The class consciousness of frequent travelers: Toward a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 101, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 869-897

  Calhoun, Craig ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 2442608467     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-101-4-869     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. For a good analysis, see Mary Kaldor, "Beyond Militarism, Arms Races and Arms Control," in Craig Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer, Understanding September 11 (New York: New Press, 2002)
2. E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136
3. See David Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)
4. Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, ed. Daniele Archibugi and David Held (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)
5. Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, ed. Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Köhler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
6. Held, Archibugi, and their colleagues conceptualize democratic cosmopolitan politics as a matter of several layers of participation in discourse and decision-making, including especially the strengthening of institutions of global civil society, rather than an international politics dominated by nation-states. Less layered and complex accounts appear in Richard Falk's call for global governance and Martha Nussbaum's universalism. See Richard Falk, Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World (New York: Routledge, 2000)
7. and Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
8. "Jihad and McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making war on national borders from without. Yet Jihad and McWorld have this in common: they both make war on the sovereign nation-state and thus undermine the nation-state's democratic institutions" (Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld [New York: Times Books, 1995], 6)
9. David Held similarly opposes "traditional" and "global" in positioning cosmopolitanism between the two (opening remarks to the University of Warwick conference, "The Future of Cosmopolitanism")
10. Timothy Brennan, "Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism," New Left Review, no. 7 (January-February 2001): 75-85; quotation from76. Arguing against Archibugi's account of the nation-state, Brennan rightly notes the intrinsic importance of imperialism, although he ascribes rather more complete causal power to it than history warrants
11. This is a central issue in debates over group rights. See, for example. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
12. Liberalism of course embraces a wide spectrum of views in which emphases may fall more on property rights or more on democracy. So too cosmopolitanism can imply a global view that is liberal, not specifically democratic. Archibugi prefers cosmopolitics to cosmopolitan in order to signal just this departure from a more general image of liberal global unity. See Daniele Archibugi, "Cosmopolitical Democracy," New Left Review, no. 4 (July-August 2000): 137-50
13. On the predominance of nationalist understandings in conceptions of society, see Calhoun, "Nationalism, Political Community, and the Representation of Society: Or, Why Feeling at Home Is Not a Substitute for Public Space," European Journal of Social Theory 2 (1999): 217-31
14. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 41
15. See Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
16. Daniele Archibugi, "Principles of Cosmopolitan Democracy," in Archibugi, Held, and Köhler, Re-Imagining Political Community, 198-228; quotation from 216
17. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 233. Held's book remains the most systematic and sustained effort to develop a theory of cosmopolitan democracy
18. Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 115
19. Charles Taylor, "Modern Social Imaginaries," Public Culture (February 2002): 1
20. It is this last tendency that invites liberal rationalists occasionally to ascribe to communitarians and advocates of local culture complicity in all manner of illiberal political projects from restrictions on immigration to excessive celebration of ethnic minorities to economic protectionism. I have discussed this critically in Calhoun, "Nationalism, Political Community, and the Representation of Society."
21. Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione, "Between Cosmopolis and Community," in Archibugi, Held, and Köhler, Re-Imagining Political Community, 152-78
22. See, for example, Janna Thompson, "Community Identity and World Citizenship," in Archibugi, Held, and Köhler, Re-Imagining Political Community, 179-97
23. Archibugi, "Cosmopolitical Democracy," 146
24. I have developed this argument about public discourse as a form of or basis for solidarity and its significance for transnational politics further in Craig Calhoun, "Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere: Interests, Identity, and Solidarity in the Integration of Europe," in Global Ethics and Transnational Politics, ed. Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 275-312
25. This hyper-Tocquevillianism appears famously in Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000)
26. but has in fact been central to discussions since at least the 1980s, including prominently Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M.Tipton, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)
27. The embrace of a notion of civil society as centrally composed of a "voluntary sector" complementing a capitalist market economy has of course informed public policy from America's first Bush administration with its "thousand points of light" forward. Among other features, this approach neglects the notion of a political public sphere as an institutional framework of civil society; see Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). It grants a high level of autonomy to markets and economic actors; it is notable for the absence of political economy from its theoretical bases and analyses. As one result, it introduces a sharp separation among market, government, and voluntary association (nonprofit) activity that obscures the question of how social movements may challenge economic institutions, and how the public sphere may mobilize government to shape economic practices
28. On how global NGOs actually work, see Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998)
29. See Stephen Toulmin's analysis of the seventeenth-century roots of the modern liberal rationalist worldview in Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990). As Toulmin notes, the rationalism of Descartes and Newton may be tempered with more attention to sixteenth-century forebears. From Erasmus, Montaigne, and others we may garner an alternative but still humane and even humanist approach emphasizing wisdom that included a sense of the limits of rationalism and a more positive grasp of human passions and attachments
30. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: New Left Books, 1974), 103
31. Amartya Sen, Development As Freedom (New York: Knopf, 2000), lays out an account of "capacities" as an alternative to the discourse of rights
32. This is also adopted by Martha Nussbaum in her most recent cosmopolitan arguments in Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). While this shifts emphases in some useful ways (notably from "negative" to "positive" liberties in Isaiah Berlin's terms), it does not offer a substantially "thicker" conception of the person or the social nature of human life. Some cosmopolitan theorists, notably David Held, also take care to acknowledge that people inhabit social relations as well as rights and obligations
33. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, "Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State," Habermas's surprisingly sharp-toned response to Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," both in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
34. This has been an important theme in the work of Ashis Nandy. See, among many, Ashis Nandy, Exiled at Home (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
35. and Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
36. This point is also made by Bruce Robbins in his Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (London: Verso Books, 1993), 182
37. See also Bruce Robbins, "The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class," in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 15-32
38. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 477-519; quotation from 488
39. This is a central point of Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1 (New York: Academic Press, 1974)
40. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977), 17
41. See the essays in Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: New Press, 1999)
42. and Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux 2 (Paris: Raisons d'agir, 2001)
43. See Charles Taylor, "Modern Social Imaginaries," Public Culture 14 (2001): 1