THE COSMOPOLITAN TRADITION

“Get out of my light,” Diogenes replied to Alexander when asked what he could offer him, so the apocryphal story goes. For moral personhood, no matter the squalor, the destitution it finds itself in, is inherently complete. It’s a beautiful vision of an indomitable human dignity that resides in perfect equality among all men, an idea of a kind of timeless resonance.

The Cosmopolitan Tradition is perhaps one of Nussbaum’s most ambitious works in scope yet, taking up so many of the threads of her prior works. For the tradition’s profundity and sheer beauty of vision, in many respects it needs reworking, it must correspond with the demands our modern world places on it. As the subtitle puts it, it’s a Noble But Flawed Ideal”. Taking outset from Diogenes and the Stoic tradition he spawned, it details the history and necessary modifications of this ideal throughout time.

It’s really brilliantly written and each chapter is a self-contained essay though it fits into a cohesive whole. Each essay on one thinker builds on the next all culminating in one final chapter that ties the entire bow together. All of it, in fact, reads like an extended discussion and critique of Diogenes and his direct successor in the form of the Stoic tradition. Her critique of Cicero provides the basis of her rebuttal canvassing the overall argument and setting forth a particularist vision of moral obligations that’s cosmopo- litan in its edges. Covering Grotius, her account encompasses a vision of the relations between states. Here too, especially, some cracks start to form. Nussbaum appears too devoted to the nation-state and dismisses neo-medievalist visions nearly out-of-hand. Adam Smith is the last thinker to get a detailed critique, and one that’s a huge relief from all of the half-hearted engagements with his thought that never go beyond quoting the oft-cited “Invisible hand” and places him at a critical juncture in Stoic thought. The themes in the book slowly and incrementally flourish like a puzzle solved one piece at a time.

Nowhere is her interdisciplinary approach better described than in her own conclusion, “approaching the imperiled world of nature with scientific fact and philosophical imagination.” And towards the end, as a reader one is left with a far deeper and more nuanced understanding of what that famous “Kingdom of Ends” Kant described as she finally, deservingly, concludes the book, “the gates of the cosmic city must be open to all.” A more IBP book, a rich tapestry of different threads of the Social Sciences pulled together in one international in outlook par excellence, is seldom found.