Towards a sociology of global morals with an ‘emancipatory intent’

Review of International Studies

Volumn 33, Issue S1, 2007, Pages 135-150

  Linklater, Andrew ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34547246390     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210507007437     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. See David Hume's that ‘there is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such’, in A Treatise of Human Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 533.
2. and the reservations about cosmopolitan motivation in Michael Walzer, ‘Spheres of Affection’, in Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country? (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002).
3. Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 2002).
4. See Raimond Gaita, ‘Critical Notice’, Philosophical Investigations, 17 (1994), pp. 616ff, and the discussion in Gaita, Common Humanity.
5. Similar sentiments are present in the claim that: ‘To no matter whom the question may be put in general terms, nobody is of the opinion that any man is innocent if, possessing food himself in abundance and finding someone on his doorstep three parts dead from hunger, he brushes past without giving him anything’. See Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 6.
6. Weil, Need for Roots, p. 6 where she describes this obligation as ‘eternal’.
7. Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Understanding Face and Feelings (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003), ch. 1.
8. In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 169, Martha Nussbaum maintains that ‘biology and common circumstances … make it extremely unlikely that the emotional repertoires of two societies will be entirely opaque to one another’.
9. Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (Darien, CT: Hafner), pp. 311ff.
10. Gaita, Common Humanity, p. 276 notes that a slave-owner might assist a slave in desperate circumstances, but in this case assistance does not rest on a doctrine of equal rights. The desire to protect another slave-owners’ property, rather than human solidarity, may prompt an act of rescue.
11. See H. C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 45ff.
12. The idea of a form of universality that requires a complex labour of translation can be found in Judith Butler, ‘Universality in Culture’, in Nussbaum, Love of Country.
13. For Occidental rationalism and societial rationalisation, see Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984).
14. Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric (London: William Heinemann, 1959), Book 1.13.
15. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), p. 9.
16. See my ‘Distant Suffering and Cosmopolitan Obligations’, International Politics, 44:1 (2007), pp. 19-36.
17. Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, pp. 136-137 maintains that a person may be unable to sleep at night knowing that his or her small finger will be removed the following day, but the same person will sleep peacefully even though s/he knows that countless distant strangers face the most awful calamities -- presuming, Smith added, that the person ‘never sees them’. For further reflections on these matters, see my Distant Suffering.
18. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II. Section 8. and Aristotle, Poetics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), Sections 7.2 and 7.4.
19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), Part II, Section 4. See also the discussion in Gaita, Common Humanity, pp. 259ff.
20. Paul L. Harris, Children and Emotion: The Development of Psychological Understanding (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
21. and Craig Taylor, Sympathy: A Philosophical Analysis (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 3.
22. Arthur Schopenhauer, On The Basis of Morality (Oxford: Berghahn, 1995), p. 169 and pp. 204--5.
23. These were crucial themes in the writings of Norbert Elias. For a summary of their significance for International Relations, see my ‘Norbert Elias, the “Civilizing Process” and International Relations’, International Politics, 41 (2004), pp. 3-35.
24. Kant denied that an ethic could be grounded in the emotions, and indeed he expressed a preference for ‘cold-blooded goodness’ over the ‘warmth of affection’ precisely because the former was ‘more reliable’. See Anthony Cunningham, The Heart of What Matters: The Role for Literature in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 222.
25. Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions (London: Routledge 1992), pp. 109ff, stresses that recent Kantians have been less cautious about emotions such as compassion because of their importance for developing a sense of ‘connectedness’ with other persons. Not that this theme was wholly alien to Kant, as we have seen. Exposure to the poor, the sick and imprisoned could produce ‘the pain of compassion’, an impulse which had been created by Nature ‘for effecting what the representation of duty might not accomplish by itself’ (quoted in Cunningham, Heart of What Matters, p. 77 and p. 213).
26. See Jack Barbalet, ‘Introduction: Why Emotions are Crucial’ in Jack Barbalet (ed.), Emotions and Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
27. Interesting issues are raised here about how the emotions mark the point where the ‘cultural’ and the ‘somatic’ intersect. See Rom Harre and W. Gerrod Parrott, (eds.), The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions (London: Sage, 1996), Introduction.
28. Neta Crawford, ‘The Passions of World Politics: Propositions on Emotions and Emotional Relationships’, International Security, 24 (2001), pp. 116-156.
29. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance (Oxford: Polity, 1993), p. 54.
30. Embodiment was central to Elias's analysis of the civilising process which was first set out in the 1930s. Its significance for the Frankfurt School and for the critical sociology of world politics is considered on pp. 147ff.
31. Bryan S. Turner, ‘Outline of a Theory of Human Rights’, Sociology, 27 (1993), pp 489-512.
32. See respectively Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 17-18, and.
33. Max Horkheimer, ‘Materialism and Morality’, in Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p. 32.
34. See Seyla Benhabib et al. (eds.), On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p. 5.
35. and Stephen. E. Bronner, Of Critical Theory and its Theorists (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 332-335 on the importance of such themes in Frankfurt School theory more generally.
36. Horkheimer, quoted in Peter M. Stirk, Max Horkheimer: A New Interpretation (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 178.
37. Vulnerability did not merely underpin solidarity with ‘the community of men lost in the universe’ -- see Max Horkheimer, ‘Schopenhauer Today’ in Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason (New York: Seabury 1974), p. 75. Schopenhauer's defence of a post-anthropocentric ethic was reflected in Horkheimer's additional claim that the idea of vulnerability should underpin compassion for all sentient creatures and ‘solidarity with life in general’ (Horkheimer, Materialism, p. 36; see also Schopenhauer, Basis of Morality, pp. 175ff).
38. For broadly similar views, see Adorno, Problems, p. 145 on the insights that can be learnt from Schopenhauer's ‘crankiness’.
39. The expression is used by J. M. Bernstein in ‘After Auschwitz: Trauma and the Grammar of Ethics’, in Robert Fine and Charles Turner (eds.), Social Theory after the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 122.
40. See J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 8.
41. Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), pp. 167ff.
42. Whether Adorno overwrote this ethical argument is a question that goes beyond this discussion. Suffice it to add that his comments about an ethic which starts with the conditions of frailty and vulnerability find sympathy in many different areas of philosophical analysis. For comments on parallel themes in recent moral and political theory, see my ‘The Harm Principle and Global Ethics’, Global Society, 20 (2006), pp. 329-343.
43. The rejection of what Onora O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 165-166 calls the practice of placing ‘the principle of injury’ at the centre of social life can be traced back to the European Enlightenment.
44. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) situates this within the broad cultural shift which supported ‘the affirmation of ordinary life’ and the parallel rejection of sacred suffering.
45. Horkheimer's later reflections on theology and suffering (see Jurgen Habermas, ‘Reflections on the Development of Horkheimer's Work’, in Benhabib, On Max Horkheimer, ch. 3) invite the comment that several major faith traditions have regarded the capacity for suffering, and the potential for sympathy with the distressed, as the most natural point of solidarity between strangers.
46. See John Bowker, Problems of Suffering in the Religions of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
47. See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity, 1995) and.
48. Jurgen Hacke, ‘The Frankfurt School and International Relations: On the Centrality of Recognition’, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), pp. 181-194.
49. See also Axel Honneth, ‘Mutual Recognition as a Key for a Universal Ethics’, at: ?www.unesco.or.kr/kor/ science_s/project/universal_ethics/asianvalues/honneth.htm?.
50. With respect to exploitation, Jurgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979), p. 164, distinguishes between ‘bodily harm (hunger, exhaustion, illness), personal injury (degradation, servitude, fear), and finally spiritual desperation (loneliness, emptiness) -- to which in turn there correspond various hopes -- for well-being and security, freedom and dignity, happiness and fulfillment’.
51. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (London: MIT Press, 1995), p. 9 and p. 183.
52. See my ‘The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Implications for the Sociology of States-Systems’, International Affairs, 78 (2002), pp. 319-338 and Linklater, Norbert Elias.
53. Habermas, Communication, ch. 4.
54. Communication, p. 105.
55. Communication, chs. 3--4.
56. See the discussion of psychoanalytical theory in Habermas, Knowledge, chs. 10--12 and the References to ‘cognitive developmental psychology’ in Habermas, Communication, p. 100; see also ch. 2 entitled ‘Moral Development and Ego Identity’.
57. Some critics regard this oversight as a weakness in Habermas's position, but not one that his approach is incapable of correcting. See Nick Crossley, ‘Emotion and Communicative Action: Habermas, Linguistic Philosophy and Existentialism’, in Gillian Bendelow and Simon. J. Williams (eds.), Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues (London: Routledge, 1998).
58. Habermas, Communication, ch. 3. See also the References to the significance of ‘affective expressions’ in the evolutionary movement from primates to hominids on p. 134, and the more central concern with the development of ‘structures of thought’ which is expressed on p. 149.
59. Joel Whitebook, ‘Fantasy and Critique: Some Thoughts on Freud and the Frankfurt School’, in David. M. Rasmussen (ed.), The Handbook of Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 300.
60. Axel Honneth, Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (London: MIT Press, 1991), p. 281.
61. What has been lost, it might be argued, is the ‘underground history’ which concerns the body and ‘the fate of the human instincts and passions which are displaced and distorted by civilization’: see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso 1972), p. 231.
62. See, for example, the following claim in Habermas, Communication, p. 176: ‘In living, the organisms themselves make an evaluation to the effect that self-maintenance is preferable to the destruction of the system, reproduction of life to death, health to the risks of sickness’. But from the ‘descriptive statement that living systems prefer certain states to others’ nothing follows ethically from the standpoint of observers.
63. See the following claim in Habermas, Communication, p. 177): ‘For a living being that maintains itself in the structures of ordinary language communication, the validity basis of speech has the binding force of universal and unavoidable -- in this sense transcendental -- presuppositions. The theoretician does not have the same possibility of choice in relation to the validity claims immanent in speech as he does in relation to the basic biological value of health’ (italics in original).
64. Jurgen Habermas, ‘History and Evolution’, Telos, 39 (1979), pp. 5-44.
65. See Habermas, Knowledge, pp. 256 and 285.
66. Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, p. 55.
67. See Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, p. 55.
68. and Erich Fromm, ‘Politics and Psychoanalysis’, in S. E. Bronner and D. M. Kellner (eds.), Critical Theory and Society (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 216.
69. Thomas A. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (London: MIT Press, 1981), p. 193.
70. Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School, p. 271.
71. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972), pp. 29-30.
72. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
73. See also the writings of Lucien Febvre collected in Peter Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History from the Writing of Lucien Febvre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 24.
74. and Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotion Standards’, American Historical Review, 90 (1985), pp. 813-836. See Linklater, Elias for a list of key works in figurational sociology which are also relevant to the argument of this article.
75. For an overview of the relevant literature, see Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).
76. Elias moved to Frankfurt University when Karl Mannheim was appointed to the Chair of Sociology in 1929. For further details, see Artur Bogner, ‘Elias and the Frankfurt School’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4 (1987), pp. 249-285, and Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School.
77. See also Chris Rojek, ‘An Anatomy of the Leicester School of Sociology: An Interview with Eric Dunning’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 4 (2004), pp. 337-359.
78. See Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996);
79. Stephen Mennell, ‘The Formation of We-Images: A Process Theory’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and.
80. Abram De Swaan, ‘Widening Circles of Identification: Emotional Concerns in Sociogenetic Perspective’, Theory, Culture and Society, 12 (1995), pp. 25-39.