Panel 1d: Cosmopolitanism -- friday, 17 October 2003, 1-3 p.m.
Chair: Tim Duvall, Government and Politics, St. John's University
Discussant: Paul Gomberg, Philosophy, Chicago State University
Abstracts:
Fonna Forman-Barzilai & David Forman-Barzilai, “Proximity and the Ethical in Adam Smith and Emanuel Levinas”
In this paper we shall demonstrate
important parallels between Adam Smith's idea of sympathy and Emanuel Levinas'
phenomenology of the face, and conclude that since both emphasize the
"proximate" character of human interaction, neither ethical system can produce
"objective" criteria for evaluating unfamiliar and distant people and practices.
The paper will demonstrate three things: 1) that Adam Smith's notion of sympathy
in the Theory of Moral Sentiments is best understood not as an emotion or a
telos, but as a social practice of surveillance through which culture and
morality are created and reproduced (disciplined); 2) that this understanding of
sympathy as a social practice through which morality is disciplined parallels
Levinas' claim that the face is a signifier of human weakness, nakedness, and
vulnerability that forcefully compels the observer to subjugate himself to "the
Ethical". Finally, we conclude that
this intersubjective way of thinking about ethics has important implications for
they way contemporary moral and political thought have appropriated both Smith's
and Levinas' thought. Indeed, if moral criteria are disciplined through
proximate interaction, then it is difficult to imagine that Smith and Levinas
can produce a "cosmopolitical" frame of reference suitable for "objectively"
evaluating practices that are distant and/or unfamiliar.
Craig Borowiak, “Democratic Accountability and Critical Cosmopolitanism
In this paper I situate a discussion of democratic accountability within debates over cosmopolitanism. Examining the writings of Onora O'Neill, Thomas Pogge, Charles Beitz, and David Held, among others, I argue that theories of cosmopolitan democracy must find ways to become more reflective about the ways they reproduce hegemonic epistemologies and structural inequities. Cosmopolitan theories mark a considerable advance in democratic theory by highlighting the significant democratic deficiencies that persist on the transnational level, and by pushing for systems of democratic accountability that seek to address issues of global injustice. And yet their penchant for universals serves as an obstacle to richer forms of engagement with alternative (and especially non-Western) worldviews. While cosmopolitan theorists make responsibility for others (including third world others) a central feature of their theories of justice, they nonetheless do so in ways that avoid engaging the challenges such others pose for the neo-Kantian framework itself. Which is to say that within the cosmopolitan framework, others are accounted for only in terms the framework sets up. Absent from this accounting are the ways the framework itself might be a source of injustice and the ways the framework might be incompatible with the experiences of subalternized populations. In light of this, a more rigorous form of democratic engagement is necessary. I argue for a more dialogical understanding of democratic accountability that makes engagement with the other as much about being held to account by others as it is about holding others to account, and as much about accounting to the other for ones effects, as it is about taking account of the others effects upon oneself. Following the work of Boaventura de Sousos Santos and Walter Mignolo, I argue that such a notion of democratic accountability should be linked to a form of critical cosmopolitanism that seeks to de-center hegemonic epistemologies by challenging cosmopolitan frameworks (which tend to inscribe western concepts and cosmologies in universalistic idioms) to account for the alternatives they render marginal, particular, and inconsequential. Such a project would entail a double translation in which dominant democratic paradigms are interpreted in terms of the non-dominant, just as non-western paradigms have been consistently interpreted in terms of the West.
Scott G. Nelson, “Agency, Freedom, Cosmopolitanism: Theorizing Citizenship in a Post-National World”
"The only true method of attaining freedom, we are told, is by the use of critical reason, the understanding of what is necessary and what is contingent." So wrote Isaiah Berlin in his famous "Two Concepts of Liberty." This paper explores this Enlightenment maxim in terms of recent efforts to think citizenship, or ethical and political engagement, beyond the redounds of the nation-state. What does it mean for the person to commit to ideals that expressly disavow the necessary (spatial) limits drawn by the state? Can such ideals furnish a conception of community that would legitimate itself through temporal rather than spatial exigencies? What might a cosmopolitan civic spiritedness look like? What ethical and political affirmations of agency and freedom might be fostered in a cosmopolitan ethos of 'the political'? To what extent would such an ethos remain true to the Enlightenment tradition, namely, a philosophy governed by the Kantian spirit of critique? The future of philosophy's taking up such questions must be mediated through the historicity of its past. The paper concentrates on Jacques Derrida's turn to Kant and suggests that, as Derrida's recent work has shown, an Enlightenment-inspired philosophy has much to contribute to contemporary efforts to understand freedom's role in discriminating the necessary from the contingent in global political life.
Lawrence Quill, “Positive Freedom and Perpetual Peace: Overcoming the Problems of Size and Transition”
As an amendment to David Hold's
cosmopolitan theory of democracy, this paper returns to the ethical foundations
of his model, Kant's Perpetual Peace, and reinterprets Kant's analysis of
republican government. Drawing upon a deep and shared contradiction within
republicanism and cosmopolitanism, this paper details how Kant's theories of
cosmopolitanism demand an emphasis upon the dynamism of politics as well as the
institutional order of government. In doing so, this argument seeks to place
republicanism within a new spatial context in a deliberate attempt to move away
from city-state and nation-state centered approaches that have dominated
discussion of civic republicanism over the past two decades.
In recent years, Held and others have described an alternative cosmopolitan
institutional structure that would operate above and beneath the state levels.
This structure, it is argued, would improve the legitimacy of the decision
making process and increase transparency at the international level.
However, as critics have started to point out, Hold's promise of institutional
reform rests not only upon the descriptive assumption that the changes he claims
are occurring are actually occurring in the manner he describes but, in
addition, the prescriptive side of his theory requires fairly extensive reforms.
Held himself has begun to speak about the probability and realism of his own
brand of cosmopolitanism, one that requires reframing the market and eliminating
developing countries debt - elements of his program he considers essential if
cosmopolitanism is to avoid the charge of high mindedness. The popular pressure
required for such reforms within his argument in turn rests on the development
of a cosmopolitan consciousness. Yet, while some choose to argue that this may
well be inevitable it seems unlikely that it will be a program advanced and
encouraged by the state and its institutions. Cosmopolitanism, like
republicanism, faces the problem of transition.
If this diagnosis is correct, the efforts of large numbers of people already
operating trans-nationally within global civil society, individuals who already
share attachments to global goods and shared predicaments will remain an elite
concern. Their function will primarily remain one of influence both beyond the
nation state, directed towards national actors in an international arena, and
within the nation state via public discussion - to citizens who may become aware
of alternative positions through their actions.
By updating Kant's own interpretation of the role of philosophers in the state
and the function of free speech, a modified version of his republicanism emerges
to support this view. One that reflects not only the need for institutional
guarantees for perpetual peace but political opportunities for perpetual
criticism ensuring that the institutions of global governance stay reflexive and
open to change. This revised view of Kant's republicanism which, following
Ulrich Beck, we may call cosmo-republicanism offers both an amendment to the
institutional based approaches of modern cosmopolitans and a new context in
which politics can emerge for republicans concerned with political freedom.