Anyone and everyone, potentially: for a political philosophy for all humans, without limits

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Notes

1. The reviewer first encountered this concept in Gouldner’s (1957/1958) noteworthy discussion of ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘locals’, which, surprisingly, is a source omitted by the author.

2. In this respect there are similarities with Laclau and Mouffes’ (1985) view – a position that is not discussed, it should be clear – of hegemony as constitutive of an acceptance of categorical imperatives rather than sustaining a position of radical doubt and scepticism towards all such claims.

3. Latour (1993) provides an interesting point of contrast in his remarkable book, We have never been modern, which does much to dispel any smugness or ontological security that might attach to the categories of ‘nature’.

4. Empirically, less ideally and more often, strangers will barely be noticed or, if noticed, tolerated. Asylum seekers are shunned not welcomed; put into camps. The homeless are an invisible presence, splashed by mud from the Bentley in the passing traffic, unseen and in all probability having less in the way of Kantian rights and global possibilities than the chauffeur, let alone the oligarch in the rear.

5. In which the phrase ‘history is bunk’ is attributed to the film director John Ford, who assuredly did not think this, rather than the carmaker, Henry Ford, who said he did.

6. Being Jewish is ascribed through lines of matrilineal descent.