"Radical Cosmopolitics," by James D. Ingram

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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

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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

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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 latenineties 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 selfconscious 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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 life”13—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

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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

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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

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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 the most common source, though by no means the originator or sole inventor, of three key elements of nearly any contemporary cosmopolitanism (moral-ethical as well as political).

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The first is the idea of practical universalism as an open-ended concern for the equal freedom and dignity of each and every person. The second is an understanding of this unconditional and unlimited imperative in terms of autonomy, that is, as a demand for individual and collective selflegislation. And the third is a “realistic utopia” of republican (we can read: liberal-democratic) peoples living in a condition of “perpetual peace.”

Yet if we inherit the parameters of cosmopolitanism as well as moral and political modernity from Kant, we inherit them as a problem, one that nearly the whole of modern practical philosophy has struggled to solve.

Like the tradition of cosmopolitanism as a whole, but to an extent heightened by the scope and ambition of his thought, Kant was a very imperfect universalist. His commitment to the equal freedom and dignity of every human being is compromised at nearly every turn as he elaborates his thought: in his applied ethics (his theory of virtue) as well as his theory of law and politics (his theory of right), his theory of human differentiation (his anthropology) as well as his speculations on human development (his philosophy of history). This should not come as a shock. Kant wrote more than two hundred years ago, and it would be more surprising if his work were not infected by the prejudices and blindnesses of his time and place.

Beyond this, his thought is based on a metaphysical structure no part of which has escaped challenge. Moreover, as his champions have long insisted, one of the hallmarks of his thought is its indefinite provision of resources for its own revision: a basis for the critique and correction of what we find problematic in Kant is almost always available in Kant, which is why he is usually situated at the beginning of a specifically modern tradition of critical-reflective philosophy—along with the ideas of modern universalism and moral-political autonomy, his greatest legacy.

The following is not, however, a study of Kant. What the balance of part 1 seeks to show is that contemporary cosmopolitanism in general is afflicted by internal difficulties, tensions, dilemmas, and contradictions for which Kant’s pioneering efforts are paradigmatic. On my reading, these difficulties and tensions reside less in Kant’s particular theses, or his prejudices, oversights, or errors, than they arise from the form of his thought. And to the extent that Kant is the founder of cosmopolitan practical philosophy, they reappear in different ways in the work of others who think along similar lines, no matter how much they tweak the details of his arguments. For, more than a set of theses, Kant establishes a style of thinking, a conceptual architecture that remains in important ways unsurpassed in normative-critical

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theory. His difficulties, then, variously transposed, recur in the writings of contemporary cosmopolitans. In other words, my interest in Kant is diagnostic: I argue that the tensions within his cosmopolitanism are exemplary of modern universalism. To show this, I read a number of Kant’s followers who have tried to update his insights and extend them in different directions only to run into the same difficulties in different forms.

Chapter 2 takes up the problem of moral or ethical cosmopolitanism, the idea that we should act so as to respect the dignity of each and every other person and that this means respecting their autonomy. This idea is the core of cosmopolitan ethics, and, as a general principle, I take it to be unassailable. Yet elaborating it turns out to be endlessly problematic. One source of difficulty emerges when we consider substantive or what I call, following Étienne Balibar, “anthropological universalisms,” which try to base a universal, cosmopolitan morality on an account of the human. The problem, as I show in the cases of Kant and Martha Nussbaum, is that such an account cannot avoid certain hierarchies and exclusions of which they cannot, in principle, be fully aware. The usual remedy, for which Kant’s name is virtually synonymous, is proceduralism, but it turns out to encounter difficulties of its own. Proceduralism pursues the universal by way of generality and impartiality, by abstracting from particular moral-ethical standpoints. As I show in the case of its leading recent practitioner, John Rawls, however, this abstraction results in indeterminacy, as it tries to escape from, but remains inevitably bound to, its particular points of departure, making it oscillate between utopia and apology, in an influential recent formulation.

In chapter 3 I explore the tension between the universal commitment to equal freedom at the heart of Kant’s practical philosophy and the obstacles to realizing it in his political theory. Starting with Kant’s 1795 essay “On Perpetual Peace,” I show that although Kant offered a prescient normative vision, he had different and conflicting ideas about how it might be realized. One feature common to all these visions— articulated in his theory of right, his philosophy of history, and his notion of Enlightenment—is that none of them is able to harmonize the end of equal freedom with a politics capable of achieving it. I then turn to the efforts to update Kant’s ideal that have sprung up since the mid-1990s under the banner of “cosmopolitan democracy.” While this theoreticalpolitical project revives and revises Kant’s ideal, promoting a global order based on respect for human rights, the rule of law, and democracy at the local, national, and global levels, I argue that it too stumbles on the

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challenge of realization. Here also, the politics that would be necessary to bring cosmopolitan institutions into being contradict the principles on which those institutions are based. This is because, for Kant as for his followers, the only political agents available to bring about global institutions are those that profit from current global injustices, contradicting in practice the egalitarianism they proclaim in principle.

The common thread that runs through part 1 is that cosmopolitanism and its universalistic ambitions, in theory as well as in practice, are constantly vulnerable to compromise or capture by the world as it is—both the limits on our conceptions of the human, the good, or the just and the power relations that underlie and reproduce global injustices. In political terms, I suggest, this reflects the fact that on the decisive political question, from whence progress can be expected, Kant’s answer—“from the top downwards”18—was exactly, theoretically as well as practically, inverted.

Part 2 is devoted to looking in the opposite direction. This means insisting that the principle of freedom equality be realized directly, by the affected individuals and groups themselves, when necessary against hegemonic understandings and institutionalizations of the universal. This, I argue, is the immanent solution to the impasses into which Kant and his cosmopolitan followers became trapped: the only way to satisfy the imperative of moral and practical equality while circumventing the paradoxes of paternalism is to say that everyone should have a fair—prima facie equal—say in the rules and arrangements that affect them.

Chapter 4 returns to moral-ethical universalism and the problem that any universal norm or idea turns out to be particular in its conception or application. Proceduralism, I argue in chapter 2, is both a recognition of and a remedy to this problem, but it suffers from an important limitation.

Since the ideal conditions it appeals to never in fact obtain, it remains counterfactual and to that extent indeterminate. I turn for a solution to Judith Butler’s work on universalism. Providing a left-Hegelian rejoinder to Kantian approaches, Butler argues that we cannot articulate the universal as such. It is best advanced not by discovering ostensibly universal foundations or constructing universal procedures but rather through the critique of false universals. Moral-ethical universalism can thus be understood as a process through which particular actors challenge particular false universals. Rather than regard universalism abstractly, formally, hypothetically, sub specie aeternitatis, then, with Butler we can see it as a dynamic of contestation. But while Butler suggests a mechanism by which

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18 Introduction

the critique of false universals can progressively articulate the universal, she does not articulate its normative bases—how, that is, this critique could itself be oriented by the ideal of equal freedom. For a corrective I turn to Pierre Bourdieu, who shows how the critique of exclusion and discrimination is implicitly oriented toward the ideal of equal inclusion in social life. The aim of the universalistic critique of false universals, in other words, boils down to the Kantian one of political equality.

Chapter 5 adopts a similar approach to show how we can conceive of cosmopolitics, a politics of universalism, as a principle of democratic contestation. Again, the key is to understand universality as emerging from the bottom up through challenges to denials of universal values, first and foremost that of equal freedom. Expressing this idea in political terms, however, requires a basic shift in the perspective of democratic theory. Rather than understanding democracy as a regime or a set of institutions, we need to see it as a principle of action, an aspiration and source of political claims, an open-ended logic of transformation that seeks to realize the promise of political equality, sometimes against the very institutions that claim to embody it. With Hannah Arendt and certain of her interpreters, I reinterpret the idea of radical democracy as a type of political action and logic of social transformation, a struggle against particular obstacles to acting as an equal participant in social life. I then return to the account of universalization developed in chapter 4 to show how such democratic struggles can help realize the universal. With Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, I argue that we can see the demand for equal freedom as the basic claim of emancipatory politics, a claim that is by nature indefinitely expansive. On this view, democratic politics can be seen as the realization of the universalistic content of modern democracy through always particular struggles, an infinitely repeatable process by which people struggle to expand their autonomy to match the scale of the forces that determine their lives.

Finally, chapter 6 illustrates the view developed over the course of book in the case of human rights. The final chapter uses the insights accumulated throughout the previous ones to criticize some common understandings in the politics of human rights and to show the benefits of thinking about them as a critical-democratic politics of universalization. Hannah Arendt’s famous but enigmatic call for a “right to have rights” serves here as a red thread through different conceptions of human rights politics. A first, liberal conception understands these rights as protection from political power, yet can only call upon the same kind

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of power for their enforcement. With the best of intentions, this view authorizes efforts whose presuppositions and effects all too often disempower those whom it means to help. A second, deliberative conception figures the human rights politics in Kantian terms, as the institutionalization of right by legal means. This view inherits the defects of its model: while it can posit a better state of affairs, it has difficulty accounting for how it might be achieved. The framework does, however, point the way to a more robustly democratic alternative. The last conception, a radically democratic model of human rights as an open-ended right to political participation activated by rights-claimants themselves, puts concrete struggles at the center of human rights politics. In this, I argue, the third interpretation remains truest to Arendt’s intuitions, which show that rights cannot be understood only as protection from or channeling of power, but as its generation in the form of counterpower. t

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This book seeks to offer a vision of cosmopolitanism that is robustly egalitarian and democratic, yet avoids the pitfall of false universalism into which so many of its predecessors have fallen. First of all, this cosmopolitanism would refer to the critical imperative of recognizing that all politics is now in fact global, that the chains of interdependence increasingly defining our world—often grossly asymmetrical, so that they can only be characterized in terms of exploitation and domination—must inform all moral and political reflection. In this sense, cosmopolitanism would refer to the endless task of exposing the prejudices, ideologies, and ruses that prevent us from seeing the global implications of apparently national or local relations and decisions. Second, it would refer to the ethical imperative of recognizing and promoting the equal moral worth of each and every human being, while at the same time being sensitive to the strong possibility that our efforts to do so will founder on, even reinforce, the world’s inequalities. The solution to this paradox, which plagues even the best cosmopolitanisms, lies in the fact that it is nevertheless possible to discover particular cases where this ethical imperative is denied and to combat the false universals on which this denial is based. Finally, cosmopolitanism should refer to the political imperative of promoting the equal freedom and dignity of each and every individual everywhere. This is best done, I argue, by supporting the struggles of individuals for an equal

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say in the decisions that affect them where they are, against the myriad forces, there and everywhere, that prevent them from having this say.

The point of the positive reconstruction of cosmopolitics in the second half of this book is thus to consider democratic universalization from the bottom up, in particular cases, from a political rather than simply a moral-ethical point of view. Universality, be it in ethics or in politics, is best thought negatively, as the negation of particular exclusions, inequalities, and false universals. In a Hegelian formulation that chapters 4 and 5 try to elucidate: universality becomes actual the moment a historically given universal is contested in the name of the universal value it betrays.

(With an essential democratic, even revolutionary, proviso: from below.)

Cosmopolitics, then, is the unpredictable process through which universalization happens again and again, the form of political action by which the universal is conflictually asserted and reinvented in and against its particular betrayals. The hopeful conclusion of the critical work carried out in the first half of the book is therefore that if the paradoxes of universalism outlined in the first chapters are inescapable, they are navigable and even corrigible, though never finally or entirely. If we cannot solve the paradoxes of the universal within the confines of the problem as it is usually framed, we can develop strategies and guidelines for judging and acting on a universalistic basis that take these paradoxes into account.

The thrust of my argument is thus that dominant ways of thinking about the relationship between politics and morality, ideals, institutions, and action—not only in practical philosophy (political theory, ethics, moral philosophy) but also in everyday political reflection, even in practice—are seriously problematic and need to be rethought. While this is necessarily a somewhat abstract matter, my argument is practical, and the version of universalism developed here can provide a political orientation or standard by which different arrangements and courses of action can be assessed.

Unlike most normative moral and political theory, the perspective I put forth here directs our attention toward the question not of what ought to be and why but of who ought to do what, where, and how in particular cases, affording a basis for making concrete judgments. This perspective has the further advantage of directly connecting the principle of equal freedom with the practice of striving for it, thereby aligning principle (theory) with politics (practice). A negative-processual view of cosmopolitics as a democratic, egalitarian politics from below is not merely the best we can do. It is the best expression of universalism as a moral-political idea.