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(Key Ideas) Robert Fine-Cosmopolitanism (Key Ideas) - Routledge (2008) PDF
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Citizenship Risk
Keith Faulks Deborah Lupton
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Robert Bocock Chris Jenks
Postmodernity Cosmopolitanism
Barry Smart Robert Fine
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xviii
Bibliography 155
Index 171
Preface: twenty-one theses on
cosmopolitan social theory
This book is the latest issue of some ten years’ writing in the area of
cosmopolitanism and social theory. In the course of this time I have
had many people to thank for exchanging ideas, putting me right
when I was wrong, having faith in my work and keeping me going
in this area when other attractions were on offer. I want to acknowl-
edge in particular two of my former doctoral students who have
rapidly become independent and internationally renowned scholars
in their own right: Dr Daniel Chernilo, Associate Professor in the
Department of Sociology, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile, and
Dr William Smith, Lecturer in the Department of Politics, University
of Dundee. I owe a particular debt to Dr Chernilo for his work on
cosmopolitanism and the history of social theory and to Dr Smith
for his work on the normative implications of cosmopolitan social
theory. You will see from the bibliography that this book has a debt
to the joint work I have done with both these colleagues. I have
received extraordinarily helpful comments, warnings and encourage-
ment from Vivienne Boon, Philosophy, Liverpool; Professor Robin
Cohen, Sociology, Warwick; Dr Glynis Cousin, Higher Education
Academy; Professor Gerard Delanty, Sociology, Sussex; Alison
Diduck, Law, UCL; Professor Alessandro Ferrara, Philosophy,
Rome; Dr David Hirsh, Sociology, Goldsmiths; Professor Maria Pia
Lara, Philosophy, University Autonóma Metropolitana, Mexico;
Professor Lydia Morris Sociology, Essex; Professor Alan Norrie,
Law, King’s London; Professor Istvan Pogany, Law, Warwick; Dr
David Seymour, Law, Lancaster; Dr Charles Turner, Sociology,
Warwick; Dr Rolando Vazquez, Sociology, Gothenburg; and
Lawrence Welch, NHS, Bradford. My thanks too to the ESRC New
Securities Programme for funding my project on ‘Cosmopolitanism
and military intervention: the elaboration of a paradigm’ and to
the organisers of the Annual Symposium on Philosophy and Social
Science, Prague, for providing a particularly genial as well as produc-
tive forum for presenting ideas.
1
Taking the ‘ism’ out of
cosmopolitanism
Laying out the field
edges that the Westphalian order has assumed different shapes and
forms in the course of its progressive evolution but his basic con-
tention is that no fundamental change to the system of nation-states
occurred before the transition to the new cosmopolitan epoch.
Events as momentous as eighteenth-century political revolutions,
the growth of imperialism in the nineteenth century, the collapse
of mainland empires after the First World War, the formation of a
raft of newly independent nation-states out of their fragments, the
rise of totalitarian regimes with anti-national and global ambitions
in the inter-war period, the collapse of overseas empires after the
Second World War, a further raft of newly independent ex-colonial
states, and the formation of two ‘camps’ during the Cold War – all
such events are presented as punctuation marks in a continuous and
expanding Westphalian narrative. Even the forms of international
co-operation established among nation-states, such as the forma-
tion of the United Nations, and the emergence of a world system of
independent nation-states appear merely to consolidate the funda-
mental principle of national sovereignty (Giddens 1985).
In this representation of history all events prior to the rise of the
new cosmopolitan order seem only to consolidate and generalise the
‘old’ order of independent nation-states, as if the hoary chestnut, le
plus ça change, le plus c’est la même chose, held absolute sway in the
sphere of life. The ‘new’ cosmopolitan order appears as a product
of our own age and not least of the work of the new cosmopoli-
tans themselves. This teleological reconstruction of the history of
the nation-state in the past allows for a spectacular image of the
radical disjuncture occurring in the present. And yet the depend-
ence of methodological cosmopolitanism on the methodological
nationalism it seeks to overcome becomes all the more pronounced.
Both conceive of a rupture between tradition and modernity in the
mid-seventeenth century marked by the Treaty of Westphalia. Both
conceive of the nation-state as the governing principle of modern
political community. Methodological cosmopolitanism differs from
methodological nationalism only in that it refuses to see the nation-
state as an end of history and proposes a second rupture, one which
brings into being the cosmopolitan condition (Wagner 2001: 83).1
I am arguing that Beck concedes too much to methodological
nationalism when he intimates that it did once have a historical
validity. I would also suggest that the critique of methodological
12 taking the ‘ism’ out of cosmopolitanism
If each State had as its chief aim not to expand or to lengthen its
borders, but to set its own house in order and to make the wid-
est appeal to its members for a moral life on an ever higher level,
then all discrepancy between national and human morals would
be excluded . . . The more societies concentrate their energies
inwards, on the interior life, the more they will be diverted from
the disputes that bring a clash between cosmopolitanism – or
world patriotism, and patriotism . . . Societies can have their
pride, not in being the greatest or the wealthiest, but in being
the most just, the best organised and in possessing the best
moral constitution.
(Durkheim 1992: 74–5)2
militarism can quickly corrupt the mind. Yet the regulative idea
that informed his cosmopolitan point of view was that the ‘germ
of enlightenment’ works towards a universal end, ‘the perfect civil
union of humankind’, and that ‘genuine principles of right’ point
towards a ‘universal law of humanity’ (Kant 1991: 114). Behind the
backs of warring humanity he perceived Providence and the Laws
of Nature accomplishing their universal purpose. ‘Perpetual peace’,
as Kant put it, ‘is guaranteed by no less an authority than the great
artist Nature herself ’ (Kant 1991: 108).
The cosmopolitan point of view Kant reconstructed was not so
much a blueprint for a future interstate order as an elaboration of
what human freedom makes possible even at the level of interstate
relations. Humanity, he wrote, is ‘by its very nature capable of con-
stant progress and improvement without forfeiting its strength . . .
no one can or ought to decide what the highest degree may be at
which mankind may have to stop progressing, and hence how wide a
gap may still of necessity remain between the idea and its execution.
For this will depend on freedom, which can transcend any limit we
care to impose’ (Kant 1991: 189–91). The boldness of Kant’s vision
was matched by his recognition that the way things are is not the
way they have to be and the way things appear is not what they
essentially are. However, Kant addressed the limits of natural law
from within the frame of natural law and on the margins of his own
texts we can detect his apprehension that the cosmopolitan point
of view might not provide the necessary solution. Nowhere is this
more evident than in his analysis of the rights of man.
The idea of ‘the rights of man’ was the distinctive accomplish-
ment of eighteenth-century republicanism. It signified that every
man should be conceived as a bearer of rights simply by virtue
of the fact that he is a man. It contrasted with traditional socie-
ties in which the idea of personality, that is, the ability to possess
rights, was a privileged status distinct from that of the majority
of the population. Roman law distinguished between the status of
persons, those who had the right to have rights, and that of slaves
and other dependants. The ‘rights of man’ universalised the status
of the person, so that every man was deemed a bearer of rights by
virtue of their manhood. Eighteenth-century republicanism then
provided the framework in which struggles for the rights of slaves,
women, workers and colonial subjects (as well as children, the mad
28 cosmopolitanism and natural law
Whether or not Hegel had Kant in mind, his own account of natural
law introduces a historical consciousness of reason that is missing in
Kant’s moral conception of the past.
Hegel located ‘Westphalia’ within the wider process of
Reformation and the liberation of political life from the control of
the Catholic Church. The Reformation introduced the principle
that law and government must accord with the idea of free will and
that humanity is in its nature destined to be free. Blind obedience
to divine law was replaced by the principle of obedience to the laws
of the state as the rational element in human will. In practice this
meant that the executive powers that were previously the property
of dynastic families were gradually transferred into state property.
The privileges of the feudal nobility were curtailed and their author-
ity transformed into official positions connected with the state. The
dependence of the people on their noble masters was broken and
replaced by dependence on the state. Feudal retinues were replaced
by standing armies established to supply monarchs with the forces
needed for the defence of their states against attacks by foreign
enemies and rebellions by their subjects. From wars between states
there arose a common interest among all states to preserve their
independence but the balance of power between them was continu-
ally threatened and the resulting imbalances led to a condition of
absolute mistrust. This culminated in the Thirty Years War and
scenes of utter desolation in which all the contending forces were
wrecked. The Peace of Westphalia brought to a close this condition
of perpetual war by establishing a legal framework which recognised
cosmopolitanism and natural law 33
We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past
and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply
think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.
The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to
the surface and has usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is
the reality in which we live.
(Arendt 1979: ix)
the source of pain was not ‘nationalist excess’ alone, but rather
six years of Nazi occupation followed by forty years of Soviet
domination . . . The lesson of history here is not one in which
the mistakes of the past are corrected, but one in which the past
continues to haunt the present.
(Turner 2004: 303)
The constitutionalisation of
international law
The idea of the ‘constitutionalisation of international law’ is drawn
from international legal theory as a means of defending the legiti-
macy of international law despite its expanded scope and increasing
distance from the consent of states (Kumm 2004; Rosenau 2002;
Teubner 2004). A key indicator of the constitutionalisation of inter-
national law is the enhanced authority of the UN and its involvement
not only in conflicts between states but also in conflicts within states
– in response to civil wars, the breakdown of government and major
human rights abuses or for the promotion of democracy. It reflects
an increasing public engagement with international law. Whether a
particular action is or is not in accord with international law or the
principles of international law, and whether international law has to
change to accommodate a particular action, have become the stuff
of public debate since 1989 – in contrast with its relative invisibility
in the post-1945 period when international law was widely regarded
as ineffective or narrowly technocratic in its concerns and citizens
were inclined to rely on the resources of domestic legal systems.
Today, international law not only claims a ‘soft’ influence over states
to take human rights into account, it demands compliance and
declares a duty to obey. Its subject matter has expanded to such an
extent that there is no clear nucleus of sovereignty states can invoke
against it. Its dependence on state consent and the state’s degree
70 cosmopolitanism and international law
legal mechanisms for deciding when to use it as the sine qua non of
subordinating power to international law (Habermas and Derrida
2003a). We may share the aspiration to develop more robust forms
of international and cosmopolitan law, but as I shall argue in the
next chapter, we should resist the temptation to overburden law
by exaggerating its attractiveness and capabilities (Hirsh 2005). We
have to leave space for the political field of judgement. The task, as
I see it, is not so much to constitutionalise international law but to
attach it more firmly to a cosmopolitan politics.
5
Cosmopolitanism and
humanitarian military
intervention
War, peace and human rights
time when state sovereignty was the privilege of the few and pow-
erful states granted themselves the right to use force against the
less powerful. According to Chandler, cosmopolitanism should be
read as an attack on the principle of sovereign equality introduced
after 1945. Similarly, Tim Brennan identifies cosmopolitanism with
Pax Americana dressed up in the cloth of international law. He is
dismissive of cosmopolitan concerns over crimes against humanity,
referring to them as ‘fear-mongering cameos of “tribal” blood-let-
ting in barbaric backlands’, and interprets the cosmopolitan attack
on national sovereignty as an attack on the capacity of ‘indigenous
peoples to draw a boundary between what is theirs and what lies
beyond’ (Archibugi 2004a: 46). Peter Gowan argues that the forma-
tion of a supra-state authority, far from exercising jurisdiction over
the US, is destined to become its lightly disguised instrument. For
Gowan, the cosmopolitan dream of uniting humanity on the basis
of a global citizenry and universal human rights is a self-deception,
since no scheme for universal harmony can work which fails to con-
front the social relations of actually existing capitalism.
The gap between facts and norms leads some critics to conclude
that the cosmopolitan outlook is either hopelessly naive or wilfully
cynical (Zolo 2002; Chomsky 1999). Most of these writers reserve
their severest criticism for the doctrine that there can be a right
of intervention even without the formal authorisation of the UN.
They see the appeal to ‘global justice’ as an umbrella under which an
attack on international law is being launched by big powers and see
cosmopolitanism as, naively or wilfully, justifying an imperial inter-
national order. Jacques Rancière argues that under a cosmopolitan
register the rights of man have become the rights of victims: ‘of
those unable to enact any rights or even any claim in their name, so
that eventually their rights had to be upheld by others, at the cost
of shattering the edifice of international law, in the name of a new
right of humanitarian interference’ (Rancière 2006). He concludes
that the rights of man or human rights (he equates the two) have
been boiled down to a right of invasion, a right of war, which is
in effect no right at all. He argues that since the invasion of Iraq
the idea of humanitarian military intervention has become so deeply
imbricated in a new imperialism as to drag the larger cosmopolitan
project down with it.
These arguments are compelling but to my mind they leave
cosmopolitanism and humanitarian military intervention 81
This was the nub of the issue for Arendt: the attempted extermina-
tion of the Jewish people was not to be understood as the culmina-
tion of a long line of persecutory acts against Jews, rather it was ‘an
attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic
of the “human status” without which the very words “mankind” or
“humanity” would be devoid of meaning’ (Arendt 1977b: 268–9).
The court failed to understand that in destroying an ethnic group
humankind in its entirety might be ‘grievously hurt and endangered’
(Arendt 1977b: 276). Arendt’s concern was that the court and espe-
cially the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, were reinforcing the very
situation that the idea of crimes against humanity had sought to
correct – the breaking up of the human race into a multitude of
competing nations.
Arendt argued that the political shortcomings of the trial dove-
tailed with its legal shortcomings. The main business of any criminal
trial, she argued, is to ‘weigh up the charges, render judgement and
mete out due punishment’. However, in this trial the prosecutor
could not resist the temptation to subordinate legal justice to moral
ends. He appealed to Jewish rather than secular legality, he resorted
to biblical conceptions of vengeance, he subsumed legal criteria of
relevance to the unchecked testimony of survivor-witnesses, and he
portrayed them all as Jewish heroes. Arendt acknowledged the extra-
legal achievements of the trial, not least its exposure to public scru-
tiny of the destruction of European Jewry and the space it provided
for survivor-witnesses to have their say in public, but she maintained
that these ends would not be served if justice were not done and be
seen to be done. It is important not to overstate Arendt’s criticisms.
The failures of the Eichmann trial, as she put it, were ‘neither in kind
nor in degree greater than the failures of the Nuremberg trials or the
successor trials in other European countries’ (Arendt 1977b: 274).
Justice was done even if the principal crime could not be found in
the law books. The difference between Arendt and Jaspers should
not be overstated. Both attempt to construct a cosmopolitan point
of view on the trial and both supported the construction of an inter-
national criminal court. However, while Jaspers measured the trial
against a legal ideal and found it wanting, Arendt drew hard-headed
judgements from deeply equivocal material.
104 cosmopolitanism and punishment
Strategies of denial
The cosmopolitan analysis put forward by both Jaspers and Arendt
contrast markedly with strategies of denial adopted by the defend-
ants themselves as well as by onlookers and historians sceptical of
the significance of this innovation in international criminal justice.
The jurist Carl Schmitt, himself interrogated at Nuremberg, quipped
that a ‘crime against humanity’ is one committed by Germans while
a ‘crime for humanity’ is committed by Americans. He treated the
prosecution of crimes against humanity as a prime example of ‘vic-
tors’ justice’ in a juridical disguise which served only to construct
the defeated enemy as ‘inhuman’ (Salter 1999).3
One strategy was to deny the validity of the law on the grounds
that it was enacted by four victorious military powers and not by an
authorised international legislature, it used vague phrases like ‘other
inhumane acts’ as part of its lexicon, it was retrospectively applied
to acts committed prior to the law itself, and it excluded equivalent
crimes committed by the victorious powers (Deak 1993). Since the
law violated formal principles of legality – that it be authoritative
in its origins, general in its application, specific in its formulation
and non-retroactive in its enforcement – it was argued that it was
not properly speaking law at all (Kirchheimer 1969; Neumann
1942). Another strategy was to claim that acts labelled ‘crimes
against humanity’ are normal routines of power in the international
arena, not fundamentally different from other acts of power not so
labelled. In the later case of Klaus Barbie, ‘the butcher of Lyons’,
his lawyers based their defence on the argument that their client’s
actions as police chief during the occupation were merely a case of
‘white Europeans’ doing to other ‘white Europeans’ what all white
Europeans have routinely done to black non-Europeans and that by
putting Barbie on trial the French were camouflaging their colonial
history (Finkielkraut 1992). A third strategy was to deny personal
responsibility on the grounds that perpetrators of crimes against
humanity have no choice but to obey orders and cannot, therefore,
be held guilty of the crimes committed. Appeal was made to external
constraints to which the perpetrators were subjected: if the choice
facing an individual is that of ‘kill or be killed’, it is only in a formal
sense that an individual is responsible for his or her actions. Appeal
was also made to the internal constraints faced by the accused.
cosmopolitanism and punishment 105
Eichmann argued that since the command of the Führer was the
‘absolute centre’ of the legal system, he simply could not have acted
otherwise despite bearing no ill feelings towards his victims.
Martin Heidegger employed similar strategies of denial when
called upon by Herbert Marcuse to disavow the Nazi regime. What
the Nazis did to the Jews was no worse, he wrote, than what the
Russians did to the Germans. He maintained that the ‘manufacture
of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps’ deserves no
more attention than other practices of modern technology, like ‘a
motorised food-industry’, which are ‘in essence – the same’. He
compared ‘those who were liquidated inconspicuously in extermi-
nation camps’ to ‘the millions of impoverished people right now . . .
perishing from hunger in China’ and distinguished only between
those ‘capable of enduring death in its essence’ and those who
merely ‘succumb’ and are ‘done in’ (Lang 1997; Rabinbach 1997).
A more interesting perspective, however, is apparent in his ‘Letter
on Humanism’ (1947). Written as a response to Sartre’s credo of
absolute individual responsibility, which allows no excuses for one’s
actions, not even Abraham acting under the command of God,
Heidegger relocated humanism as a metaphysics of the subject
that denies the historicality and finite freedom of human existence
(Heidegger 1976: 219). Humanism elevates the human being as
master of all things. It constructs a technological relation to the
world based on the domination of nature and people. Heidegger
insisted that when he spoke against humanism, his argument was
not designed to be destructive. It ‘in no way implies a defence of the
inhuman, but rather opens other vistas’ (Heidegger 1976: 250). It
does not declare humanism false but inadequate to the task of realis-
ing ‘the proper dignity of man’. It does not align itself ‘against the
humane’ or advocate ‘the inhuman’ but maintains only that human-
ism ‘does not set the humanitas of man high enough’ (Heidegger
1976: 233). Nazism became a catastrophe because it turned oppo-
sition to humanism into an advocacy of the inhuman. Heidegger
said he did not wish to do away with laws that ‘hold human beings
together ever so tenuously’ but rather ‘to think the humanity of
homo humanus . . . without humanism’ (Heidegger 1976: 254). If
Schmitt stood for the atrophy of responsibility, Heidegger stood for
its hypertrophy. In either case ordinary legal responsibility appeared
hard to sustain.
106 cosmopolitanism and punishment
Or again:
or essence in the same sense as other things’ (Arendt 1958: 9). She
preferred the language of ‘human status’ to ‘human nature’ because
it refers to ‘the sum total of human activities and capabilities which
correspond to the human condition’ (Arendt 1958: 10). I think we
need to make a further step. Once we think of ‘humanity’ in terms
of a certain status in the world, we can also address its historicity.
The idea of the human status originated in the ancient world as a
particular status that contrasted with that of slaves, foreigners and
women. In the modern world it is generalised as the status of all
human beings. The anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, observed:
your book on totalitarianism. At that time you had not yet made
your discovery . . . that evil is banal. Of that ‘radical evil’ to which
your then analysis bore such eloquent and erudite witness, noth-
ing remains but this slogan . . .
(Arendt 1978a: 245)
Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right
from wrong, be connected with our faculty for thought? Could the
activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting
upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific
content and quite independent of results, could this activity be
of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evil-doing?
(Arendt 1978b: 1, 5)
the highest manifestation of the spirit of the West would lose their
validity and breed a ‘spiritless radicalism’ full of hostility to culture
and images of destruction.
Arendt argued that the barbarism Nietzsche anticipated proved
to be a pale image of the barbarism to come. She wrote of the jus-
tified disgust with the fake world of bourgeois values felt by the
most thoughtful of the ‘elite’ after the Great War. She wrote of the
revulsion felt by radical intellectuals of the front generation over the
gulf between the values society espoused and the mechanised mur-
der it actually produced.8 The intellectual elite became ‘absorbed by
their desire to see the ruin of this whole world of fake security, fake
culture and fake life’ and elevated violence, cruelty and destruction
as ‘supreme capacities of humankind’ (Arendt 1979: 330). It turned
negativity into nihilism. True, Arendt emphasised the temporary
nature of the alliance between the elite and the mob, for thinking
and thoughtlessness are uneasy bed-fellows, but experience of the
pathologies of thinking belies any premature identification of this
activity with abstention from evil-doing.
Actually the dangers of thinking are scattered throughout
Arendt’s writings. Thinking can turn ‘what ought to be’ into an
absolute standard against which everything that exists is treated
with indifference or disdain. Thinking can turn the idea of progress
into a justification for the most criminal of human actions. Thinking
can superimpose the logic of an idea onto the concrete historical
process and pretend to know the mysteries of the whole histori-
cal process. Thinking can privilege spurious deductions from ideo-
logical premises over any activity of understanding or judgement.
Heidegger is for Arendt the exemplary case of a philosopher who
pushed thinking to the point where its remoteness from the world
led to ‘error’, if not evil – in this case, his engagement with National
Socialism (Villa 1997). It is an old story that great philosophers
do not necessarily manifest sound political judgement and tend to
regard ‘with indifference and contempt . . . the world of the city’.
Thinking does not only prepare the way for judgement. It needs
judgement to save itself from itself.
his own interest and against his own will’. The common enemy that
unites the nation is not only an external power but the particular will
of every individual: ‘such an enemy existed within the breast of each
citizen’. The general will inaugurates a world of mutual suspicion
and the abolition of all legal and institutional guarantees. In follow-
ing Rousseau’s dictum that ‘it would be absurd for the will to bind
itself for the future’, it anticipates the structureless quality of totali-
tarian governments to come: ‘Nothing is less permanent and less
likely to establish permanence than the will’. Nature itself seems to
offer no resistance (Arendt 1988: 73–94). It is not surprising that
Arendt presents the faculty of the will as ‘the trickiest and the most
dangerous of modern concepts and misconceptions’ (Arendt 1988:
225).
In The Life of the Mind Arendt develops this theme. She found
something deeply disturbing in the change in the conception of the
future that accompanies the modern concept of progress – ‘from
that which approaches us to that which we determine by the Will’s
projects’. There is something frightening in the movement from a
political conception of freedom that is possible only in the sphere
of human plurality to a philosophical conception of freedom that is
fundamentally solipsistic. There is something delusional in the prej-
udice that political community can represent the will of the people,
for all political communities ‘constrain the will of their citizens’ and
at best ‘open up some spaces of freedom for action’ (Arendt 1978b:
2, 199). Unlike thinking, which manifests itself in internal dialogue,
Arendt argued that willing is essentially about domination, not dia-
logue, even if we are both those who give the orders and those who
obey them and take for granted the obedience in ourselves. ‘To will
is to command’, writes Nietzsche, ‘inherent in the Will is the com-
manding thought’ (Arendt 1978b: 2, 161). Drawing on Nietzsche,
Arendt links the emergence of the will to the sources of evil in the
modern world: from the fact that ‘the will cannot will backward . . .
cannot stop the wheel of time . . . from that impotence Nietzsche
derives all human evil’ – resentment, thirst for vengeance, the will to
power over others (Arendt 1978b: 2, 168). Drawing on Heidegger,
Arendt associates the destructiveness of the will with its obsession
with the future: ‘In order to will the future in the sense of being the
future’s master, men must forget and finally destroy the past . . .
124 cosmopolitanism and the life of the mind
They went really on their own judgments, and they did so freely;
there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular
cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They
had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed
for the unprecedented.
(Arendt 1977b: 295)
evil was an occasion for deep reflection on how human cruelty and
misery can co-exist with a just god. Today, it would seem, the judge-
ment of evil can be opposed to all reflection, dialogue or delibera-
tion. The strength of Arendt is to stress from the start the unity of
judgement and understanding. She saw the crisis of understanding
and crisis of judgement brought about by the rise of totalitarian-
ism so closely inter-twined that she spoke in the same breath of
‘the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment’.
The essential point, she argued, is to learn to ‘understand without
preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary
rules which is morality’ (Arendt 1992: 388). Judgement and under-
standing belong to one another.
The relation of judgement to understanding was a key thematic
of Arendt’s earlier works, collected under the title of Essays in
Understanding. Understanding has much in common with think-
ing. Arendt characterises understanding as ‘a profoundly human
activity . . . a specifically human way of being alive; for every single
person needs to be reconciled to a world into which he was born
a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness,
he always remains a stranger’ (Arendt 1992: 308). Understanding
is the opposite of indoctrination or ideology. It generates no fixed
results. It can only be done in concert with others. It takes into
consideration the viewpoints of others. It is prepared to share its
conclusions in open and uncoerced discussion with others. It is
prepared, like Penelope’s weaving, to ‘undo every morning what
it has finished the night before’ (Arendt 1978b: 1, 88). It takes as
much pleasure, as Gotthold Lessing put it, in ‘making clouds’ as it
does in clearing them. Understanding differs from thinking in that
it relates the subjectivity of thinking to the substance of what is
to be understood. Understanding is always of something. It must
have an object and its task is the comprehension of what exists,
not the setting up of an ‘ought’ which has ‘no proper topos or place
in the world’ (Arendt 1978b: 2, 196). It can never be a statement,
therefore, only of the subject’s opinions, convictions or feelings.
This does not imply acquiescence in the arrangements of the world,
for the peace understanding established with the world has more
warmth in it than this. Nor does it imply empathy with the subjects
of our understanding or justification of their actions, for empathy
may be unwarranted and justification reveals nothing of subjectiv-
cosmopolitanism and the life of the mind 129
2007: 384). However, to quote again the same critic, it does indeed
invite each human being to become ‘friends of humanity’. I have
argued that what it means to become a friend of humanity is itself
socially situated and very much depends on our local position.
I have argued that the concept of the ‘cosmopolitan condition’
refers to the development not only of certain forms of cosmopoli-
tan consciousness but also of certain laws, institutions and prac-
tices. There is a sense in which the cosmopolitan condition is ‘out
there’ in the world. We can try to understand what it is, and there is
indeed much disagreement over how it is to be understood, but we
cannot determine what it is. In this regard cosmopolitanism is not
just an abstract ideal, but an evolving set of social forms which, like
all social forms, is a potential object of confirmation or criticism,
reform or repudiation. It can neither simply be willed into being
nor willed away. Since the cosmopolitan condition is constructed
through the activities of humankind, it can be reconstructed and
deconstructed, is always unfolding, and may or may not accord with
our own sense of what is right.
I have maintained, following Habermas, that the cosmopolitan
condition is a complex social reality. It incorporates what I take to be
three separate moments or elements: first, the development of a vari-
ety of new practices, institutions and laws in the sphere of interstate
relations; second, the refraction of these new practices, institutions
and laws on all preceding fields of right and law (including those of
the nation-state, civil society, the family, morality, civil and politi-
cal rights and private property); and third, the recalibration of the
‘system of right’ as a whole in the light of these new developments.
I have viewed cosmopolitanism more like a modern cathedral than
an ancient temple, more like the fluid and adaptive organism of a
human brain than a simple relation between structure and function,
more like a set of flows between nodal points than a fixed state of
affairs. It is not identical to any particular institution (such as the
UN, a world parliament, international law, human rights, interna-
tional courts, global civil society), but to an open, conflictual and
dynamic system in which the relation between form and function is
always relative to its place within the system as a whole.
I have maintained that there is a sense in which the cosmopolitan
condition may be viewed as a necessary stage in the development of
the idea of right – necessary in the same sense that the development
conclusion 137
2 Confronting reputations
1 Kant’s key essays are: ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan
Point of View’ (1785), ‘Reviews of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of
the History of Mankind’ (1784–5); ‘On the common saying “This may
be true in theory but it does not apply in practice”’ (1793), ‘Toward
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795–6), ‘International
Right’ in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797); and ‘The contest of the
faculties’ (1798). They are collected in Kant 1991.
2 In The Rights of Others Seyla Benhabib elaborates thus the idea of cos-
mopolitan right: ‘A cosmopolitan theory of justice cannot be restricted
to schemes of just distribution on a global scale, but must also incor-
porate a vision of just membership. Such just membership entails:
recognizing the moral claim of refugees and asylees to first admittance;
144 notes
I am less convinced than Derrida that we should pin our faith on the
building of a UN army or that we can simply declare our ambivalence
in general philosophical terms. Cosmopolitanism must be able to draw
upon the resource of political actors capable of making complex and
informed judgements on urgent questions of public deliberation. It has
to grapple with ambivalence.
We seem to be increasingly haunted by the spectre of terrorism:
images of 9/11 and 7/7, images of the beheading of hostages, images
of the suicide bombing of many innocent civilians by the ‘resistance’
in Iraq. On the surface, much of this terrorism appears to have lost all
rational connection with political instrumentality and appears distinct
from the traditional terrorism that has marked national movements in,
say, Algeria or Ireland, or even in Israel/Palestine. On the other side, it
may well be the case that under current American leadership much of
what is called the ‘war on terror’ works to ‘regenerate the causes of the
evil they claim to eradicate’ (Habermas and Derrida 2003a: 100). The
cosmopolitan outlook is a refusal to lose our sense of astonishment in
the face of either form of violence and an understanding that we are not
notes 149
were in no position to know that it was criminally wrong’ and that ‘the
selections of able-bodied people on the ramp had in effect been a res-
cue operation because otherwise “all those coming in would have been
exterminated”’ (Arendt 2003: 237). Arendt concluded that only when
Judge Hofmeyer pronounced the sentences did one realise how much
‘damage to justice’ was done by not taking into account the everyday
reality of Auschwitz.
3 We may hear in this reductive view of history an echo of Goebbels’
comment, ‘we will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all
times or as their greatest criminals’, or as Eichmann’s lawyer put it,
‘you are decorated if you win and go to the gallows if you lose’.
4 Alain Finkielkraut argues ambiguously that the Holocaust was ‘from
Eichmann to the engineers on the trains . . . a crime of employees’
and that it was ‘precisely to remove from crime the excuse of service
and to restore the quality of killers to law-abiding citizens . . . that the
category of “crimes against humanity” was formulated’ (Finkielkraut
1992: 3–4). Zygmunt Bauman adopts a mechanistic view both of soci-
ology and of the actual workings of bureaucracy with less equivocation
(Bauman 1990). For a critique of Bauman’s approach to the question
of responsibility, see Fine and Hirsh (2000).
5 This theme is taken up by Primo Levi who, in The Periodic Table,
describes the SS as ‘ordinary men’ and in If This is a Man argues that
save for exceptions, they were not monsters but ‘average human beings’
who had been ‘reared badly’ and ‘subjected to a terrifying miseduca-
tion’ (Levi 1995).
6 In her essay on ‘Fascism and representation’, Gillian Rose used the
label ‘Holocaust piety’ to characterise this way of thinking: ‘It is this
reference to the “ineffable” that I would dub “Holocaust piety” . . .
The “ineffable” is invoked by a now widespread tradition of reflection
on the Holocaust: by Adorno, by Holocaust theology, Christian and
Jewish, more recently by Lyotard, and now by Habermas. According to
this view, “Auschwitz” or “the Holocaust” are emblems for the break-
down in divine and/or human history. The uniqueness of this break
delegitimises names and narratives as such, and hence all aesthetic or
apprehensive representation . . . the search for a decent response to
those brutally destroyed is conflated with the quite different response
called for in the face of the inhuman capacity for such destruction.
To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and
knowledge, in short, the witness of “ineffability”, that is, non-repre-
sentability, is to mystify what we dare not understand, because we fear
that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we
are – human, all too human’ (Rose 1996: 41–3).
7 The philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, compared the Holocaust
with an earthquake so catastrophic as to ‘destroy not only lives, build-
ings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes
directly and indirectly’ (Lyotard 1988: 56). In his thought experiment
he imagined a situation in which not only vast numbers are extermi-
notes 151
nated but the means to prove this happened are also destroyed and the
authority of the tribunal supposed to establish the crime is discred-
ited on the ground that the judge is ‘merely a criminal more fortunate
than the defendant in war’. There are parallels between the questions
Lyotard and Arendt pose but this should not be allowed to obscure
the opposing answers they give and the different sensibilities which
inform them.
this encounter might prevent him from making ‘the correct judgment’.
In the Afterword of If This is a Man Levi declared his own equivoca-
tion thus: ‘Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand
what happened, because to understand is almost to justify . . . I can-
not say I understand the Germans’ (Levi 1995: 395–6). His fear was
that understanding the Germans might lead to loss of judgement even
though his purpose was to understand and judge at the same time.
11 Again there are interesting resemblances between Arendt’s notion of
understanding and that of Hegel. In the Preface to his Philosophy of
Right Hegel famously comments: ‘To comprehend what is, is the task
of philosophy, for what is, is reason . . . If his [an individual’s] theory
. . . builds a world as it ought to be, then it certainly has an existence,
but only within his opinions – a pliant medium in which the imagina-
tion can construct anything it pleases . . . this rational insight is the
reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants to those who
have received the inner call to comprehend, to preserve their subjective
freedom in the realm of the substantial and at the same time to stand
with their subjective freedom . . . in what has being in and for itself ’
(Hegel 1991: 21–2).
12 Arendt’s characterisation of the social sciences is overblown to the
extent that an array of positions in the field has sought to face the ten-
sions between facts and norms. I would rather see Arendt as providing
a critique of positivist social science from within the parameters of
social science.
Conclusion
1 A similar methodological error is to be found in other fields of social
inquiry. For example, critical histories of the Labour party in the UK
may construct an ideal of socialism which the Labour party has never
fulfilled and represent its history as one betrayal after another of an
ideal which exists only in the head of the critic and his or her fellow
thinkers. This essentially idealist methodology displays no shortage
of judgement but it cannot possibly understand the dynamics of the
party.
2 For example, in my research on black workers in South Africa (Fine
1991), I explored how some workers struggled against all the odds for
basic human rights in the apartheid workplace and how the winning
of basic human rights brought with it new dilemmas caused by the
legalisation of trade unions, the establishment of industrial courts and
thence the ensconcing of labour rights in the constitution of the new
South Africa. The movement between struggles for human rights and
the institutionalisation of human rights is inherent in the phenomenon
itself. This movement runs in both directions and in the case of more
vulnerable workers institutionalisation may well precede the possibil-
ity of struggle.
3 For example, in his impassioned polemic against existing
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Index
the Law of Peoples 64–8; South Jaspers, Karl: and the Eichmann
Africa 153; Universal Declaration trial 101–3; and the Nuremberg
of Human Rights 147; violations Tribunal 97–101; and strategies
and humanitarian military of denial 106; The Question of
intervention 83 German Guilt 98
human status 110 judgement/judging
humanism 105 115–18; equivocations of
humanitarian military intervention 125–30; and thinking 118–21;
78–95; ambivalence towards and understanding 128, 129;
82–90, 148; authorisation 84–5; universality 126; and willing 131
and international law 93–5; juridical approach to
justification 83–4; military cosmopolitanism 59
conduct 85–6
Kant, Immanuel ix, xi, xii, xiii,
idealisation of cosmopolitanism 40 4, 57, 82, 134, 143, 144,
industrialism ix 153; Hegel’s critique of
international authority, Kant’s theory of cosmopolitanism
proposition 24 29–38; legacy of 36–8; theory
International Commission of cosmopolitanism 22–9;
on Intervention and State Critique of Judgment 125; Critique
Sovereignty 89–90 of Practical Reason 108; Idea
International Court of Justice 92 for a Universal History from a
International Criminal Court 62, 92 Cosmopolitan Point of View
international institutions: limited 25; Metaphysics of Justice 22;
functions 61; reform 60 Perpetual Peace 25–6, 144; What
international law 138–9; classical is Enlightenment? 19
75–6, 81; constitutionalisation Kellogg–Briand Pact 147
69–77; and humanitarian Koestler, Arthur 149
military intervention 93–5; Kosovo, NATO intervention 78, 84,
interpretation of principles 88, 91–2
43; Kant’s proposition 24; Kymlicka, Will 16, 53
Law of Peoples 63–9; and new
cosmopolitanism 2–3; and Labour party 153
political judgement 93–4; and Law of Peoples 63–9
power 73–5; and republicanism League of Nations 65, 147
23–4; and terrorism 149 Levi, Primo 121, 150, 152–3
international relations and new Lévi-Strauss, Claude 110
cosmopolitanism 3–4 Leviathan 24, 143
International War Crimes Tribunal Life of the Mind, The (Arendt)
149 115–32, 151–3
internationalism: liberal 43–4; and Lyotard, Jean-François 150–1
new cosmopolitanism 143
inter-societal conflict xiv Mann, Thomas 51
inter-societal relations xi, xii Marx, Karl ix, 12; critique of Hegel’s
intra-societal conflict xiii–xiv Doctrine of the State 145;
Iraq, US-led invasion 79, 92–3, 94 reconstruction of incomplete
ius gentium 30–1 works 151
174 index
Treitschke, Heinrich von 13, 142 violence: against civilians 98; and
Turner, Charles 51 republicanism 37–8; and self-
discipline xiii–xiv
understanding 128–9, 153
United Kingdom, invasion of Iraq war: enthusiasm of people for 33,
79, 92–3, 94 145; Kant’s views on 24–5, 26;
United Nations: army 77, 148; legitimate 30, 144; and nihilism
and the constitutionalisation 121, 152; and republicanism 26,
of international law 69; 33–5
interventions without war crimes 98
authorisation of 80, 88; ‘war on terror’ 149
membership 65–6; peace- Weber, Max xiii, xiv, 12; Science as a
keeping and humanitarian Vocation 12
military interventions 78–9, 90, Westphalian model 3–4, 10–11, 75,
148; reform 60; Security Council 76
87–8, 90, 92; sub-groups 147 Wheeler, Nicholas 87
United States: commitment will/willing 116–17; equivocations of
to internationalism 72, 147; 122–5; and freedom 122; general
constitution 146; invasion of Iraq will 122–3; and judging 131; and
79, 92–3, 94; National Security nihilism 124–5; and thinking
Strategy 66–7 130–1
universal civic society 24 Wolff, Christian 31
Universal Declaration of Human world citizens 4
Rights 147 world state 61; dangers of xiii,
universal responsibility 82, 99, xiv–xv; Kant’s views on 24
100–1 World Trade Center destruction 8–9
universalism x; humanistic World Trade Organization (WTO)
13–14, 142; modern/postmodern 60
identification 135 worldlessness 131–2
worldly cosmopolitanism 97, 111,
Vattel, Emmerich von 23, 31 113–14, 131
victors’ justice 96, 97, 106
Vietnam War 149 Zeno of Elea 14
Zimbabwe 79