On Cosmopolitanism

April 13, 2020 timothywstanley@me.com

Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term, not least for its anti-Semitic undertones. On the right, it is an epithet for bleeding-heart liberals who support looser immigration policies, foreign aid, and multilateral efforts to confront climate change. On the left (and the nativist right), it is used to describe the Davos crowd and footloose capitalists. But as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Cosmopolitan Tradition, cosmopolitanism has a rich history as a mode of political and ethical thought, one that 'urges us to recognize the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings.' ...But how such claims are to be determined and adjudicated remains unresolved. Nussbaum’s intent is not to argue for a world government; nor does she put much store in the modern system of foreign aid. Rather, her purpose is to determine whether cosmopolitanism can be made sufficient for a world in which it has already become necessary—that is, a world of nation-states comprising individuals on deeply unequal material footings, who are nonetheless more interconnected than ever. Nussbaum concludes that the cosmopolitan tradition 'must be revised but need not be rejected.' She proposes that it be replaced by her own version of the 'Capability Approach' to development.

Stuart Whatley, “After Cosmopolitanism,” - hedgehogreview.com/issues/monsters/articles/after-cosmopolitanism