The Fundamental Contradiction of Modern Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This article is a study of that eminently European contribution to world politics: the idea of cosmopolitanism. The argument is that modern cosmopolitanism depends on two postulates which are contradictory. Cosmopolitans have always claimed, “There are two cities, one higher and one lower.” Modern cosmopolitans, however, claim, without abandoning the first postulate, “There is only one city.” In this article I ask four questions which enable the contradiction between these to be illustrated. These are: Is the cosmopolis the higher of two cities? Is it a community of men and gods? What is the criterion of inclusion in it? How free is one to be cosmopolitan? Along the way I clarify what I consider the fundamental contradiction of modern cosmopolitanism to be by distinguishing it from what I call the fundamental problem and the fundamental paradox of cosmopolitanism.

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Aron Telegdi-Csetri and Viorela Ducu for organising a very interesting conference in Bucharest in 2011, and to some of the speakers, especially Garrett Brown, Elena Trubina and the late Gary Banham, for vinous and vigorous conversation. This paper originated in thoughts I had before and after that conference. I have done greater battle with editors over this article than over any other I have written. The etymological root of the word ‘debate’ is, interestingly, the same as that of the word ‘battle’: but I found very few journals willing to engage in debate. It was rejected by seven journals, if not summarily, then usually on grounds of incomprehension. I am grateful, therefore, to the editors of The European Legacy for showing some faith in someone who is sceptical about cosmopolitan arguments.

Notes

1. Costas Douzinas, “The Metaphysics of Cosmopolitanism,” in After Cosmopolitanism, ed. Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, Bolette Blaagaard (London: Routledge, 2013), 57–76.

2. See, for instance, Pippa Norris and Richard Inglehart, eds., Cosmopolitan Communications: Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

3. See Zlatko Skrbis and Ian Woodward, Cosmopolitanism: Uses of the Idea (London: Sage, 2013), 4–5, for a remarkable list.

4. Catherine McKinnon, “Cosmopolitan Hope,” in The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, ed. Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

5. Samuel Scheffler, “Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism,” in Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 109.

6. Gerard Delanty, Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

7. Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, 2d ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 183.

8. Michael Oakeshott, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926–51, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2007), 97.

9. See, among others, beginning at the head of the alphabet, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Allen Lane, 2006), Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), Gillian Brock, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and Garrett Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism: From Kant to the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

10. W. E. H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1865), vol. 2, 107.

11. Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism, 29.

12. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, 45–46.

13. See, respectively, Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), and Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).

14. See Derek Heater, World Citizenship and Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Western Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 1996), and Jens Bartelson, Visions of World Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

15. M. H. Boehm, “Cosmopolitanism,” in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Edwin Seligman (London: Macmillan, 1931), vol. 4, 460–61.

16. The Politics of Aristotle, trans. and intro. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), lix–lx.

17. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), vol. 2, 39.

18. Malcolm Schofield, “Social and Political Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. Keimpe Algra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 768.

19. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), 498.

20. Bartelson, Visions of World Community, 16.

21. Braidotti, Hanafin, Blaagaard, After Cosmopolitanism, 3.

22. See Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, 19, Delanty, Cosmopolitan Imagination, 5, and David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideas and Realities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 50.

23. Braidotti, Hanafin, Blaagaard, After Cosmopolitanism, 2.

24. See, usefully, Jeremy Waldron “What is Cosmopolitan?” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000): 227–43.

25. See David Held, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order,” in Brock and Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, 26, and Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.

26. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959), 51.

27. Katrin Flikshuh, “Kant’s Kingdom of Ends: Metaphysical not Political,” in Kant’s ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’: A Critical Guide, ed. Jens Timmermans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

28. Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

29. Catherine Lu, “The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000): 257.

30. Ulrich Beck and Johannes Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 181.

31. Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2001).

32. Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideas and Realities, 14.

33. Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity,” in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2007), 83.

34. Bartelson, Visions of World Community, 3, 2.

35. Bartelson, Visions of World Community, 174.

36. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 73.

37. Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93. Emphasis added.

38. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 204.

39. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36.

40. Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectuals Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 11–12.

41. David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

42. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 71.

43. Cicero, De Re Publica, De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 321–23.

44. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 632.

45. Bartelson, Visions of World Community, 139, 181.

46. For instance Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1989), and Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

47. See Toni Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of “Dislocated Communities” (Oxford: British Academy, 2008), and David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

48. See, among many, Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideas and Realities.

49. Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism, 144.

50. Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideas and Realities, 16, 80.

51. Held, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Order,” 249–52.

52. Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideas and Realities, 24.

53. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, 77–99, esp. 80, 85, 107, 97, 247.

54. Skrbis and Woodward, Cosmopolitanism: Uses of the Idea, 114.

55. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simpson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1894), vol. 2, 237.

56. John Potter, A Discourse of Church Government (1707), 7^th ed. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), 5.

57. Hobbes, Leviathan, 526.

58. Robin Dunbar, Human Evolution (London: Pelican, 2014), 19.

59. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 51.

60. David Stove, “Robert Nozick’s War Wounds,” in The Plato Cult and Other Follies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 48–49.

61. Scheffler, “Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism,” 118.

62. Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899) (London: Macmillan, 1925), 305–9.

63. Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2005): 147.

64. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 4.