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Abstract
There are two dominant schools of thought addressing problems of cosmopolitanism and (international) conflict: democratic national sovereigntism, inspired by Hegel, and global constitutionalism, inspired by Kant and reformulated by Habermas. This paper develops a third position by reading Adorno's critique of both theoretical traditions. Rather than compromising between these camps, Adorno triangulates between them. Critically illuminating their respective deficiencies in view of the changing conditions of a globalized modern world has critical implications for cosmopolitics. Although largely negative, Adorno's critique provides an important framework for a contestatory reformulation of cosmopolitanism, one that is better equipped to confront societal and political global conflicts insufficiently reflected in sovereigntist and global constitutionalist models.
Notes
1 S. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights Across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty,” American Political Science Review 103.4 (2009): 691–704.
2 See D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); C. Offe, “Governance: An ‘Empty Signifier’?,” Constellations 16.4 (2009): 500–62; Y. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); C. Mouffe, On the Political: Thinking in Action (New York: Routledge, 2005); and C. Mouffe, “Which World Order: Cosmopolitan or Multipolar?,” Ethical Perspectives 15.4 (2008): 453–67. For a critique, see M. Thaler, “The Illusion of Purity: Chantal Mouffe's Realist Critique of Cosmopolitanism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36.7 (2010): 785–800.
3 D. Archibugi, A Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Towards Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); J. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); J. Habermas, The Divided West (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2006); D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); and R. Marchetti, “Models of Global Democracy: In Defense of Cosmo-Federalism,” in Global Democracy: Normative and Empirical Perspectives, ed. D. Archibugi et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 22–46. Some recent variations of “moderate,” “rooted” or “statist” cosmopolitanism attempt to strike a balance between the two traditions. See P. Lenard and M. Moore, “A Defense of Moderate Cosmopolitanism and/or Moderate Liberal Nationalism,” in Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Canada and the World, ed. W. Kymlicka and K. Walker (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 47–68; G. Hirshberg, “A Defense of Moderate Cosmopolitanism” (Dissertation, Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Georgetown University, 2009); S. Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); K.-C. Tan, “Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism,” in Rooted Cosmopolitanism, ed. Kymlicka and Walker, 31–46; L. Ypi, “Statist Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 16.1 (2008): 48–71; D. Weinstock, “Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Unpacking the Arguments,” in Rooted Cosmopolitanism, ed. Kymlicka and Walker, 87–104.
4 R. Keohane, “Governance in a Partially Globalized World,” American Political Science Review 95.1 (2001): 1–13.
5 R. Fine, “Debating Human Rights, Law, and Subjectivity: Arendt, Adorno, and Critical Theory,” in Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations, ed. L. Rensmann and S. Gandesha (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 154–72.
6 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1976); T. W. Adorno, History and Freedom (Cambridge: Polity Press, [1964–65] 2006), 102. These repressive customs are by no means as individuated or distinct as Hegel – along with contemporary sovereigntists – suggests.
7 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, [1966] 1973), 338.
8 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 334.
9 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 340.
10 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 323.
11 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 341.
12 Adorno's critique is shared by Hannah Arendt, who adds that behind all “nationalistic phraseology,” “national sovereignty is no longer a working concept of politics, for there is no longer a political organization which can represent a sovereign people within national boundaries.” Thus the nation-state, “having lost its very foundations, leads the life of a walking corpse,” in spite of “repeated injections of imperialistic expansion” (H. Arendt, “The Seeds of a Fascist International,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, [1945] 1994), 143).
13 Adorno, History and Freedom, 105f.
14 For an alternative reading of Hegel's presumed “ethical cosmopolitanism,” see L. Moland, Hegel on Political Identity: Patriotism, Nationality, Cosmopolitanism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
15 After 1945, political sovereignty and the Westphalian principle of “sovereign equality” – violated internationally by the Nazi regime – was restored as a principle of international law in response to its totalitarian dismantling. To be clear, such sovereignty was now to be protected more robustly by international institutions, which were simultaneously strengthened. Moreover, in response to the Nazi atrocities and subsequent genocidal crimes, “human rights” and “crimes against humanity” have evolved as categories of international law, increasingly making the principle of national state sovereignty conditional and signalling elements of a “human rights revolution.” See S. Benhabib, Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011); and M. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Still, in practice, the principle of sovereignty is being challenged only gradually by human rights regimes and the human rights revolution.
16 M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, [1969] 2002), 160. Horkheimer and Adorno thus revise and radicalize Kant's critique of the unconditional “right of sovereignty.” Kant criticizes this so-called right in ius gentium as a licence for rulers to go to war as they please. See I. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1795] 1970b), 93–130; and R. Fine, “Debating Human Rights,” 162.
17 Mouffe, On the Political, 110.
18 D. Zolo, “The Political and Legal Dilemmas of Globalisation,” Theoria 103 (2004): 40.
19 L. Rensmann, “Back to Kant? The Democratic Deficits in Habermas’ Global Constitutionalism,” in Deprovincializing Habermas: Global Perspectives, ed. T. Bailey (New York: Routledge, 2013), 27–49.
20 T. W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, [1962] 1998a), 145.
21 Adorno, “Progress,” 145.
22 See R. Fine, “Debating Human Rights,” 164–9; and L. Rensmann, “Grounding Cosmopolitics: Rethinking Crimes against Humanity and Global Political Theory with Arendt and Adorno,” in Arendt and Adorno, ed. Rensmann and Gandesha, 138–9.
23 Adorno, History and Freedom, 140.
24 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 236.
25 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 236; see also Fine, “Debating Human Rights,” 164–9.
26 Adorno would probably have welcomed the possibilities established by international human rights law in so far as they enable progressive claims against domination and create possibilities for humans to appeal to. Likewise, in one of his last essays, Adorno defends the separation of powers “upon which every democracy is based,” as an institutionalized context for critique and freedom: “The system of checks and balances, the reciprocal overview of the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary, means as much as that each of these powers subjects the others to critique and thereby reduces the despotism that each power, without this critical element, gravitates to” (T. W. Adorno, “Critique,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, [1969] 1998b), 281).
27 H. Brunkhorst, “Constitutional Evolution in the Crisis of the Early Twenty-First Century,” Social Research 81.3 (2014): 519–39.
28 See, most dramatically, I. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1784] 1970a), 41–53.
29 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 237.
30 Rensmann, “Back to Kant?,” 28–33.
31 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 103.
32 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (New York: Verso, [1951] 1974), 156.
33 S. Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 169. See also Fine, “Debating Human Rights,” 167.
34 Cf. Adorno, History and Freedom.
35 Kant's league of nations model in Perpetual Peace, to be sure, temporarily suspends the imposition of coercive global public law and gives credit to the resilience of the heterogeneous public wills of nations and republican political autonomy – in contrast to contemporary liberal cosmopolitan constitutionalists like Habermas. Cf. Kant, “Perpetual Peace;” D. Howard, From Marx to Kant (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987), 266ff; and Rensmann, “Back to Kant?,” 33.
36 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 103.
37 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320.
38 Adorno, “Progress,” 146.
39 R. Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 271.
40 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 101.
41 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247.
42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 341.
43 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320. Adorno's critique is undoubtedly driven by a universalistic perspective and normativity (cf. Benhabib, Dignity in Adversity, 21). Adorno points out, however, that Kant and Hegel share teleological narratives about human progress and universal history, clouded in the ideas of, respectively, the progressive advancement of universal law and enlightenment humanitarianism, or the “world spirit.” If any telos can be found in history, in view of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, Adorno argues that Hegel's “world spirit” actually points to the realization of “absolute of suffering” and would have to be redefined as “permanent catastrophe” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320).
44 Such trust has recently been expressed in the contested concept of “humanitarian interventionism” in international law. For a critical discussion of Kant and “humanitarian interventionism,” see A. Franceschet, “Kant, International Law, and the Problem of Humanitarian Intervention,” Journal of International Political Theory 6.1 (2010): 1–22.
45 Cf. J. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); and Habermas, The Divided West.
46 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, 130.
47 Habermas, The Divided West, 116.
48 Habermas, The Divided West, 135, 143, 174.
49 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 101. For a Kantian critique of Habermas, see Rensmann, “Back to Kant?”
50 L. Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 121.
51 It is Adorno's decentred democratic thinking and defence of democratic institutional mechanisms, most explicit in his late writings (for instance, Adorno, “Critique”), that can be contrasted with Habermas's global constitutionalist turn away from democratic deliberation. This is ironic in so far as Habermas suggests that the “old Frankfurt School never took bourgeois democracy very seriously” (J. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, ed. P. Dews (London: Verso, 1986), 98).
52 Brunkhorst, “Constitutional Evolution.” Espen Hammer has similarly praised the Adornian ethic as an effective counterweight to liberal and Habermasian attempts to restrict politics to “the management of social positivity” and “consensually enforced administration” (E. Hammer, Adorno and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005), 178ff).
53 This criticism applies even to liberal global justice theorists who propose just institutional reforms to tackle injustices created by global capitalism without fully engaging with the underlying systemic conflicts that make such reforms unlikely. See, for instance, T. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
54 As I have explored elsewhere, Adorno perceptively analyses the contours of the cosmopolitan condition of world society and politics. See L. Rensmann, “Adorno and the Global Public Sphere: Rethinking Globalization and the Cosmopolitan Condition of Politics,” in Re-Imagining Public Space: The Frankfurt School and Beyond, ed. D. Boros and J. M. Glass (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 163–90.
55 Adorno, “Progress,” 144.
56 T. W. Adorno, “Gesellschaft,” in Soziologische Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, [1967] 1979), 9–20, 13.
57 L. Rensmann, “Political Terror in the Age of Global Modernity: Adorno's Critical Theory of Totalitarianism Revisited,” Politics, Religion and Ideology 12.1 (2011): 3–26.
58 Adorno, “Progress,” 144. For more cautious interpretations of Adorno in the context of his “negative” ethics and politics, see G. Schweppenhäuser, Adorno: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); S. Mariotti, “Critique from the Margins: Adorno and the Politics of Withdrawal,” Political Theory 36.3 (2008): 456–65; and E. Hammer, “Adorno and Extreme Evil,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 26.4 (2000): 75–93.
59 See R. Wolin, The Frankfurt School Revisited (New York: Routledge, 2006); Rensmann, “Grounding Cosmopolitics;” G. Boucher, Adorno Reframed (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013); D. Cook, “Adorno's Global Subject,” in Critical Theory and the Challenge of Praxis: Beyond Reification, ed. S. Giacchetti Ludovisi (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015).
60 See C. W. Barrow, “The Return of the State. Globalization, State Theory and the New Imperialism,” New Political Science 27.2 (2005): 123–45.
61 T. W. Adorno, “Die auferstandene Kultur,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 20.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, [1949] 1986), 454; Adorno, History and Freedom, 111; B. Beauzamy, “Transnational Social Movements and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Legitimacy Beyond the State? Re-Examining the Democratic Credentials of Transnational Actors, ed. E. Erman and A. Uhlin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 110–29.
62 U. Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity,” British Journal of Sociology 51.1 (2000): 79–106.
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Lars Rensmann
Lars Rensmann is Associate Professor of Political Science at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. Besides numerous articles and book chapters on international political thought, European and global politics, and critical theory, he is the author of The Frankfurt School and Antisemitism (New York: State University of New York Press, forthcoming) and Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture (with A. S. Markovits, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), and the editor of Arendt and Adorno (with S. Gandesha, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
