more difficult matter, for its question is what this basic moral-ethical starting point—the idea that everyone should be the object of our concern, respect, attention, etc.—implies for politics, the domain of collective action and organization. The short answer is almost nothing, or nothing directly. A longer answer is that the implications can be extremely far-reaching, overturning most of our assumptions about citizenship, legitimacy, justice, and all the other central concepts of political reflection, but they are almost totally indeterminate. Although it is hard to imagine a political cosmopolitanism that makes no reference to the imperative of universal moral-ethical concern, the imperative itself does not take us very far.

Like moral-ethical cosmopolitanism, political cosmopolitanism begins by pointing out an exclusion that has been overlooked. The starting point of cosmopolitan political theory in the 1990s was the (re)discovery of the inadequacy of the state as a container of politics and justice. This was revolutionary insofar as political philosophy (as the name suggests) almost invariably assumes a polis—or its contemporary analogue, a state—as its field of reflection. It is only a small exaggeration to say that all the classics of Western political theory, from Plato to Rawls, address the questions of justice, order, authority, legitimacy, etc. within a bounded community. As with statistics in newspapers, this arbitrary restriction so often goes without saying that when a philosopher calls attention to it—when Plato recommends a city of 5,040 adult men or Rawls stipulates a complete and closed social system, self-sufficient, with a place for all the main purposes of human life¹³—we cannot but be struck by the failure of the restriction to correspond to the obvious fact that people seldom fit neatly into a single community and that their interactions and above all the effects of their actions on others endlessly confound boundaries. To this extent, as soon as such restrictions on the scope of politics and justice are called into question, they are found wanting.

The indeterminacy of the transition from moral-ethical to political cosmopolitanism makes itself felt, however, when we move beyond pointing out the arbitrary limitation (of the state or the bounded political community) and try to specify positively what a universalistic politics would be. Shifting from ethics to politics is usually taken to involve asking what (rights, resources, responsibilities, etc.) should be extended to whom. In short, it asks how a more just world would be organized. Here it is typically a matter of deducing, in light of what we know about social and political organization, the implications of indefinitely expanding the scope of rights, duties, institutions, and so on so as to conform to cosmopolitan morality—questions that might arise in ethics or moral philosophy and are far from easy. This corresponds to what political theorists usually call ideal theory (even if they disagree about how ideal this theory should be). This is sometimes, though less often, accompanied by another form of investigation, nonideal or applied theory, which asks to what extent the imperatives discovered or developed by ideal theory could be realized. But even this does not broach politics as such, for it still seeks to simply transfer the insights of moral or ethical reflection onto the world. This is what R. B. J. Walker has in mind when he reproaches cosmopolitan theorizing for avoiding the transition from the ethical to the political, affirming the priority of universality over particularity, and … appealing to traditions of humanitarian ethics rather than to questions about the possibilities of politics.¹⁴

To seriously consider the politics of universalism, I will argue in this book, we must go further and ask how these rights, resources, etc. are to be redistributed, by whom, and what the practical consequences and implications of doing so are likely to be. These latter questions require us to assess present potentials and possibilities in order to say how such a world might be realized—a matter of strategy, agency, and probable or foreseeable consequences. Especially in recent decades, political theory has tended to focus on the first set of questions to the neglect of the latter. A central argument of this book is that this metatheoretical preference has tended to subvert the very universalism cosmopolitanism is committed to advancing. This is the problem, so built into the dominant forms of political reflection that it is seldom even identified as such, that I try to respond to in the book’s second half. I do so by mobilizing the insights of a minor tradition within political theory to overcome the rift between the ideal and the political, as well as the subordination of the latter to the former. First, however, let me explain why I see cosmopolitanism as a privileged place for interrogating the relation between ethics or morality and politics.

It is when we turn our gaze abroad, beyond our communities, nations, and accustomed frames of reference, that the appalling state of our social organization becomes most glaring. The inequities that emerge when we broaden our view to the global level are so indisputable, the violence and degradation they cause so overwhelming, that one is tempted to see such injustice not as relative but as absolute. One staple of cosmopolitan writings, whatever their philosophical stripe and specific provisions, is a catalogue of outrageous instances of global wrongs. Martha Nussbaum, drawing on the UNDP’s 2003 Human Development Report, furnishes a typical example:

A child born in Sweden today has a life expectancy at birth of 79.9 years. A child born in Sierra Leone has a life expectancy at birth of 34.5 years. In the United States, gross domestic product per capita is $34,320; in Sierra Leone it is $470. Twenty-four nations among the 175 surveyed by the United Nations Development Programme have GDP per capita over $20,000. Sixteen nations have GDP per capita under $1,000. Eighty-three nations are under $5,000, and 126 nations are under $10,000. Adult literacy rates in the top 20 nations are around 99 percent. In Sierra Leone the literacy rate is 36 percent. In 24 nations the adult literacy rate is under 50 percent.¹⁵

We might consider the staggering wrongness of the world this way: justifications are often proffered, by political theorists as well as governments, for the general state of affairs within particular countries. No one attempts this with the world as a whole. This is not only because the organization of the world is so manifestly unjustifiable. It is also because, whereas particular people (in some places, We, the People) are in principle responsible for what happens within a particular country, no one bears this responsibility globally. It is on the global level that moral failure and political incapacity are at their apogee.

But there are also historical-philosophical reasons for seeing cosmopolitanism as a privileged vantage point for considering the intersection of morality and politics, which arise from the modern self-understanding. It is characteristically modern to think of our ideas and aspirations as unconditional, unlimited, and independent of anything outside of them- and ourselves.¹⁶ Captured in different theoretical idioms by the idea that modernity is autonomous, reflexive, or postmetaphysical, this means that modern philosophy, like modern politics, is condemned to be responsible for and to itself and only itself, to respect no limits other than those it sets for itself. In philosophy this means that critical reflection can find no resting place in nature or tradition, religion or metaphysics, but must in the end answer to what Kant called the tribunal of reason, which is to say to nothing other than rational reflection itself. In practical affairs it means that concern for others, like demands for equal freedom and dignity, variously expressed by political movements for liberalism, democracy, and socialism, is equally unlimited, so that there is no internal limit to what these principles should mean or to whom they could apply. In this sense, modernity, in thought as well as in politics, is condemned to be both critical and universalistic—and indefinitely so. Cosmopolitanism, as I understand it, is a central expression of this tendency.

It may seem to follow from this that the task for cosmopolitans is to embrace the tradition of emancipatory, egalitarian universalism, often promoted in recent discussions under the banner of Enlightenment or the project of modernity. The lesson of my examination of the history of cosmopolitanisms, however, is that this cannot suffice. Even the best-intentioned universalisms, we will see, have a way of turning into their opposite, of proclaiming a highly particular project or set of values as universal, and on that basis justifying violence against or rule over others. Indeed, avoiding what Foucault called Enlightenment blackmail is not only a matter of intellectual scruple;¹⁷ it is a matter of political urgency. Terms like Enlightenment, modernity, civilization, reason, and indeed cosmopolitanism have long been used to justify the exercise of power. Today this dynamic has once again become central to the rhetoric of world politics. The irony is that this effectively reduces these ideals, which for their advocates are the very essence of universalism, into a sort of identity politics, a set of historically and culturally specific values possessed by some and not by others, to be imposed by the strong on the weak. Such an appropriation makes universalism not only particularistic, but an ideology of domination. If we allow ourselves to become trapped in this game, democracy, equality, and human rights come to mean taking the side of that which we should ordinarily be most suspicious, namely, those who already enjoy an unjustifiable share of the world’s power and resources.

If democracy and human rights are to be truly universal, they must be appropriable from anywhere, by anyone. Above all, they must not become the property of some particular community or tradition. May aim is therefore to redeem what is worthy and enduring in universalistic emancipatory struggles—liberalism, democracy, socialism, anticolonialism, feminism, antiracism, etc.—without allowing them to be used for the legitimation of power. In this sense, this book can be understood as an attempt to rescue cosmopolitanism from cosmopolitans.

KANTIAN CONUNDRUMS AND A CRITICAL-DEMOCRATIC ALTERNATIVE

Aside from a negation of the negation of moral and political particularism and a call to indefinitely broaden the scope of our moral-ethical concern and political responsibility, what is cosmopolitanism? In line with most commentators, I take its content first and foremost from the thinker who remains its single most important inspiration and model, Immanuel Kant. Not only is Kant a central author of the expansive vision of modernity I just evoked; he is also