Cosmopolitanism from Below: Universalism as Contestation

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism is attractive as a normative orientation, but the historical record of actual cosmopolitanisms, like that of practical universalisms more generally, is not encouraging. When they have not been merely empty, cosmopolitanisms' ostensibly universal values have too been often co-opted by dominant powers, making them into ideologies of domination. My question here is not whether but how to embrace cosmopolitanism so as to avoid these perversions. The key, I argue, is to focus on the processes through which their ostensibly universal values are challenged and appropriated from below, in struggles against exclusion, domination and exploitation. This means understanding cosmopolitanism not as a plan, project or design, but as a process and practice of contestation. In order to be truly universalistic and inclusive, cosmopolitanism must be political and its politics must be contestatory.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• universalism
• contestation
• radical democracy

Acknowledgements

This paper evolved out of a series of talks given in 2013–14. I want to thank generous hosts and interlocutors at the Toronto chapter of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought, the Philosophy and the Social Sciences Conference in Prague, the New School for Social Research in New York, Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Copenhagen and especially the Department of Global Political Studies at the University of Malmö.

Notes

1 I argue this in the first half of my book, Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), for which the present paper serves as a kind of précis.

2 Carl Schmitt's slogan, “He who invokes humanity wants to cheat,” is often invoked in such contexts, typically to discredit anti-humanitarian anti-universalism by associating it with a well-known Nazi. It is less often recalled that Schmitt took the slogan from the socialist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

3 D. Diderot and J. le Rond d'Alembert, “Cosmopolitain ou cosmopolite,” Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 9 (Wikisource, 1765).

4 For a reflection on the possibility and difficulty of a truly cosmopolitan approach to cosmopolitanism, see R. Rao, “The Elusiveness of ‘Non-Western Cosmopolitanism,’” in Politics and Cosmopolitanism in a Global Age, ed. S. Gupta and S. Padmanabhan (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 193–215.

5 M. Nussbaum, For Love of Country?, ed. J. Cohen (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1996); J. Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. W. Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); K. A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006).

6 M. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (London: Belknap, 2006); O. O'Neill, Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); P. Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).

7 S. Scheffler, “Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism,” Utilitas 11.3 (1999): 255–76.

8 T. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).

9 C. Calhoun, “Cosmopolitanism: The Class-Consciousness of Frequent Flyers,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2003): 869–97.

10 J.-J. Rousseau, “Geneva Manuscript,” in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 158.

11 J.-J. Rousseau, A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe and The State of War, trans. C. E. Vaughn (London: Constable, 1917), 111–12.

12 While criticisms of the anti-political character of cosmopolitanism tend to draw on Schmitt (see, for instance, C. Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 5), similar arguments are found in Rousseau or Hegel (see R. Fine, “Kant's Theory of Cosmopolitanism and Hegel's Critique,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 29.6 (2003): 609–30).

13 For a brief but incisive development of this theme, see A. Pagden, “Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism,” Constellations 7.1 (2000): 3–22.

14 T. Brennan, “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” Race & Class 31.1 (1989): 4.

15 W. D. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 721–48.

16 Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis,” 742–4.

17 J. Butler, “Universality in Culture,” in Nussbaum, For Love of Country?, 45.

18 J. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), ch. 6.

19 É. Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. J. Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pt. 1.

20 The classical struggle for freedom and equality, against domination and subordination, could be said to omit what could be called the fundamental claim of any cosmopolitics: the claim for inclusion against exclusion. We can observe that this dimension of (in)justice was in fact hotly contested in the course of the French Revolution, Balibar's principal historical source for the logic of equaliberty, whether regarding French women, other Europeans or the claims of French slaves in the Haiti, and similar claims have emerged in nearly all subsequent revolutionary moments.

21 A major consideration of the defects of this model and attempts to work out an alternative can be found in J. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

22 From a large literature, see G. Caruso, “Toward an Emancipatory Cosmopolitan Project: The World Social Forum and the Transformation of Conflicts,” Globalizations 9.2 (2012): 211–24; D. Murray, “Democratic Insurrection: Constructing the Common in Global Resistance,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39.2 (2010): 461–82; M. B. Steger and E. K. Wilson, “Anti-Globalization or Alter-Globalization? Mapping the Political Ideology of the Global Justice Movement,” International Studies Quarterly 56.3 (2012): 439–54.

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Notes on contributors

James D. Ingram

James D. Ingram is Associate Professor of Political Science at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His research interests focus on continental political theory and he is the author of Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), along with a number of articles in the field.