Democracy Forum operates at a level ofliteracy and respon-

sibility which is all too rare in our time." -John Kenneth Galbraith
Other books in the NEWDEMOCRACY FORUM series:
The New Inequality: Creating Solutionsfor PoorAmerica,
by Richard B. Freeman
A Community ofEquals: The Constitutional Protection ofNew
Americans, by Owen Fiss
Metro Futures: Economic Solutionsfor Cities and Their Suburbs,
by Daniel D. Luria andJoel Rogers
U r g ~ n t Times: Policing andRights in Inner-City Communities,
by Tracey L. Meares and Dan M. Kahan
Will Standards Save Public Education?by Deborah Meier
Do Americans Shop Too Much? byJuliet Schor
Beyond Bachyard Environmentalism, by Charles Sabel, Archon
Fung, and Bradley Karkkainen
Is Inequality Bad.for Our Health? by Norman Daniels, Bruce
Kennedy, and Ichiro Kawachi
l'Vhat's Wrong with a FreeLunch? by Philippe Van Parijs
Are Electionsfor Sale? by David Donnelly,Janice Fine, and
Ellen S. Miller
Whose Vote Counts?by Robert Richie and Steven Hill
For Love
of Country?
Martha C. Nussbaum
Edited by Josh"a eonen for Sosto" Review
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-.28g2
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
1996, 200.2 by Martha C. Nussbaum andjoshua Cohen
Contents
Editor's Preface byJoshua Cohen VII
Introduction byMartha C. Nussbaum IX
I. Martha C. Nussbaum
PATRIOTISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
Il. Kwame Anthony Appiah
COSMOPOLITAN PATRIOTS 21
3
Richard Falk
REVISIONING COSMOPOLITANISM
Benjamin R. Barber
CONSTITUTIONAL FAITH 0 30
Sissela Bok
FROM PART TO WHOLE 38
Judith Butler
UNIVERSALITY IN CULTURE 45
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
05 043
TIllS bookis printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSljNISO specifications for
permanence as revised in 1992.
Library ofCong;ress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nussbaum, Martha Craven.
For love ofcountryl' / Martha C. Nussbaum; edited by Joshua Cohen for Boston review.
p. (New democracy forum)
Originallypublished. POI' love ofcountry : debating the limits of patriotism. c1996.
new editor's pref. and new inrrorl. by the author.
2: Nationalism. 3. Internationalism. I. Cohen, Joshua. II. Title. III. Series.
2002066453
Nathan Glazer
LIMITS OF LOYALTY 61
Amy Gutman
DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 66
53
Gertnlde Himmelfarb
THE ILLUSIONS OP COSMOPOLITANISM 72
Michael W. McConnell
DON T NEGLECT THE LITTLE PLATOONS 78
Robert Pinsky
EROS AGAINST ESPERANTO 85
Hilary Putnam
MUST WE CHOOSE BETWEEN PATRIOTISM
AND UNIVERSAL REASON? 91
Elaine Scarry
THE DIFFICULTY OF IMAGINING /
OTHER PEOPLE 98
AmartyaSen
HUMANITY AND CITIZENSHIP 111
Charles Taylor
WHY DEMOCRACY NEEDS PATRIOTISM
Immanuel Wallerstein
NEITHER PATRIOTISM NOR
COSMOPOLITANISM 122
Michael Walzer
SPHERES OF AFFECTION 125
m. Martha C. Nussbaum
REPLY 131
Notes . 145
Contributors 153
119
Joshua Cohen
Editor's Preface
IN HIS GREAT RIVERSIDE CHURCH SPEECH OF
April '967, Martin Luther King.jr., declared his reasons
for opposing the Vietnam War. The war was, he said, a
disaster for Black Americans, poisonous for the country,
and above all a nightmare "for victims of our nation and
for those it calls enemy." Responding to moral demands
that lie "beyond the calling of race or nation or creed,"
King said that he had come to speak for these "enemies."
Speaking out was the "privilege and the burden of all of
us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyal-
ties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and
which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and
positions."
In her essay "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism"-
which provoked the debate recorded in this book-
Martha Nussbaum defends the moral position to which
King gave such powerful expression. According to this
cosmopolitan outlook, our highest allegiance must be to
the community of humankind, and the first principles of
our practical thought must respect the equal worth of all
members of that community. Cosmopolitanism is a con-
troversial view, one tendency of moral thought opposed
R'S PREFACE
hiio!t"Of outlooks that resist its ideal of world citizenship in the name
sellsibiliti,,, and attachments rooted in group affiliation or na-
tradition. The responses to Nussbaum's essay reflect these
once the complexity of these issues
and the importance oftheir resolution.
This book, then, presents competing philosophies-first princi-
ples connected to conduct through complex links of historical cir-
cumstance, social location, and individual judgment. But as King's
condemnation of the war demonstrates, those connections are no
less real for being indirect. The disagreement about cosmopoli-
tanism is practical as well as theoretical, with important implications
for contemporary debate about protectionism, immigration, human
rights, foreign intervention, development assistance, and what we
should teach in our schools. In exploring the merits of cosmopoli-
tanism as moral theory and personal conviction, Martha Nussbaum
and her respondentsjoinphilosophical debate to public discussion,
enriching each.
NUSSBAUM'S LEAD ESSAY FIRST APPEARED IN BOSTON
Review (OctoberjNovember 1994), along with twenty-nine replies.
Eleven of those replies are included here, some substantially ex-
panded, along with five additional contributions. The issues ad-
dressed-about the place oflove of country in a morally decent life,
and the tensions between local emotional attachments and cosmo-
politan moral principles-took on new and compelling urgency af-
ter the horrible slaughter of innocents on September II. Nussbaum's
response to those awful events, provided in a new introduction to
the book, reminds us that moral thought is most important when the
dangers we face are greatest.
Martha C. Nussbaum
Introduction:
Cosmopolitan Emotions?
IN THE AFTERMATH OF SEPTEMBER i i , WE HAVE
all experienced strong .emotions for our country: fear,
()utrage, g ! ! ~ f , astonishment. Our media portray the dis-
aster as a tragedy that has happened to our nation, and
that is how we very naturally see it. So too the ensuing
war: it is called "America's NewWar," and most news re-
ports focus on the meaning of events for us and our na-
tion. We think these events are important because they
concern us. Not just human lives, but American lives. In
one way, the crisis has expanded our imaginations. We
find ourselves feeling sympathyfor many people who did
not even cross our minds before: New York firefighters,
that gay rugby player who helped bring down the fourth
plane, bereaved families of so many national and ethnic
origins. vVe even sometimes notice with a new attention
the lives of Arab-Americans among us, or feel a sympathy
with a Sikh taxi driver who complains about customers
who tell him to go home to "his country," even though he
came to the United States as a political refugee from per-
secution in the Punjab. Sometimes our compassion even
crosses that biggest line of all, the national boundary.
Events have led many Americans to sympathize with the
---_.. -----
ON
and girls of Afghanistan, for example, in a way that many
[endinlsts had been trying to get people to do for a long time, without
All too often, however, OUf imaginations remain oriented to the
local; indeed, this orientation is implicit in the unusual level of our
alarm. The world has come to a stop-in a way that it never has for
Americans, when disaster befalls human beings in other places.
Floods, earthquakes, cyclones-and the daily deaths of thousands
from preventable malnutrition and disease-none of these typically
makes the American world come to a standstill, none elicits a
tremendous outpouring of grief and compassion. The plight of in-
nocent civilians in the current war evokes a similarly uneven and
flickering response.
And worse: our sense that the "us" is all that matters can easily flip
over into a demonizing ofan imagined "them," a group of outsiders
who are imagined as enemies of the invulnerability and the pride of
the all-important "us." Compassion for our fellowAmericans can all
too easily slide over into an attitude that wants America to come out
on top, defeating or subordinating other peoples or nations. Anger
at the terrorists themselves is perfectly appropriate; so is the attempt
to bring them tojustice. But "us-them" thinking doesn't always stay
focused on the original issue; it too easily becomes a general call for
American supremacy, the humiliation of"the other."
One vivid example of this slide took place at a baseball game I
went to at Chicago's Comiskey Park, the first game played there after
September II-and a game against the Yankees, so there was a
heightened awareness of the situation of New York and its people.
Things began well, with a moving ceremony commemorating the
firefighters who had lost their lives, and honoring local firefighters
who had gone to New York afterward to help out. There was even a
lot of cheering when the Yankees took the field, a highly unusual
transcendence of'local attachments. But as the game went on and the
beer flowed, one heard, increasingly, the chant "U-S-A, U-S-A," a
Introduction . Xl
chant left over from the Olympic hockey match in which the United
States defeated Russia. This chant seemed to express a wish for
America to defeat, abase, hurniliate its enemies. Indeed, it soon be-
came a general way of expressing the desire to crush one's enemies,
whoever they were. When the umpire made a bad call that went
against the White Sox, the same gronp in the stands tnrned to him,
chanting (,(,U-S-A." In other words, anyone who crosses us is evil and
shonld be crnshed. It's not surprising that Stoic philosopher and
Roman emperor Marclls Aurelius, trying to educate himself to have
an equal respect for all hnman beings, reports that his first lesson
was "not to be a fan ofthe Greens or Blues at the races, or the light-
armed or heavy-armed gladiators at the Circus."
Compassion is an emotion rooted, probably, in our biological
heritage. (Although biologists once portrayed animal behavior as
primatologists bynow recognize the existence
in apes, and it may well exist in other species as rBlit
this history does not mean that compassion is devoid of thought. In
fact, as Aristotle argued long ago, human compassion standardly re-
quires three thoughts: that a serious bad thing has happened to
someone else; that this had event was not (or not entirely) the per-
son's own fault; and that we ourselves are vulnerable in similar ways.
Thus compassion forms a psychological link between our own self-
interest and the reality of another person's good or ill. For that rea-
son it is a morally valuable emotion-when it gets things right. Of-
ten however the thoughts involved in the emotion, and therefore
, , ..
the emotion itself, go astray, failing to link people at a distance to
one's own current possibilities and vulnerabilities. (Rousseau said
that kings don't feel compassion for their subjects because they
count on never being human, subject to the vicissitudes of life.)
Sometimes, too, compassion goes wrong by getting the seriousness
of the bad event wrong: sometimes, for example, wejust don't take
very seriously the hunger and illness of people who are distant from
us. These errors are likely to be built into the nature of compassion
N
rlevelons in childhood and then adulthood: we form intense at-
to the local first, and only gradually learn to have com-
""SSllon for people who are outside OUf own immediate circle. For
Americans, that expansion of moral concern stops at the na-
tional boundary.
Most of us are brought up to believe that all human beings have
equal worth. At least the world's major religions and most secular
philosophies tell us so. But our emotions don't believe it. We mourn
for those we know, not for those we don't know. And most of us feel
deep emotions about America, emotions we don't feel about India,
or Russia, or Rwanda. In and of itself, this narrowness of OUf cmo-
tionallives is probably acceptable and maybe even good. We need to
build outward from meanings we understand, or else our moral life
would be empty of urgency. Aristotle long ago said, plausibly, that
the citizens in Plato's ideal city, asked to care for all citizens equally,
would actually care for none, since care is learned in small groups
with their more intense attachments. Ifwe want our life withothers
to contain strong passions-forjustice in aworld of injustice, for aid
in a world where many go without what they need-we would do
well to begin, at least, with our familiar strong emotions toward fam-
ily,city, and country.
But concern should not stop with these local attachments. Amer-
icans are unfortunately prone to such emotional narrowness. So are
all people, but the power and geographical size of America have long
contributed to its particularly strong isolationist roots. When at least
some others were finding ways to rescue the Jews during the Holo-
caust, America's inactivity and (general) lack of concern was culpa-
ble, especially in proportion to American power. It took Pearl Har-
bor to get us even to come to the aid ofour allies. When genocide was
afoot in Rwanda, our own sense ofself-sufficiency and invulnerabil-
ity stopped us from imagining the Rwandans as people who might
be us; we were therefore culpably inactive toward them. So too in the
present situation. Sometimes we see a very laudable recognition of
Introduction . x i n
the interconnectedness of all peoples, and of the fact that we must
join forces with people in all nations to defeat terrorists and bring
them tojustice. At other times, however, we see simplifying slogans
("America Fights Back") that portray the situation in terms of a good
"us" crusading against an evil '"them"-failing to acknowledge, for
example, that people in all nations have strong reasons to oppose
terrorism, and that the fight has many active allies.
Such simplistic thinking is morally wrong, because it encourages
us to ignore the impact of our actions on innocent civilians, and to
focus too little on the all-important project of humanitarian relief. It
is also counterproductive. We now understand, or ought to, that if
we had thought more about support for the educational and human-
itarian infrastructure of Pakistan, for example, funding good local
nongovernmental organizations there the way several European na-
tions typically do in India, young people of that nation might possi-
bly have been educated in a climate of respect for religious plural-
ism, the equality of women, and other values that we nghtly pnze,
instead ofhaving fundamentalist madrasas as their only educational
alternative. Our policy in South Asia has showed for many years a
gross failure of imagination and sympathy; we basically thought in
terms of cold war values, ignoring the real lives of people to whose
prospects our actions could make a great difference. Such crude
thinking is morally obtuse; it is also badly calculated to advance any
good cause we wish to advance, in a world where all human lives are
increasingly interdependent.
Compassion beg,-ins with the local. But if our moral natures and
our emotional natures are to live in any sort ofharmony we must find
devices through which to extend our strong emotions and our abil-
ity to imagine the situation of others to the world ofhuman life as a
whole. Since compassion contains thought, it can be educated. We
can take this disaster as occasion for narrowing our focus, distrust-
ing the rest of the world, and feeling solidarity with
alone. Or we can take it as an occasion for expansion of our ethical
Afi;."ns. Seeing how vulnerable our great country is, we can learn
;sqlrhelhlng about the vuluerability all humau beings share, about
it is like for distant others to lose those they love to a disaster
of their own making, whether it is hunger or flood or ethnic
cleansing.
There are hopeful signs in the present situation, particularlyin at-
tempts to educate the American public about Islam, about the histo-
ries of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and about the situation and atti-
tudes of Arab-Americans in this country. But we need to make these
educational efforts consistent and systematic, not just fear-moti-
vated responses to an immediate crisis.
Our media and our systems of educatiou have long given us far
too little information about lives outside our borders, stunting OUf
moral imaginations. The situation of America's women and its
racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities has to some extent worked its
way into curricula, at various levels, and into OUf popular media. We
have done less well with parts of the world that are unfamiliar. This
is not surprising, because such teaching requires a lot ofinvestment
in new curricular initiatives, and such television programming re-
quires a certain temporary inattention to the competition for ratings.
But we now know that we live in a complex, interconnected world,
and we know our own ignorance. As Socrates said, this is at least the
beginning of progress. At this time of national crisis we can renew
our commitment to the equal worth of humanity, demanding media,
and schools, that nourish and expand our imaginations by present-
ing non-American lives as deep, rich, and emotion-worthy. "Thus
from our weakness," said Rousseau of such an education, "our frag-
ile happiness is born." Or, at least, it might be born.
I
Patriotism
Martha C. Nussbaum
and Cosmopolitanism
When anyone asked him where he camefrom, he said,
"J am a citizen ofthe world."
Diogenes Laertius, Life ofDiogenes theCynic
In Rabindranath Tagore's novel The Home and the World, the
young wife Bimala, entranced by the patriotic rhetoric of her hus-
band's friend Sandip, becomes an eager devotee of the Swadeshi
movement, which has organized a boycott of foreign goods. The
slogan of the movement is Bande Mataram (Hail Motherland). Bi-
mala complains that her husband, the cosmopolitan Hindu land-
lord Nikhil, is cool in his devotion to the cause:
And yet it was not that my husband refused to support Si.lJll:deshi, or
was in any way against the Cause. Only he had not been able whole-
heartedlyto accept the spirit of Bande Mataram.
HI am willing," he said, "to serve my country; but my worship I re-
serve for is far greater than my country. To worship my
country as a god is to bring a curse upon it."
Americans have frequently supported the principle of Bande
Mataram, giving the fact of being American a special salience in
moral and political deliberation, and pride in a specificallyAmeri-
can identity and a specifically American citizenship a special
tion rather than considering ties of obligation and commitment
1 , . "
that join America to the rest of the world. As WIth Rorty s pI,ece,
the primary contrast drawn in the project was between a pol:tlcs
based on ethnic and racial and religious difference and a politics
based on a shared national identity. What we share as both rational
and mutually dependent human beings was simply not on the
agenda. ,
One might wonder, however, how far the politics of nationalism
really is from the politics of difference. The Home and the World
(better known, perhaps, in Satyajit Ray's haunting film of the
title) is a tragic story of the defeat of a reasonable and principled
lit . m by the forces of nationalism and ethnocentrism, cosmopo 1 ams
I that Tagorc deeply at bottom,
'I'.' d' ethnocentric par.t.icularism.are not alien to one an-
natrona Ism an '.. ../ _ / ;....., .
other, bout akin:-that to give support to nationalist sentiments sub-
ts ultimately even the values that hold a nation together, be-
verts, .. 1
cause it substitutes a colorful idol for the substantive
values and right. Once someone has said, I am an Indian
first a citizen of the world second, once he or she has made that
morally questionable move of self-definition by a morally Irrele-
vant characteristic, then what, indeed, will stop that person from
saying as Tagore's characters so quickly learn to say, I am a Hmdu
first and an Indian second, or I am an upper-caste landlord first,
and' a Hindu second? Only the cosmopolitan stance of the land-
lord Nikhil-so boringly flat in the eyes of his young WIfe B:mala
and his passionate nationalist friend Sandip-has the promIse of
transcending these divisions, because only this stance asks us to
give our first allegiance to what is morally that which,
being good, I can commend as such to all bemgs. .
Proponents of nationalism in politics and In education fre-
quently make a weak concession to cosmopolitanism. They may
argue, for example, that although nations should general base
education and political deliberation on shared national values, a
c. NUSSBAUM
among the motivations to political action. I believe, as do
and his character Nikhil, that this emphasis on patriotic
is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of
some ofthe worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve-for example,
the goal of national unity in devotion to worthy moral ideals ofjus-
tice and equality. These goals, I shall argue, would be better served
by an ideal that is in any case more adequate to our situation in the
contemporary world, namely the very old ideal of the cosmopoli-
tan, the person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of
human beings.
My articulation of these issues is motivated, in part, by my expe-
rience working on international quality-of-life issues in an institute
for development economics connected with the United Nations. It
is also motivated by the renewal of appeals to the nation, and na-
tional pride, in some recent discussions ofAmerican character and
American education. In a well-known op-ed piece in the .New York
Times (13 February 1994), philosopher Richard Rorty
Americans, especially the American left, not to patriotism
as a value, and indeed to give central importance to "the emotion
of national pride" and "a sense of shared national identity." Rorty
argues that we cannot even criticize ourselves well unless we also
"rejoice" in OUf American identity and define ourselves funda-
mentally in terms of that identity. Rorty seems to hold that the pri-
mary alternative to a politics based on patriotism and national
identity is what he calls a "politics of difference," one based on in-
ternal divisions among America's ethnic, racial, religious, and
other subgroups. He nowhere considers the possibility of a more
international basis for political emotion and concern.
This is no isolated case. Rorty's piece responds to and defends
Sheldon Hackney's recent call for a "national conversation" to dis-
cuss American identity. I As a participant in its early phase, I was
made vividly aware that the project, as initially conceived; pro-
posed an inward-looking task, bounded by the borders of the na-
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
5
C. NUSSBAUM
.(;dfuIuitm"nt to basic human rights should be part of any national
education system, and that this commitment will in a sense hold
nations together," This seems to be a fair comment '
. on pracn-
cal reality; and the emphasis on human rights ' t inl
. . IS eer ai y neces-
sary for a world In which nations interact all th ti (I
e ime on terms et
us hope) ofjustice and mutual respect.
But is it sufficient? As students here grow up, is it sufficient for
them to learn that they are above all citizens of the United States
butthat they ought to respect the basic human rights ofcitizens of
India, BohVIa, Nigeria, and Norway? Or should they-as I think-
addition to gIVIng special attention to the history and current
situanon oftheir own nation, learn a good deal more than they fre-
quently do about the rest of the world in which they II'v ab t
I di d Boli e, ou
n ra an olivia and Nigeria and Norway and their histories
and comparative successes? Should they learn only tha:
citizens ofIndia have equal basic human rights, or should they also
the problems ofhunger and pollution in India, and the
ImphcatIOns of these problems for the larger issues of global hun-
ger and global ecology? Most important, should they be taught
that they are, above all, citizens of the United States, or should
they be taught that they are, above all, citizens ofa world of
human beIngs, and that, while they happen to be situated in the
Umted State.s, they have to share this world with the citizens of
other countnesPI suggest four arguments for the second concept
ofeducation, ,whIch I call education. But first I .intro-
a hIsto,:cal digression, which traces cosmopolitanism to its
ongIns, In the process recover some excellent arguments that
have traditIOnally supported it.
When Diog
enes
the Cynic replied, "I am a citizen of the world"
he, apparently, that he refused to be defined by his local
ongms and group memberships, so central to the self-image of the
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism 7
conventional Greek male; instead, he defined himself in terms of
more universal aspirations and The Stoics, who fol-
lowed his lead, further developed his image of the kosmou polites
(world citizen) arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two com-
munities-the local community of our birth, and the community
of human argument and aspiration that "is truly great and truly
in which we look neither to this corner nor to thai, but
measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun" (Seneca, De
Otio). It is this community that is, fundamentally, the source of our
moral obligations. With respect to the most basic moral values,
such as justice, "We should regard all human beings as our fellow
citizens and neighbors" (Plutarch, On the Fortunes ofAlexander).
We should regard our deliberations as, first and foremost, deliber-
ations about human problems ofpeople in particular concrete situ-
ations, not problems growing out of a national identity that is alto-
gether unlike that of others. Diogenes knew that the invitation to
think as a world citizen was, in a sense, an invitation to be an exile
from the and its easy sentiments, to see our
own ways of life from the point of view ofjustice and the good.
The accident of where one is born isjust that, an accident; any hu-
man being might have been born in any nation. Recognizing this,
his Stoic successors held, we should not allow differences of na-
tionality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect
barriers between us and our fellow human beings. We should rec-
ognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental
ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and
respect.;
This clearly did not mean that the $toiss were proposing the ab-
olition oflocal and national forms ofpolitical organization and the
creation of a world state. Their point was even more radical: that
we should give our first allegiance to no mere form of governmeut,
no temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the
humanity of all human beings. The idea of the world citizen is
The Stoics stress that to be a citizen of the world one does not
need to give up local identifications, which can be a source of great
richness in life.They suggest that we think of ourselves not as de-
void oflocal affiliations, but as surrounded by a series of concen-
tric circles.The first one encircles the self, the next takes in the im-
mediate family, then follows the extended family, then, in order,
neighbors or local groups, fellow city-dwellers, and fellow coun-
trymen-and we can easily add to this list groupings based on eth-
nic, linguistic, historical, professional, gender, or sexual identities.
Outside all these circles is the largest one, humanity as a whole.
Our task as citizens of the world will be to "draw the circles some-
how toward the center" (Stoic philosopher Hierocles, ist-znd cs),
making all human heings more like our fellow city-dwellers, and
so on. We need not give up our special affections and identifica-
tions, whether ethnic or gender-based or religious. We need not
think of them as superficial, and we may think of our identity as
constituted partly by them. We may and should devote special at-
tention to them in education. But we should also work to make all
human beings part ofour community of dialogue and concern,
base our political deliberations on that interlocking commonality,
and give the circle that defines our humanity special attention and
respect.
In educational terms, this means that students in the United
States, for example, may continue to regard themselves as defined
partly by their particular loves-their families, their religious, eth-
nic, or racial communities, or even their country. But they must
also, and centrally, learn to recognize humanity wherever they en-
counter it, undeterred by traits that are strange to them, and be ea-
ger to understand humanity in all its strange guises. They
learn enough about the different to recognize common alms, aspI-
rations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see
how variously they are instantiated in the many cultures and their
histories. Stoic writers insist that the vivid imagining of the differ-
NUS S BA UM
this way the ancestor and the source of Kant's idea of the "king-
dom of ends," and has a similar function in inspiring and regulat-
ing moral and political conduct. One should always behave so as
to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and moral choice
in every human being. It is this concept that also inspires Tagore's
novel, as the cosmopolitan landlord struggles to stem the tide of
nationalism and factionalism by appeals to universal moral norms.
Many of the speeches of the character Nikhil were drawn from Ta-
gore's own cosmopolitan political writings.
Stoics who hold that good civic education is education for
,,:orld citizenship recommend this attitude on grounds.
FIrst, they hold that the study of humanity as it is realized in the
whole world is valuable for self-knowledge: We see ourselves more
clearly when we see our ways in relation to those of other reason-
able people.
Second, they argue, as does Tagore, that we will be better able
to solve Our problems if we face them in this way. No theme is
deeper in Stoicism than the damage done by factiOnand local alle-
to the political life of a group. Political they
argue, IS sabotaged again and again by partisan loyalties, whether
to one's team at the Circus or to one's nation. Only by making our
fundamental allegiance to the world community ofjustice and rea-
son do we avoid these dangers.
. Finally, they insist that the stance of the kos
mou
politesis intrin-
sically valuable, for it recognizes in people what is especially fun-
damental. about them, most worthy of respect and acknowledg_
ment: their aspiration, tojustice and goodness and their capacities
for reasoning in this connection. These qualities may be less color-
ful than local or national traditions and identities-it is On this
basis that the young wife in Tagore's novel spurns them in favor of
qualities in the nationalist orator Sandip that she later comes to
see as superficial-but they are, the Stoics argue, both lasting and
deep.
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
9
present day and offer four arguments for making world citizen-
ship, rather than democratic or national citizenship, the focus for
civic education.
III
1. Through cosmopolitan education, We learn more
aboutourselves.
One of the greatest barriers to rational deliberation in politics is
the unexamined feeling that one's own preferences and ways are
neutral and natural. An education that takes national boundaries
as morally salient too often reinforces this kind of irrationality, by
lending to what is an accident of history a false air of moral weight
and glory. By looking at ourselves through the lens ofthe other, we
come to see what in OUf practices is local and nonesscnnal, what is
more broadly or deeply shared. Our nation is appaUinglyignorant
of most of the rest of the world. I think this means that it is also, in
many crucial ways, ignorant of itself.
To givejust one example of this: If we want to understand our
own history and our choices about child-rearing and the structure
of the family, we are helped immeasurably by looking around the
world to see in what configurations families exist, and through
what strategies children are in fact being cared for. (This would in-
clude a study of the history of the family, both in our own and
other traditions.) Such a study can show us, for example, that the
two-parent nuclear family, in which the mother is the primary
homemaker and the father the primary breadwinner is by no
means a pervasive style of child-rearing in today's world. The ex-
tended family, clusters of families, the viUage, women's associa-
tions-all these groups, and others, in various places in the world
have major child-rearing responsibilities. Seeing this, we can be-
gin to ask questions-for example, about how much child
there is in a family that involves grandparents and other relatives rn
child-rearing, as compared with the relatively isolated Western-
11
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
p
C. NUSSBAUM
essential task of education, and that it requires, in turn,
master-y ofmany facts about the different. Marcus Aurelius gives
nnuseu the following advice, which might be caUed the basis for
cosmopolitan education: ':Accustom yourself not to be inattentive
to what another person says, and as far as possible enter into that
person's mind" (VI. 53). "Generally," he adds, "one must first
learn many things before one can judge another's action with un-
derstanding."
A favored exercise in this process of world thinking is to con-
ceive of the entire world of human beings as a single body, its many
people as so many limbs. Referring to the fact that it takes only
changmg a smgle letter in Greek to convert the word "limb"
(melos) into the word (meros), Marcus says: "If, changing
the word, you call yourself merely a [detached] part rather than a
limb, you do not yet love your fellowmen from the heart, nor de-
rive complete joy from doing good; you will do it merely as a duty,
not as doing good to yourself" (VII. IS). It is important to recall
that, as emperor, he gave himself that advice in Connection with
daily duties that required coming to grips with the cnltures of
remote and, initially, strange civilizations, such as Parthia and
Sarmatia.
I would like to see education adopt this cosmopolitan Stoic
stance. abused-if, for ex-
ample, it was taken to deny the fundam;ntal importance of the
separateness of people and of fundamental personal liberties. Sto-
ics were not always sufficientlyattentive to these values and to their
political salience; in that sense, their thought is not always a good
basis for a scheme of democratic deliberation and education. But
as the image is primarily intended_as a reminder of the interde-
pendence of all human beings and communities_it has fundamen_
tal significance. There is clearly a huge amount to be said about
how such ideas might be realized in curricula at many levels. In-
stead ofbeginning that more concrete task, however, I focus on the
IS
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
I t given the present costs of pollution controls and the present
eas , I di
economic situation of developing nations, without ecologica 1-
ter? If we take Kantian morality at all seriously, as we should, we
sas . .
need to educate our children to be troubled by this fact. Otherwise
are educating a nation of moral hypocrites who talk the lan-
we ,
goage of universalizahility but whose universe has a self-serving,
narrow scope.
This point may appear to presuppose universalism, rather than
being an argoment in its favor. But here one may note that the :al-
ues on which Americans may mostjustly pride themselves are, in a
deep sense, Stoic values: respect for human dignity and the oppor-
tunity for each person to pursue happiness. Ifwe really do behe:e
that all human beings are created equal and endowed WIthcertam
inalienable rights, we are morally required to think about what that
conception requires us to do with and for the rest of the world.,
O again that does not mean that one may not permissibly
nee , li ' lik
give one's own sphere a special degree concern. Po tics, 1 e
child care, will be poorly done if each thinks herself equally re-
ibl for all rather than giving the immediate surroundmgs
sponSI e 10 , . .
special attention and care. To give one's. own special care IS
justifiable in universalist terms, and I think this IS Its most c,ompel-
ling justification. To take one example, we do not really
own children are morally more important than other people s chil-
d n though almost all of us who have children would gIve
ren, eve h 'I'
our own children far more love and care than we give ers. t IS
good for children, on the whole, that things work this way,
that is why our special care is good, rather than selfish. Education
may and should reflect those special example, m ,a
iven nation, spending more time on that nation's history and poli-
But my argument does entail the that we should
fine our thinking to our {j'Nn sphere; that in making ,choIces in
both political and economic matters we should:uost senously co:-
sider the right of other human beings to life, liberty, and the pu -
nuclear family; or about how the different structures of child
care support women's work." If we do not undertake this kind of
educational project, we risk assuming that the options familiar to
us are the only ones there are, and that they are somehow "nor-
mal" and "natural" for all humans. Much the same can be said
about conceptions of gender and sexuality, about conceptions of
work and its division, about schemes ofproperty holding, or about
the treatment ofchildren and the aged.
2. We makehea,dwaXfolving problems that require
inten:atio,!al
The air does not obey national boundaries. This simple fact can
be, for children, the beginning of the recognition that, like it or
not, We live in a world in which the destinies of nations are closely
intertwined with respect to basic goods and survival itself. The
pollution of third-world nations that are attempting to attain our
high standard ofliving will, in some cases, end up in our air. No
matter what account of these matters we will finally adopt, any in-
telligent deliberation about also, about the food sup-
ply and population-requires global pla
l1ning,
knowledge,
and . '. ....y.
To ofglob;l dialogue, we need knowledge not
only of the geography and ecology of other nations-something
that would already entail much revision in our curricula-but also
a great deal about their people, so that in talking with them we may
be capable of respecting their traditions and commitments. Cos-
mopolitan education would supply the background necessary for
this type of deliberation.
3, We recognize moral obligations to the rest ofthe world that
are real and that otherwise would go unrecognized.
What are Americans to make of the fact that the high living stan-
dard we enjoy is one that very likely cannot be universalized, at
SBAUM
and that we should work to acquire the knowl-
enable us to deliberate well about those rights. I
believe this sort of thinking will have large-scale economic and po-
consequences.
4, We make a consistent and coherent argument basedon
distinctions we are prepared to defend.
In Richard Rorty's and Sheldon Hackney's eloquent appeals to
shared values, there is something that makes me very uneasy. They
seem to argue effectively when they insist on the centrality to dem-
ocratic deliberation ofcertain values that bind all citizens together.
But why should these values, which instruct us to join hands
across boundaries of ethnicity, dass, gender, and race, lose steam
when they get to the borders of the nation? By conceding that a
morally arbitrary boundary such as the boundary of the nation has
a deep and formative role in our deliberations, we seem to deprive
ourselves of any principled way ofpersuading citizens they should
in fact join hands across these other barriers.
For one thing, the very same groups exist both outside and in-
side. Why should we think ofpeople from China as our fellows the
minute they dwell in a certain place, namely the United States, but
not when they dwell in a certain other place, namely China? What
is it about the national boundary that magically converts people to-
ward whom we are both incurious and indifferent into people to
whom we have duties of mutual respect? I think, in short, that we
undercut the very case for multicultural respect within a nation by
failing to make central to education a broader world respect. Rich-
ard Rorty's patriotism may be a way of bringing all Americans to-
gether; but patriotism is very close to jingoism, and I'm afraid I
don't see in Rorty's argument any proposal for coping with this
very obvious danger.
Furthermore, the defense of shared national values in both
Rorty and Hackney, as I understand it, requires appealing to cer-
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
tain basic features of human personhood that obviously also tran-
scend national boundaries. So if we fail to educate children to
cross those boundaries in their minds and imaginations, we are
tacitly giving them the message that we don't really mean what we
say. We say that respect should be accorded to humanity as .such,
but we really mean that Americans as such are worthy ofspecial re-
spect. And that, I think, is a story that Americans have told for far
too long.
IV
Becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business. It is, as
D' aid a. ki ..'n.d of exile-from the comfort of local truths,
lOgenes s 1 " . . . . .
from the warm, nestling feeling of patnotism, from the absorbing
drama ofpride in oneself and one's own. In the writings of Marcus
Aurelius (as in those ofhis American followers and Tho-
) reader can sometimes sense a boundless loneliness, as If
reau , a , c 1'6
the removal of the props of habit and local boundanes had left 1 e
bereft of any warmth or security. If one life as a child who
loves and trusts his or her parents, it is temptln? to w,ant
struct citizenship along the same lines, finding m Ideallz,edIm-
age of a nation a surrogate parent who will do one s thinking for
one. Cosmopolitanism offers no such refuge; it only reason
and the love of humanity, which may seem at umes less colorful
than other sources ofbelonging. .'
In Tagore's novel, the appeal to world citizenship falls. It falls
because patriotism is full of color and intensity and paSSIOn,
d ' itmino' th whereas cosmopolitanism seems to have a har time gnppmg e
imagination. And yet in its very failure, Tagore H succeeds,
For the novel is a story ofeducation for world citizenship, smce the
entire tragic story is told by the widowed Bimala, who under-
stands, if too late, that Nikhil's morality was vastly
dip's empty symbol-mongering, that what looked like paSSIOn, m
Sandip was egocentric self-exaltation, and that what looked like
I

i
N SRAUM
in Nikhil contained a truly loving perception of
as a person. If one goes today to Santiniketan, a town several
hours by train from Calcutta where Thgore founded his cosmopol-
itan university, Vishvabharati (which means "all the world")-one
feels the tragedy once more. For all-the-world university has not
achieved the anticipated influence or distinction within India, and
the ideals of the cosmopolitan community of Santiniketan are in-
creasingly under siege from militant forces of ethnocentric particu-
larism and Hindu-fundamentalist nationalism. And yet, in the
very decline of Tagore's ideal, which now threatens the very exis-
tence of the secular and tolerant Indian state, the observer sees its
worth. To worship one's country as if it were a god is indeed to
bring a curse upon it. Recent electoral reactions against Hindu na-
tionalism give some grounds for optimism that this recognition of
worth is widespread and may prove efficacious, averting a tragic
ending of the sort that Tagore describes.
And since 1am in fact optimistic that Tagore's ideal can be suc-
cessfully realized in schools and universities in democracies
around the world, and in the formation of public policy, let me
conclude with a story of cosmopolitanism that has a happy ending.
It is told by Diogenes Laertius about the courtship and marriage of
the Cynic cosmopolitan philosophers Crates and Hipparchia (one
of the most eminent female philosophers of antiquity), in order,
presumably, to show that casting off the symbols of status and na-
tion can sometimes be a way to succeed in love. The background
is that Hipparchia is from a good family, attached, as most Greek
families were, to social status and pedigree. They resent the cos-
mopolitan philosopher Crates, with his strange ideas of world citi-
zenship and his strange disdain for rank and boundaries.
[Hipparchia] fell in love with Crates' arguments and his wayof life
and paid no attention to any of her suitors nor to wealth or high birth
or good looks. Crates, though, was everything to her. Moreover, she
Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism 17
toldher parents that she wouldkill herselfif she werenot off
h
. So Crateswas called on by her parents to talk their daughter
to irn. d h didn' de her So
f
t h did all he could but in the en e 1 t persua .
out 0 1, e , f h d said
d
d threw off his clothes in front 0 er an sal ,
be stoo up an .. d ., ac-
. bridegroom' these are his possessIOns; make your eciston
IS your' . nl dertake
you cannot be my compamon u eBS you un .
H f "The girl chosehim. Adoptingthe sameclothmg
the samewayole. d h ulated
I
flif he went around with her husband an t eycop
and srytsv res . And he
. blic and they went off together to dinner parties. once s
III pu di hr at the house of Lysimachus and there refuted
went to a nner par"l , h' "If' uld 't be
d h Atheist with a sophismlike t IS: rt wo n
Thee orus t e, hi hen i uld 't be
c Theodorus to do somet mg, t en It wo n
.udged wrong tor d
J r B' hi a to do it either; but Theodorus oes no
. d ed wrong tor rpparc 1 . f h
JU;n if he beats himself; so Hipparchia too does no wrong I S e
wr g d rue," Andwhen Theodorus couldnot replytoher argu-
heatsThheo 0 d' ff her cloak. But Bipparchia was not upset or dis-
merit, e nppe 0 be (DL 6 9
6- 8)'
traught as a woman would normally. .
tl recommending Crates and Hipparchia as the
I am not exac y . h othetical cosmopolitan schools
marital ideal for students in my yp . h) 6 B t the story
Theodorus the Atheist as their lOgIC teac err. u . ht
al this' that the life of the cosmopolitan, who puts rIg I
h:;:r:::untry universal reason hefore thesymbols of nauona
belonging, need not be boring, ftat, or lacking III love.
II
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Cosmopolitan Patriots
My FATHER WAS A GHANAIAN PATRIOT. HE
once published a column in the Pioneer, our local news-
paper in Kumasi, under the headline "Is Ghana worth
dying for?" and it was clear that his answer was yes.'
But he also loved Asante-the region of Ghana where he
and I both grew up-a kingdom absorbed within a Brit-
ish colony, then also a region of a new multiethnic Re-
public, a kingdom he and his father had also once loved
and served. And, like so many African nationalists of his
class and generation, he always loved an enchanting ab-
straction they called "Africa."
When he died, my sisters and I found a note he had
drafted and never quite finished, last words oflove and
wisdom for his children. After a few paragraphs re-
minding us of our double ancestry, in Ghana and in En-
gland, he wrote: "Remember that you are citizens of the
world." And he went on to tell us that this meant that
wherever we chose to live-as citizens of the world we
could surely choose to live anywhere-we should make
sure we left that place better than we found it. "Deep in-
KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH
side of me," he went on, "is a great love for mankind and an abid-
ing desire to see mankind, under God, fulfill its highest destiny."
The favorite slander of the narrow nationalist against ns cosmo-
politans is that we are rootless: What my father believed in, how-
ever, was a rooted cosmopolitanism, or, ifyou like, a cosmopolitan
patriotism. Like Gertrude Stein, he thought there was no point in
roots if you couldn't take them with you. "America is my country
and Paris is my hometown," Stein said.
2
My father would have
understood her.
Some might complain that cosmopolitanism must be parasitic:
Where, they will ask, would Stein have gotten her roots in a fully
cosmopolitan world? Where, in other words, would all the diver-
sity we cosmopolitans celebrate Comefrom in a world where there
were only cosmopolitans?
The answer is straightforward: The cosmopolitan patriot can
entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted
cosmopolitan, attached to a home of his or her own, with its own
cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of
other, different, places that are home to other, different, people.
The cosmopolitan also imagines that in such a world not everyone
will find it best to stay in their natal patria, so that the circulation
ofpeople between different localities will involve not only cultural
tourism (which the cosmopolitan admits to enjoying) but migra-
tion, nomadism, diaspora. (In the past, these processes have usu-
ally been the result of forces we should deplore: the old migrants
were often refugees, and older diasporas often began in an invol-
untary exile. But what can be hateful if coerced can be celebrated
when it flows from the free decisions ofindividuals or groups.)
In a world of cosmopolitan patriots, people would accept the
citizen's responsibility to nurture the culture and politics of their
homes. Many would, no doubt, spend their lives in the places that
shaped them; and that is one of the reasons local cultural practices
would be sustained and transmitted. But many would move, and
Cosmopolitan Patriots 23
would mean that cultural practices would travel also (as they
always traveled). The result would be a world in which each
form of human life was the result oflong term and persistent
of cultural hybridization: a world, in that respect, much processes
the world we live in now. .. . .
Behind the objection that cosmopolitanismis parasinc many
. ty that we should dispel: an exaggerated estimate of
case, an anxre . I th global
the rate of disappearance of cultural heterogeneity. .n e .
f ultural exchanges, some forms of human life are disap-
system 0 c . h t asym
d the processes ofhomogenization are somew a _
peanng, an . I I e but
I N ither of these phenomena are parncu ar y n w,
metnca. e I t: f ul
. d d robably are. Neverthe ese, as rorms 0 c _
their range an spee p d I II
. r; are created and they are create oca y,
ture disappear, new rorms '.. h
. h h e exactly the regional inflections t at cosmo-
which means t ey av f ..
Iitans celebrate. The disappearance of old cultural is, in
po . t ith a rich variety of forms of human hfe,just be-
short consisten wi lso bei
' ul I c that differ from each other are a so emg cause new c tura rorms
created all the time. " I' re senti-
I d patriotism unlike natrona Ism, a
Cosmopo itamsm an , id I' b
h id I .nes Different political i eo ogres can e ments more t an 1 eo 00- . .
. .th both Some cosmopolitan patnots are con-
made consistent wrtn notn. . f ialist bent
. d religious' others are seculanzers 0 a soc .
servatrve an , . . 1 h. r er withthe Roman
Christian cosmopolitanism i.S 0 d as t e gd inant shaping
huh which Stoicism came to e a om
ethics. (On my wer;
Bibl Onl someone ignorant of t e istory 0
theuld e. this :s an expression ofdivided loyalties.) But I am a lib-
wo see . . ntiments can
eral, and both cosmopolitanism and se ,
t b hard to accommodate to liberal principles,
seem 0 e . Lib I ho propose a
Patriotism often challenges liberalism. era s.w'
f
s'var-
state that does not take sides in the debates among Its state.
. . of the good t.o. __ .... _:
ious conceptions ,__ .'-b .. d. III
that celebrates itself-and moflern L? L i fU. .. !
,.c,..,, ... !
I
able rights," and then seem almost immediately to become pre-
occupied with looking after the rights of the local branch of the
species, forgetting-this is the cosmopolitan critique-that their
rights matter as human rights and thus matter ouly if the rights of
foreign humans matter, too.
This is surely more of an objection to the practice of liberalism
than to its theory (and, as I shall argue later, cosmopolitans also
have a reason for caring about states). At the heart of the liberal
picture of humanity is the idea of the equal dignity of all persons:
Liberalism grows with an increasing appreciation of the inade-
quacy of an older picture in which dignity was the possession of an
elite. Not every premodern society made its elite hereditary, as the
eunuchs who ran the Ottoman Empire would have attested. But it
is only in the modern age that the idea has grown that everyone of
us begins life with an equal entitlement to respect: an entitlement
that we may, perhaps, lose through misbehavior, but which other-
wise remains withus all our lives.
This idea of the equal dignity of all persons can be cashed out
in different ways, but it is what undergirds the attachment to a de-
mocracy of unlimited franchise; the renunciation of sexism and
racism and heterosexism; the respect for the autonomy of individu-
als which resists the state's desire to fit us to someone else's con-
ception of what is good for us; and the notion of human rights-
rights possessed by human beings as such-that is at the heart of
liberal theory.
It would be wrong, however, to conflate cosmopolitanism and
humanism; wrong, because cosmopolitanism is not just the feeling
that everybody matters. The cosmopolitan also celebrates the fact
that there are different local human ways of being, while human-
ism is consistent with the desire for global homogeneity. Human-
ism can be made compatible with cosmopolitan sentiments, but it
can also live with a deadening urge to uniformity.
A liberal cosmopolitanism of the sort I am defending might put
ANTHONY APPIAH
America, at least) often desire a public education and a public cul-
ture that stoke the fires of the national ego. Patriots also seem espe-
sensinve these days to slights to the national honor, to skepti-
crsm about a celebratory nationalist historiography-in short, to
the critical reflection on the state that we liberals, with our instru-
mental conception of it, are bound to engage in. No liberal should
say "My country, right or wrong,"because liberalisminvolves a set
of political principles that a state can fail to realize' and the liberal
will have no special loyalty to an illiberal state, because liberals
value people over collectivities.
This patriotic objection to liberalism can also be made how-
ever, to Catholicism, to Islam, to almost any religious view: in-
deed, t.o any view, including humanism, that claims a higher U:oral
authonty one's own particular political community. And the
answer to It 18 to affirm, first, that someone who loves principle can
also love country, family, friends; and second, that a true patriot
holds the state and the community within which she lives to cer-
tain standards, has moral aspirations for them, and that those aspi-
rations may be liberal.
The cosmopolitan challenge to liberalism begins with the claim
liberals have been too preoccupied with morality within the
natIOn-state.John Rawls's Theory of[ustice, which began the mod-
ern of philosophical liberalism, left the questions of
morality to be dealt with later. How to develop the
picture InanInternational direction is a currentpreoccu-
of professional political philosophy. The cosmopolitan is
hkely to argue that this order of priorities is all wrong.
It is all very well to argue for or light for liberalism in your own
country. But if that country, in its international operations, sup-
ports, or even tolerates, illiberal regimes elsewhere, then it fails
the will argue, because it does not sufficiently weigh
the lives ofhuman bemgs as such. Liberals take it to be self-evident
that we are all "created equal" and that we bear certain "inalien-
Cosmopolitan Patriots 25
E ANTHONY APPIAH
its point like this: We value the variety of human forms of social
and cultural life, we do not want everybody to become part ofa ho-
mogeneous global culture, and we know that this means that there
will also be local differences (both within and between states) in
moral climate. So long as these differences meet certain general
ethical constraints-so long, in particular, as political institutions
respect basic human rights-we are happy to let them be.
PATRIOTISM, AS COMMUNITARIANS HAVE SPENT MUCH
time reminding us recently, is about the responsibilities as well as
the privileges of citizenship. But it is also, and above all, not so
much a matter of action-ofpractical morality-as of sentiment: If
there is one emotion that. patriotism brings to mind, it is surely
pride. When the national anthem plays, when the national team
wins, when the national army prevails, there is thai shiver down
the spine, the electric excitement, the thrill of being on the win-
ning side. But the patriot is surely also the first to suffer his or her
country's shame: it is the patriot who suffers when a country elects
the wrong leaders, or when those leaders prevaricate, bluster,
pantomime, or betray "our" principles.,.Patriotism is about what
the nineteenth-century Liberian scholar-diplomat Edward Blyden
once so memorably called "the poetry of politics," which is the
feeling of "people with whom we are connected.'" It is the Connec-
tion and sentiment that matter, and there is no reason to Suppose
that everybody in this complex, ever-mutating world will find their
affinities and their passions focused on a single place.
My father's example demonstrates for me, more dearly than any
abstract argument, the possibilities that the enemies of cosmopoli-
tanism deny. We cosmopolitans can be patriots, loving our home-
lands (not only the states where we were born but the states where
we grew up and where we live). Our loyalty to humankind-so
vast, so abstract, a unity-does not deprive us of the capacity to
Cosmopolitan Patriots 27
loser bv: the notion of a global citizenship can
care for people c oser y, .
h
i nd practical meaning.
ave a rea a I makes me suspicious of the purport-
B t my father's examp e (h ' Gh
u . t against patriotism my fat er s a-
d! opohtan argumen .
e y co
sm..
hich I want to defend) that alleges that nation-
natan patnotIsm, W
d
f M tha Nussbaum in her fine essay, "a
ality is in the wor soar h . "
i , . ti "Nussbaum argues t at In con-
II
. el nt characterts rc,
mora y irr eva bi bo ndary such as the boundary of
di th t a morally ar itrary u .
ce mg a d s: ti e role in our deliberations, we
. h deep an tormanv ..
the nanon as a f anv pri .pled way of persuading em-
denri rselves 0 any pnnel
seem to epnve ou . s: ., h nds" across the "boundaries of
zens that they should in tact Jom d
a
"
didgender an race.
ethnicity an c ass an . k i g here if I insist on the dis-
ul
ay what I thin is wron c. I
I can 0 y s . 5 Th .r conllation is a perfect y
'. t te and nation. ei
tinction between s a after Rwanda, Sri Lanka,
r. d rn person-even
natural one or a mo e b .. But the yoking of nation and
. B . nd Azer a'pn. .
Amritsar, osma, a . d d to bring the arbItrary
h
Enl" htenment was mten e
state in t e .g .,th the "natural" bound-
. f t into conform.ty WI .
boundanes 0 sta es . b dari es of one could be arbi-
. '. th idea that the oun an
aries of nations; e .. f h th were not is easy enough to
wh
ile the boundanes 0 teo er
trary .
re reminded ofIt. f
grasp, once we a d hi sentially Herderian way 0
h I t to en orse t 18 es hil
Not t at wan . t Loosely and unp i 0-
. preeXist sta eS.
thinking-NatlOns never. . "imagined community" of cul-
sophically defined, a nation is adn h I of the face-to-face and
. beyon t e sea e
ture or ancestry r u n n m ~ 6 B all the nations I can think of that
seeking political expresslOn. ut h I cy of older state ar-
. ith states are t e ega
are not cotermmous w h b Ghana and as the
A nte is in what as ecome , .
rangements-as sa. . h t used to be Yugoslavia,
d C
tian nations are m w a k
Serbian an roa . h . and the state to ma e a
. c di tingulsh t e nation .
I want, m tact, to is hi . morally arbi-
. I site to Herder's: If anyt mg is .'
point entire y 0ppo . 7 S' human beings live m
.. t the state but the nanon, mce
trary, It IS no
ONY APPIAH
narrower than the species, and since it is within
poJiticalorders that questions of puhJic right and wrong are
largely argued out and decided, the fact of being a fellow-citizen-
someone who is a member of the same order-is not morally arbi-
trary at all. That is why the cosmopolitan critique of liberalism's
focus on the state is overstated: because the cultural variability that
cosmopolitanism celebrates has come to depend on the existence
of a plurality of states, we need to take states seriously.
The nation, on the other hand, isarbitrary, but not in a way that
permits us to discard it in our moral reflections. It is arbitrary in
the root sense of that term, because it is, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary, "dependent upon will or pleasure." Nations
often matter more to people than states: Monoethnic Serbia makes
more sense to some than multicultural Bosnia; a Hutu or a Tursi
Rwanda makes more sense to others than a peaceful shared citizen-
ship of Tutsi and Hutu; only when Britain or France became na-
tions as well as states did ordinary citizens come to care much
about being French or British. But notice that the reason nations
matter is that they matter to people. Nations matter morally, when
they do, in other words, for the same reason that football and op-
era matter-as things desired by autonomous agents, whose auton-
omous desires we ought to acknowledge and take account of even
ifwe cannot always accede to them.
States, on the other hand, matter morally intrinsically. They
matter not because people care about them, but because they regu-
late our lives through forms of coercion that will always require
moral justification. State institutions matter because they are both
necessary to so many modern human purposes and because they
have so great a potential for abuse. As Hobbes saw, to do its job the
state has to have a monopoly of certain forms of authorized coer-
cion, and the exercise of that authority cries out for (but often does
not deserve) justification even in places, like so many post-colonial
Cosrrwpolitan Patriots . 29
.. f li g for the state
.' where many people have no pOSItIVe ee n
socIeties,
at all. . th n no need for the cosmopolitan to claim that the
Tbere IS, en, t d the na-
. orally arbitrary in the way that I have sugges e ..
state IS rn t think that living in politIcal
. . There are many reasons 0 uld
tlOn IS. .' rrower than the species is better for us than wo
muUltIeS na . f h' h
com Ifment in a single world-state, a cosmopolis 0 w ic
be our engu . uld be not figurative but literal citizens. It
mopolitans wo di .
we cos . I this celebration of cultural variety that snn-
is, in fact, preclsey lit from some of the other heirs ofEnlight-
guishes the c o s ~ o p o an
enment humamhs
m.
I' e best on a smaller scale that we should
I . b use umans IV h
tIS eca b t the county: the town, the street, t e
defend not just the state, ur,. d' the family as communi-
. the craft the pro eSSlO
n,
an , h
bUSIness, ' . I that are narrower than t e
. I the many eire es
ties, as eire es among . te spheres of moral concern.
hori that are appropfla .
human onzon, . d , d the right of others to live m
h
tid s cosmopolitans, e en .' d
We s ot , a .' h 'b'l' t' s of association within an
. t t With rtc POSSI 1 1 ie . .,
democratic s a es f hi h they can be patriotIC CItIzens.
h . borders states 0 w c I
across t elf . ' I' that right for ourse ves.
And, as cosmopohtans, we can calm
Benjamin R. Barber
Constitutional Faith
WRITING IN T
and the Stoi HE GREAT TRADITION OF KANT
ideal of co OICS, Nussbaum deploys the noble
alisms of against the manifold parochi-
es eciall patnotIsm, and ethnicity. She is
p y unhappy With recent A .
adducing a national ident' b attempts at
ing a "colorfr1 'd I c h
lty
ecause they risk substitut-
U1 I 0 ror t e subst I" I .
and right" Sh an rve va ues ofJUstice
. h' e wants us to emulate Tagore's Nikhil d
t e temptations of an American Bande Matar::
ave two problems with Nussbau' . .
ercise in Kantian universalism. First s':os
ates the success of th A' '. erapprecI_
e mencan expenrn t i c .
the sentiments ofpatri I" en m graItmg
defined precisely by a frame
and right" sh' s antIve values of justice
e pnzes. And se d h
the thinness of c I' con, s e underestimates
osmopo nanism and th .
manizing role played bv idenn ".e crucial hu-
. y I entIty pohtIcs mad .
mg world of contracts m eracmat-
Patriotism has its p th' I arkets
b,
and legal personhood.
a oogIeS uts d .
tanism Because sh " d' 0 Des cosmopoh_
. e mlsJu ges these two elements, she
----------------_._-.-
Constitutional Faith 31
is unduly alarmed about what has been a remarkably successful
and undogmatic constitutional exercise in American exception-
alism and unduly frightened of efforts to refocus American patrio-
tism and community in an era of individualism and privatizing
markets. In an overly tribalized world, cosmopolitanism might be
a useful counterpoint. But ours is a world disenchanted in which
Gemeinschaft and neighborhood have for the most part been sup-
planted by Gesellschaft and bureaucracy. What we require are
healthy, democratic forms oflocal community and civic patriotism
rather than abstract universalism and the thin gruel of contract re-
lations.
AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY HAS FROM THE START
been a remarkable mixture of cosmopolitanism and parochialism.
The colonists and later the founders understood themselves to be
engaged in a novel process of uprooting and rerooting. In his cele-
brated Lettersfrom an American Farmer, St. John Crevecoeur sets
the tone for America's new form of patriotism, conceived precisely
to counter the religious parochialism and persecutions fromwhich
immigrants to America were fleeing. American patriotism was
itself the counter to the very evils Nussbaum associates with Amer-
ican patriotism. Crevecoeur solemnizes the creation of a "new
man" in "the great American asylum [where] '" everything
tended to regenerate [men] ... new laws, a new mode ofliving, a
new social system: here they are become men; in Europe they were
so many useless plants ... [here] they have taken root and flour-
ished." How has that happened? "By what power hath this sur-
prising metamorphosis been perfonned? By that of the laws."
American civic identity is invented to bar the confessional wars
Nussbaum fears it will occasion.
Jefferson himself echoes Crevecoeur when he writes, "Let this
be the distinctive mark of an American, that in cases of commotion
he enlists under no man's banner, but repairs to the standard of the
BENJAMIN R. BARBER
law." Andjust a fewyears later the feisty English emigrant Frances
Wright, herself unable to vote, nonetheless joined in celebrating
the new American patriotism, seeming to remonstrate explicitly
with Nussbaum: "What is it to he an American?" Wright asks. "Is
it to have drawn the first breath in Maine, in Pennsylvania, in Flor-
ida, or in Missouri? Pshaw! Hence with such paltry, pettifogging
calculations of nativities! They are Americans who have complied
with the constitutional regulations of the United States.... wed
the principles of America's declaration to their hearts and render
the duties of American citizens practically to their lives." Still more
recently, Justice Felix Frankfurter spoke of the need "to shed old
l o y ~ l t i e s and take on the loyalty of American citizenship," which is
a kind of "fellowship which binds people together by devotion to
certain feelings and ideas and ideals summarized as a requirement
that they be attached to the principles of the constitution."
Elsewhere, I have tried to Sumup this approach to Americanism
by suggesting that "from the outset, then, to be an American was
also to be enmeshed in a unique story of freedom, to be free (or to
be enslaved) in a novel sense, more existential than political or le-
gal.. Even in colonial times, the new world meant starting over
agam, meant freedom from rigid and heavily freighted traditional
cultures. Deracination Was the universal experience.... To be an
American was not to acquire a new race or a new religion or a new
culture, it was to possess a new set of political ideas" (An Aristoc-
racy ofEveryone).
. The Am.erican trick was to use the fierce attachments of pa-
triotic sentnnenr to bond a people to high ideals. Our "tribal"
sources from which we derive our Sense of national identity are
the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights, the inaugural addresses of Our presidents, Lincoln's Get-
tysburg Address, and Martin Luther King's "free at last" sermon
at the 1963 March on Washington-not so much the documents
themselves as the felt sentiments tying us to them, sentiments that
Constitutional Faith 33
are rehearsed at Independence Day parades and in Memorial Day
speeches. If Sheldon Hackney wants to recreate a sense of such pa-
triotic rhetoric among ordinary Americans, he surely is more likely
to strengthen than to imperil the civic fabric and the American
commitment to cosmopolitan ideals.
At times, Nussbaum seems to come close to recognizing as
much, acknowledging that even among cosmopolitans the circles
must be drawn toward the center. But she is distrustful, worrying
that in the end patriotism, however conceived, is "close to jingo-
ism." She seems diffident in the face of the actual ideals that ani-
mate American patriotism-however little realized they may be.
Vet it is precisely these ideals that give parochial America its global
appeal, these ideals that afforded Lincoln the opportunity to claim
that America might yet be the "last best hope" for people every-
where, these ideals that draw peoples damaged by toxic patrio-
tisms elsewhere to American shores. Justice Hugo Black captured
America's patriotic idealism in the phrase "conatitutional faith."
More recently, Sanford Levinson wrote a lively testament to Black's
idea-also called Constitutional Faith. At its best (it often is not at
its best), America's civic nativism is, then, a celebration of interna-
tionalism, a devotion to values with cosmopolitan reach. The cos-
mopolitanization of such values has even gollen America in trouble
(in Mexico under Wilson, in Vietnam under Kennedy, Johnson,
and Nixon, and perhaps now in Bosnia)-a reminder to Nussbaum
that cosmopolitanism too has its pathologies and can also breed its
own antiseptic version ofimperialism.
My second objection to Nussbaum's worries is that, though she
is not entirely unmindful of the problem, she finally understates
the thinness of cosmopolitanism. Like such kindred ideas as legal
personhood, contract society, and the economic market, the idea
of cosmopolitanism offers little or nothing for the human psyche
to fasten on. By her own admission, it "seems to have a hard time
gripping the imagination." Not just the imagination: the heart, the
nei hborhood. For the American everyman (every-
taste for rep;esentative poet is not Emerson but Whitman,
woman). but Woody Guthrie, bards who praised the handiwork 0
R osevelt and who wonld have us travel together as
Lincoln and
d
' king in the immediacy and the immensity of the
rades nn hil ' g
com, 'I d celebrating the neighborhood w 1 e urgm
Amencan an scape, .
' hb to extend their circles of fellowship, II
neig sba defines the cosmopolitan as a "person whose a e-
NUBS aum f h beinzs," hut
' h ldwide community 0 uman emgs, . e 18 to t e war h .
panc 'II'ance is initially to the farmer, the sailor, t e
WhItmans a A d h Guthrie sings of the Amencan
d h h pwright, n w en hi
an t e s 1 ifi . "This land is your land, t IS
h ' about the speCI cs.
land" e smgs om California to the New York Island, from the
land IS my land, fr t"Is Guthne's rooted
th Gnlf Stream wa ers , . ,
redwood t,o atible withjustice? Hardly. In nearly every
love of Amenca mco ha: I ' to a demand forjustice. The poetry
h transmutes t at ove in . I h
song, e . th same patriotic-civic a c emy
L t Hughes practices e ,
of angs on , be Ameri gain" appealing not to
d "L t Amenca e enca a ,
when it plea s e I' , b t to the unrealized American
disembodied cosmopo itamsm, u. .
values that are the country's embodied sonl.
0, let America be America again-
The land that neverhas beenyet- , fr
And yet must be-the landwhere ME-
The land that's mine-the poor man ,
. H hes have "sung America" in avoice
Whitman, Guthne, Ut untr live up to its aspirations.
ofloving devotion that insists t e wh I y humankind in general
The old cliche has it that those w 0 ove n in particular (Mo-
id ' dividual women or me
often cannot abi e in 1 , A ' oets prudently ask us to
' h p) Our WIse mencan p
liere's M,sant ro e , I b I' in the particular.
' f th genera y reve mg
kindle an affection or e h ' d Hughes to Nussbaum.
d Whi tman and Gut ne an f
I recommen 1 f hIdis not just a matter 0
They will remind her that love 0 ome an
Constitutional Faith 35
R. BARBER
viscera. the vitals of the body that houses the brain in which Nuss-
would like us to dwell. No one actually lives "in the world of
which the cosmopolitan wishes us to be good citizens." Rather, We
live in this particular neighborhood of the world, that block, this
valley, that seashore, this family. Our attachments start parochially
and only then grow outward. To bypass them in favor of an im-
mediate cosmopolitanism is to risk ending up nowhere-feeling at
home neither at home nor in the world. This is the lesson of Amer-
ica's tempestuous multicnltural politics: to become an American,
women and men must first identiJYas African Americans or Polish
Americans or Jewish Americans or German Americans; to acquire
the dignity ofnatural citizens they must first take pride in their lo-
cal communities. Diogenes may have regarded himself a citizen of
the world, but global citizenship demands of its patriots levels of
abstraction and disembodiment most women and men will be un-
able or unwilling to muster, at least in the first instance.
Like Ibsen's Pastor Brand, Nussbaum urges her parishioners up
the harsh and lonely mountain to an abstract godhead they cannot
see. As ordinary women and men, they SOon fall away from the
quest and return to the loving warmth of their hearthsides in the
valley below. Brand continues on his selfless mission, to which he
has sacrificed wife, child, and parish, only to discover, too late,
too late, on the mountain top, at the moment of his death, that God
to whom he has given all is not the master of an abstract universe
but the God oflove who wants nothing more for Brand than that
he love and care for those in his immediate circle down in the
valley.
Nussbaum acknowledges that "becoming a citizen of the world
is often a lonely business," and her mentors (Marcus Aurelius, Em-
erson, Thoreau) are not only solitary intellectuals who march to a
different drum, but heroic figures like Brand. Nussbaum's cosmo-
politanism also has something ofthe heroic about it, a Nietzschean
quality that seems intolerant of ordinary needs and the democratic
N R. BARBER
the odd term she employs repeatedly in trying to rally a little
sympathy in herself for patriots, as if she were a tourist from some
black-and-white rationalist utopia touring the technicolor slums of
some National Geographic tribal culture teeming with multihued,
brightly feathered natives. But patriotism is more than color, and
when it is reduced to color, the color is all too often blood-red, for
it speaks to the power of the visceral human need to belong-if
only by virtue of imagined identities and contrived others whose
exclusion (or extermination) helps draw the boundaries.
The question is not how to do without patriotism and national-
ism but how to render them safe. A civic patriotism that eschews
exclusion but meets the need for parochial identity can provide an
alternative to the many pathological versions of blood kinship that
are around today in places like ex-Yugoslavia, Romania, Rwanda,
Tajikistan, Nigeria, the Ukraine, and Afghanistan, to name just a
few. I recently completed a study of this kind of fractiousness,
which I subsume under the term Jihad (the book is called Jihad
versus McWorld, "McWorld" being my name for the toxic cosmo-
politanism of global markets). But Jihad is a sickness of the na-
tional body and cannot be treated with remedies aimed at detach-
ing the soul from it. Pathological patriotism can be cured only by
healthy patriotism, jingoism only hy a pacific constitutional faith,
destructive nationalism only by liberal nationalism (in the title
of Yael Tamir's book), separatist, exclusionary ethnicity only by
multicultural ethniciry, If the tribes of traditional community are
dangerous, then we need to find forms of egalitarian, democratic,
and voluntarist communities that render tribalism safe. Cosmo-
politanism as an attitude may help us in that effort, but cosmo-
politanism as, a political destination is more likely to rob us of our
concreteness and our immediacy and ultimately can only benefit
the less wholesome aspects of the yearning for community and
identity.
Constitutional Faith 37
, h ' f s I have argued,
Nussbaum may wish to say t at', a ,
Of course litani osmopohtan-
h
' r is the safest way to cosmopo itamsm, c I
paro
c
ia Ism d hi lism At least that is the lesson
lso be a roa to paroe ia . li
ism can a her final citation, to the uoble Crates. Cosmopo ,tans
draw from , ublic and then go off to dinner parties? ThIS IS
even the earthiest of parochial
s
can
the n 0 c
understand.
Sissela Dok:
From Part to Whole
AGAINST ALL FORMS
h
OF NATIONA
et nocentrism Ma th N b LISM AND
, raussaumhll
seriouslv in educat' , ,c a enges us to take
/' IOn as III polin h
ideal that grants eq I 0 I ICS, t e cosmopolitan
ua respect to all H
on such thinkers as D' ' er essay, drawing
, IOgenes, Marcus Au I' d
gore, Illuminates both h ' re lUS, an Ta-
id w at IS most pers ' ,
1 eal and the ' " uasrve III this
questIOns It Inevitabl ' ,
Few w u1d di , Yraises III practice
o Isagree WIth N b' ,
need for greater und t di uss aurn s stress on the
. crs an lUg respe t d
non across nation I d herI C ,an coopers-
a an ot er bound' if "
are to mount coIl ti aries, I Societies
ec rve respon t h I
themselves respect n h b ses 0 c a lenges which,
, 0 sue ounda' .
such as AIDS '0 I nes-to epIdemics
, 11 r examp e or t .
tary, and humanitarian c r i s ~ s N 0 enVIronmental, mili-
her call for children t "I ' or would many oppose
o earn a good d I
they frequently do ab h ea more than
they live, about Ind' oudttBe ~ e ~ t of the world in which
ia an olivia and N' ,
way and their h' t ' igena and Nor-
IS ones, problems d '
ceases." ,an comparatIVe sue-
From Part to Whole 39
I fully share Nussbaum's emphasis, in this regard, on aims, aspi-
ralIOIJ', and values that can be shared cross-culturally, My ques-
arise when she goes further, to urge that children should
taught to view themselves as citizens of the world, whose "alle-
giance is to the worldwide community of human beings," I am un-
certain as to what children will be taught about conflicting alle-
giances under such a regime: whether world citizenship is to be an
ideal inviting them to enlarge their perspective and to strive for
broader and deeper knowledge, understanding, and care, or
whether teachers must also instruct children to regard all claims to
national or other identity as "morally irrelevant." In the latter case,
why should they take seriously allegiances other than those to hu-
man beings in general? Why not conclude, with William Godwin,
that if two persons are drowning and Oneis a relative ofyours, then
kinship (or, presumably, nationality) should make no difference in
your decision as to whom to try to rescue first?
The metaphor from Hierocles that Nussbaum discusses-of
concentric circles of human concern and allegiance-speaks to the
necessary tensions between what we owe to insiders and outsiders
of the many interlocking groups in which we find ourselves, It is a
metaphor long used to urge us to stretch our concern outward
from the narrowest personal confines toward the needs of out-
siders, strangers, all of humanity, and sometimes also of animals,
as Peter Singer proposes in The Expanding Circle, But more often
it has been invoked to convey a contrasting view: that of "my sta-
tion and its duties," according to which our allegiances depend on
our situation and role in life and cannot be overridden by obliga-
tions to humanity at large,
From each of the two perspectives, the risks of misjudgment,
abuse, even idolatry on the part of holders of the oilier perspective
are seen as considerable, Nussbaum rightly points not only to the
evils that we witness in so many parts of the world in the name of
loyalty to kin, ethnic group, and nation, but also to the harm done
- - ----------
BOK
moral hypocrites who use only the language of universality.
Dickens has immortalized the latter in Martin Chuzzlewit, in the
person ofMr. Pecksni/f, who cheated his fellowhumans with gusto
even as he mtoned the language of universal love. Sometimes what
is at issue is, rather, "inner hypocrisy." Thus Marcus Aurelius's in-
spiring reflections on cosmopolitanism, equality, and the love of
fellowhuman beings did not prevent him from overseeing in-
tensIfied persecution of Christians voicing those very same ideals.
From whatever perspective we view the image of the concentric
circles, it conveys our ambivalence about the conflicting calls on
Our concern and sense of responsibility. Henry Sidgwick took the
contrast between the two perspectives to be so serious as to
threaten any coherent view of ethics. On one hand, he held as the
fundamental principle of ethics "that another's greater good is to
be preferred to one's OWn lesser good." According to this princi-
ple, any sacrifice on one's own part would be called for, so long as
It could achieve a greater good for others, no matter where they
lived." On the other hand, Sidgwick also accepted what he called
the common-sense view that our obligations to help others differ
depending on the relationships in which we stand to them-rela_
tionships of family member, friend, neighbor, and fellow citizen.
2
Both the universalist and the bounded view concern human
survival and security. I agree with Sidgwick that neither can be
dismissed out of hand as morally irrelevant. Thus the duties he
mentions family members are ones known, in Some form,
to every societv and moral tradition: without some internal sup-
port and loyalty, no group, however small, could survive. Holders
of both views may concur on the survival value of at least a few
such duties, even as they disagree on the extent to which narrower
duties should be allowed to conflict with duties to humanity at
large. At the same time, many exponents of both views concede
that prohibitions, as on killing, breaking promises, and
cheatlUg, ought to hold across all the boundaries of all the circles
,
From Part to Whole
d that in certain acute emergencies-after an earthquake, for ex-
an .
ample-the obligation to offer humanitarian aid across boundanes
may supersede domestic needs.
Apart from such limited areas of agreement, however, the t"':o
erspectives lead to glaringly different conclusions about domestic
;nd international policy. When the needs of outsiders, however
defined, are of vast extent and prolonged duration and would re-
quire a considerable of scarce resources, of
the bounded view are especially likely to refuse to grant pnonty to
such needs over those of family members or compatriots.
We see the two perspectives invoked with passion in current de-
bates about immigration, foreign aid, and humanitarian interven-
tion. As the gap between the haves and have-riots widens, within
societies and internationally, the differences between the two take
on ever sharper practical import. The world's population has ex-
panded over six times since Sidgwick contrasted the universalist
and the more bounded views of human responsibility and noted
the threat that the reasonableness of both posed for ethics. The 1.3
billion persons who now live in extreme need-many of them chil-
dren, many unable to survive without outside mo.re nu-
merous than all human beings who lived m hIS time. ThIS vast
expansion of human misery is paralleled, however, by even greater
growth in the numbers of the well-to-do. Even as global levels of
average longevity, nutrition, health, and hteracy continue to chmb,
the gap only widens between rich and poor: Just III the last three
decades, the income gap between the world's richest 20 percent
and poorest 20 percent has doubled.
This widening gap between haves and have-nets, and the sheer
magnitude and intensity of present suffering, challenge, I suggest,
all existing conceptions of human rights and dulles and obhga-
tions, What does it require in practice, under today's conditions,
to give priority either to world citizenship or to national or com-
munity allegiances? What does it mean to honor human nghts or
LA BOK
to take seriously the duty to aid fellow humans in distress? And
whose obligation is it to offer assistance on the scale now needed
,
or to protect rights, such as those not to be killed or tortured, when
violated by others abroad?
These questions trouble many cosmopolitan and noncosmopol-
itan thinkers and human rights activists alike and will form the
background for policy debates in the century to come. Nussbaum's
essay helps to clarify the con1licts at issue; and the metaphor of
concentric circles to which she refers encourages participants in
such debates to envisage problems both from within and without
the different circles, and, more generally, from the two discrepant
perspectives on them to which Sidgwick points.
The two perspectives, therefore, also matter for debates about
educational approaches to enable children to better reflect on the
range of their allegiances. I see no reason to teach children that
claims to national or other identities are "morally irrelevant."
Rather, the question is how, and on what grounds, to weigh these
claims when they conflict, and what responsibility to acknowledge
with respect to each. Educational programs that declare either a
global or a more bounded perspective to be the only correct one
are troubling insofar as they short-circuit reflection concerning
such choices.
But here a new question arises: If both perspectives are impor-
tant in education, which one should be given priority, at least from
the point of view of when it is first introduced? Or, to use the
metaphor of the concentric circles, in which direction might chil-
dren's learning about inner and outer circles and the respective al-
legiances best develop? Is it better for parents and teachers to be-
gin at the outer edges and move inward, to move back and forth
between the two, or to begin with the inner circles and move
outward?
Alexander Pope offers one answer, in "AnEssay on Man":
From Part to Whole . 43
God lovesfromWhole to Parts: but human soul
Must rise fromIndividual to the Whole.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov'd, a circle strait succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race,
/ ... /
Pope's interpretation of how we learn to reach beyond the inner-
most circles is persuasive and worth taking into account in teach-
ing. If children begin learning about the world "from part to
whole," even as they are made familiar with the larger framework
early on, they will have a basis from which to explore all they can
learn about the world, and, in turn, ways of shifting back and forth
between the concentric circles. They will then be better equipped
to work out their stance with respect to interlocking identities, loy-
alties, and obligations, and to debate these with others. By con-
trast, children deprived of a culturally rooted education too often
find it difficult to experience any allegiances whatsoever, whether
to the world or to their community or family. Instead, they risk de-
veloping a debilitating sense of being exiled everywhere with re-
sponsibilities to none save themselves.
Rabindranath Tagore's philosophy of education was one, I be-
lieve, of encouraging children to reach out "from part to whole." In
"A Poet's School," he describes the aims of the school he started at
Santiniketan in West Bengal. Just as trees absorb nourishment
from the atmosphere around them, so children, he explains, learn
from "the diffuse atmosphere of culture"-one which keeps their
minds sensitive to their inheritance and to the current of influ-
ences that come from tradition, and which makes it easy for them,
in turn to "imbibe the concentrated wisdom of ages.'" But the
,
SSELA BOK
nourishment children draw from culture, inheritance, and tradi-
tion should be offered to them freely and thus free them to look be-
yond their immediate world, not constrain them through rote
learning and indoctrination:
It is onlythrough the fullestdevelopment ofall his capacities that man
is likely to achieve his real freedom. He must be so equipped as no
longerto be anxious abouthis own self-preservation; only through his
capacityto understandand to sympathizewith his neighbourcanhe
function as a decent member of human society and as a responsible
citizen,"
From such a point ofview; there is nothing wrong with encour-
aging children fully to explore their most local existence in order
to reach beyond it by degrees. Nor need there be anything wrong
with lasting pride in, love for, or identification through particular
bonds, communities, and cultures. Acknowledging these need not
blind one to problems within any of the circles of allegiance nor
involve exceptionalism or disparagement or dismissal of others,
Without learning to understand the uniqueness ofcultures, begin-
ning with one's own, it may well be impossible to honor both hu-
man distinctiveness and the shared humanity central to the cosmo-
politan ideal,
Butler
Universality in Culture
CONSIDER THAT IT MAY BE A MISTAKE
, ffili to n by stating an order of pnonnes: I
clare one s a ia 10 . f
fi d then Yo It may be that the ordenng 0
am X rst an d ced
h identifications is precisely the problem pro u
discourse ou multiculturalism which does not yet
know how to relate the terms that it enumerates, It
I 0 I pose to return to a uld be a great conso anon, sup ,
::d -made universal perspective, and to every-
y id 0fy 0th a universal moral attitude before
one to 1 enn WI hi I
they take on their various specific and paroe ia con-
cerns. The problem emerges, however, when the
h 0 al" proves to be culturally variable,
ing of "t e umvers . al
h ifi cultural articulations of the umvers and t e speCI c
work against its claim to a transcultural status. c
h ht to be no rererence This is not to say that t ere oug 0
h 0 al or that it has become, for us, an Impos-
to t e unrvers . is that there are
ibilitv On the contrary, All It means
s 11.]" 0 h not al-
cultural conditions for its articulation t at are 0 f r
h d that the term gams Its meamng 0
ways t e same, an . I
o I through these decidedly less than umversa us precIse y
47
rTH BUTLER
conditions. This is a paradox that any injunction to adopt a uni-
versal attitude will encounter. For it may he that in one culture a set
ofrights are considered to he universally endowed, and that in an-
other those very rights mark the limit to universalizability, i.e., "If
we grant those people those rights we will he undercutting the
foundations ofthe universal as we know it." This has become espe-
cially clear to me in the field of lesbian and gay human rights,
where the universal is a contested term, and where various cultures
and various mainstream human rights groups voice doubt over
whether lesbian and gay people ought properly to be included in
"the human" and whether their putative rights fit within the ex-
isting conventions governing the scope of rights considered uni-
versal.
Consider that to claim that there are existing conventions gov-
erning the scope of rights descrihed as universal is not to claim
that that Scope has heen decided once and for all. In fact, it may he
that the universal is only partially articulated, and that we do not
yet know what forms it may take. The contingent and cultural
character of the existing conventions governing the scope of uni-
versality does not deny the usefulness or importance of the term
universal. It simply means that the claim of universality has not
been fully or finally made and that it remains to be seen whether
and howit will he further articulated. Indeed, it may well be politi-
cally important to claim that a given set ofrights are universal even
when existing conventions governing the scope ofuniversality pre-
clude precisely such a claim. Such a claim runs the good risk of
provoking a radical rearticulation of universality itself Whether
the claim is preposterous, provocative, or efficacious depends on
the collective strength with which it is asserted, the institutional
conditions of its assertion and reception, and the unpredictable
political forces at work. But the uncertainty of success is not
enough ofa reason to refrain from making the claim.
Mari Matsuda has recently argued that hate speech-in particu-
Universality in Culture
.ally degrading speech-ought not to qualify as protected
racr .. ..
precisely hecause it sends a message of racial m enonty,
that message has heen refuted by universally accepted codes of
1 Setting aside for the moment whether or not hate speech
ought to he unprotected for that reason, the argument raise.s other
d f ti s Is Matsuda's view one which only isolates kin s a ques ion . .
d f h that ought not to he part of puhlic discourse, or is
kin s a speec . .
it also a normative position concermng what ought to be paBI-
dari f' l it"mate speech-namely, speech that's con-
trve boun anes 0 eg ] .. 2 _
. d by eds tino: notions of universalityi' How would we rec
strame .." , . for i h
. h a vi .th that of Etienne Balibar, or instance, w a
rmcile sue a VIewWI " ali
h . . f, s our current notions of uruvers ty. argues t at racism In arm .
How might we continue to insist upon more reformula-
f uni ersality if we commit ourselves to hononng only the
nons 0 UllIV, .. 1
.. I d parochial versions of universality current y en- proVlslOna an
oded in international law? Clearly, such are enor-
c I ful r political arguments in international contexts, hut
a . . ul.
. Id he a mistake to think that such conventional form ations
It wou h h "the uruver
exhaust the possibilities of what might e meant y .-
sal." Are we to expect that we will know in .the meamng to
he assigned to the utterance of universality, or is this utterance the
occasion for a meaning that is not to he fully or concretely antic-
ipated? . h.
If standards of universality are historically articulated, t en it
. h hi I d exclusionary charac- uld that exposmg t e paroc ia an
wo seem . litv i t f the
ter of a given historical articulation of ity is par ._
project of extending and rendering substantive the notion a
ality it If "Speech that contests current standards governmg
vers itseu, "h .
the universal reach ofpolitical enfranchisement c aractenzes rae-
. h t he sure. But there are other sorts of speech that
ist speec , a . . laboration
stitute valuahle contestations crucial to the contlnumg e I
f h . l itself and which it would be a mistake to forec ose.
D t e unrversa 1 , . . h ubi
An example of the latter would he a situation in whic s
JUDITH BUTLER
who have been excluded from enfranchisement by existing con-
ventions (including racist conventions) governing the exclusionary
definition of the universal seize the language of enfranchisement
and set into motion a "performative contradiction": claiming to be
covered by that universal, they thereby expose the contradictory
character of previous conventional formulations of the universal.
This kind of speech appears at first to be impossible or contra-
dietary, hut it constitutes one way to expose the limits of current
notions of universality, and to constitute a challenge to those ex-
isting standards to revise themselves in more expansive and inclu-
sive ways. In this sense, being able to utter the performative contra-
is hardly a self-defeating enterprise; on the contrary, it is
crucial to the continuing revision and elaboration of historical
standards of universality proper to the futural movement of de-
mocracy itself To claim that the universal has not yet been articu-
lated is to insist that the "not yet" is proper to an understanding of
the universal itself: that which remains "unrealized" by the univer-
sal constitutes it essentially. The universal begins to become artic-
ulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulation and
this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it,'who
have no entitlement to occupy the place of the "who," but who
nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclu-
sive of them. The excluded, in this sense, constitutes the contin-
gent limit of universalization. And the universal, far from being
commensurate with its conventional formulation, emerges as a
postulated and open-ended ideal that has not been adequately en-
coded by any given set of legal conventions.
4
If existing and ac-
cepted conventions of universality constrain the domain of the
speakable, this constraint produces the speakable, marking a bor-
der of demarcation between the speakable and the unspeakable.
The border that produces the speakable through the exclusion
of forms of speech becomes an operation of censorship ex-
ercised through the very postulation of the universal. Does every
Universality in Culture 49
Dc.stll1ation of the universal as an existent, as a given, not codify the
ex,lmiiOlls by which that postulation of universality proceeds? In
instance and through this strategy of relying on established
C",.VlmtiOl" of universality, do we unwittingly stall the process of
univ,:rS'"l><atlOn within the bounds of established convention, nat-
uralizing its exclusions, and preempting the possibility of its radi-
al
, ti ;> The universal can be articulated ouly in response to a
c iza IOn. '.
challenge from (its own) outside. What constitutes the
h
icht I' h. as a legitimate commumty that might debate
t at mIg qua 1.1 . " ,
d agree upon this universality? If that very commumty IS consn-
an . dTh
ruted through racist exclusions, how shall we trust It to e 1 erate
on the question of racist speech? . .
The above definition of universality is distinct from an idealiz-
ing presupposition of consensus, one that is in some ways already
there. A universality that is yet to be articulated might well defy or
confound the existing conventions that govern our anticipatory
imaginings. This last is something other than a pre- or postcon-
ventional idealization (Habermas) conceived as always already
there, or as one already encoded in given
suda), a position that equates present and ultl.mate accomplish-
ments. It is the futural anticipation of a universality that has not yet
arrived, one for which we have no ready concept, whose
ulations will only follow, if they do, from a contestation of unrver-
sality at its already imagined borders.
The notion of "consensus" presupposed by either of the first
two views proves to be a prelapsarian contention, which short-
circuits the necessarily difficult task of forging a con:en-
sus from various locations of culture, to borrow Horni Bhabha s ti-
tle and phrase, and the difficult practice of among the
various languages in which universality makes Its vaned and
tending appearances." The task of cultural is one that IS
necessitated precisely by the performative contradiction that takes
place when one with no authorization to speak within and as the
JUDITH BUTLER
universal nevertheless lays claims to the terms Or h
. . ,per aps more
appropriately phrased, the extension of universality through the
act of translation takes place when one who is excluded from the
um.versal, yet belongs to it nevertheless, speaks from a split sit-
uanon ofbemg at once authorized and deauthorized (so much for
delineatmg a neatly spatialized "site of enunciation") That t
I' . . rans-
IS not the simple entry of the deauthorized into the autho-
rized, wherehy the former term simply alters its status and the lat-
ter domain simply makes room for what it has unwittingly failed to
accommodate. If the norm is itself predicated on the exclusion of
the one. who speaks, one whose speech calls into question the
of the universal itself, then translation on such occa-
sIOns.IS to be something more and different than an assimilation to
norm. The kind of translation that exposes the alterity
the norm (an alterity without which the norm would not as-
sume Its borders and "know" its limits) exposes the failure of the
normto effect the universal reach for which it stands, exposes what
we mIght underscore as the promising ambivalence of the norm.
. The failure of the norm is exposed by the performative contra-
diction enacted by one who speaks in its name even as the name is
not yet to designate the one who nevertheless insinuates his or
her way into the name enough to speak "in" it all the same. Such
double-speaking is precisely the temporalized map of universal-
future,. the task of a postlapsarian translation the future of
which remains unpredictable. The contemporary scene ofcultural
translatIOn emerges with the presupposition that the utterance
does not have the same meaning everywhere, indeed that the utter-
ance has become a scene of conflict (to such a degree, in fact, that
we to prosecute the utterance in order, finally, to "fix" its
meamng and quell the conflicts to which it gives rise). The transla-
non that takes place at this scene of conflict is one in which the
meanIng mtended is no more determinative of a "final" reading
than the one that is received, and no final adjudication of conflict-
Universality in Culture . 51
ing positions can emerge. Without this finaljudgment, an interpre-
tive dilemma remains, and it is that interpretive dilemma that is the
dynamic mark of an emerging democratic practice.
Thus it makes little sense to imagine the scene of culture as one
that one might enter to find bits and pieces of evidence that show
an abiding faith in an already established notion of universality. If
one were to enter various domains of culture in order to find exam-
ples of world citizens, one would invariably cull from those various
examples the selfsame lesson, the selfsame universal bearing. But
is the relation between culture and the universal appropriately con-
strued as that between an example and the moral dictum it is said
to support? In such cases, the examples are subordinate to the uni-
versal, and they all indicate the universal in the same way. The fu-
tural articulation of the universal, however, can happen only if we
find ways to effect cultural translations between those various cul-
tural examples in order to see which versions of the universal are
proposed, on what exclusions they are based, and how the entry
of the excluded into the domain of the universal requires a radical
transformation in our thinking of universality. When competing
claims to the universal are made, it seems imperative not to pre-
sume that the cultural moments at issue exemplify a ready-made
universal. The claim is part of the ongoing cultural articulation of
universality, and the complex process oflearning how to read that
claim is not something any of us can do outside of the difficult pro-
cess of cultural translation. This translation will not be an easy one
in which we reduce every cultural instance to a presupposed uni-
versality, nor will it be the enumeration of radical particularisms
between which no communication is possible.
The risks will be that translation will become an imposition ofa
universal claim on a culture that resists it, or that those who defend
the universal will domesticate the challenge posed by alterity by
invoking that very cultural claim as an example of its own nascent
universality, one which confirms that such a universality is already
JUDITH BUTLER
achieved. What kind of cultural imposition is it to claim that a
Kantian may be found in every culture? For whereas there may be
something like a world reference in moral thinking or even a re-
course to a version of universality; it would sidestep the specific
cultural work to be done to claim that we have in Kant everything
we might want to know about how moral reasoning works in vari-
ous cultural contexts.
Importantly, then, the task that cultural difference sets for us is
the articulation of universality through a difficult labor of transla-
tion. That labor seeks to transform the very terms that are made to
stand for one another, and the movement of that unanticipated
transformation establishes the universal as that which is yet to be
achieved and which, in order to resist domestication, may never he
fully or finally achievable.
Ric:l1ClI"O falk
Revisioning Cosmopolitanism
MARTHA NUSSBAUM'S POWERFULLY ARGUED
and artfully constructed cosmopolitan initiative chal-
lenges the political imagination at a historically relevant
moment to transcend the blinkered reahsm of modern
patriotic conceptions ofloyal citizen and state
that associate political duty and identity with terntonal
boundaries. One recent nationalist response to cnucisrn
bout its narrowness of outlook is for adherents to the
a . I
patriotic side of the debate to extend their ethica con-
sciousness to the larger reality ofhumamty by InCOrpo-
rating "human rights" into their ethical convictions.
Cosmopolitan adherents welcome this beyond
the exclusivities of nationalism and statism but find
such an expression of solidarity with humanity as a
whole too peripheral to achieve an appropnate reloca-
tion of ethical orientation.
Despite sharing Nussbaum's essential vision, I,am
disturbed by its implicit encouragement of a polanzed
either/or view of the tension between national and cos-
mopolitan consciousness. In so doing, it engenders a
55
Revisioning Cosmopolitanism
their traditional humanistic goals to join with their conserva-
"adversaries" to reduce taxes, roll back wages and welfare,
nromote privatization and the free flow of capital, and generally
to the pressures exerted by regional and global
Because this pattern can be traced globally m many diverse
settmgs, it seems correct to treat it as a structural and defining at-
of the current phase of international history. Its specific
con"'qulen.ce is to preclude for the indefinite future the reestablish-
ment of the humane state.
In my view, the ethical viability of patriotism depends on suffi-
cient political space at the level of the state to enable the
nd maintenance of the humane state and to make such a project
;easible and meaningful at the level of citizen participation. The
"Swedish model" is paradigmatic of this possibility, and its demise
expresses the current era of globalization. If Sweden can no
be Sweden because of the pressures being exerted by capital
to reduce taxes, hold wages, downsize welfare, and aVOId any kind
ofjudgmental posture in foreign policy of the. sort previously asso-
ciated with Swedish neutrality, then to contmue to rely on a
tionalist orientation in the quest for political fuliillment seems in-
creasingly to be a courtship with self-delusion. Sweden has
temporarily avoided self-delusion by its forced march mto the Eu-
ropean community-a step taken democratically, but at the cost of
Sweden's right to be Sweden!
Economic unevenness means the humane state can still achieve
impressive results in several Asian countries in past
with massive poverty. Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and
others have manifested this potentiality, although the considerable
material achievements of each is yet to be matched by upholding
the full range of human rights of its citizens. Raising material a.nd
social standards, while seeking regional stability and global equity,
makes possible the emergence of new types of states, de-
spite the eclipse of the phenomenon in its northern birthplace,
RICHARD FALK
discussion that inevitably overlooks the originality of our political
circumstances in the late twentieth century-an originality that
makes both poles problematic.
The patriotic pole reflects the reality of the sovereign state as the
organizing hasis of international society. Priority is naturally given
here to national consciousness as the orienting basis for education,
socialization, aspiration, and loyalty. This kind of orientation pre-
supposes a degree of autonomy and primacy for the sovereign, ter-
ritorial state that no longer exists and, if recoverable, will require
deep structural changes at national, regional, and glohallevels of
social, political, and economic organization. At present, the auton-
omy and primacy of the state is heing seriously and cumulatively
compromised, if not challenged, and even superseded, hy various
types of regionalization and globalization, especially hy complex
forms of economic, ideographic, and electronic integration. The
impact of such trends on the capacity of states to promote material
standards of the most disadvantaged portions of national and for-
eign populations is particularly severe. As such, the option and
possihility of the humane state is disappearing in the haze of global
consumerism and the heavy-metal rhythms of popular culture. In
this atmosphere of diminished autonomy, the domestic choices be-
tween conservative and liberal are losing their traditional signifi-
cance, as political parties of varying ideological legacy are under
virtually irresistible pressure to adapt to the discipline of the global
market. This logic of conformity is also diminishing, in many re-
spects, the more fundamental distinctions between authoritarian
and democratic political systems, and even between adherents of
Marxist-Leninist principles and those deriving from the market-
oriented constitutionalism of the West.
This dynamic if stultifYingconvergence is partly a consequence
of the new ascendancy of foreign economic policy in constructing
the domestic programs of government, particularly inducing left-
liberal and social-democratic political parties and leaders to aban-
sufficiently distinguished from or even aware of globalist tenden-
cies that are integrating experience across boundaries at a rapid
rate. To project a visionary cosmopolitanism as an alternative to
nationalist patriotism without addressing the subversive challenge
of the market-driven globalism currently being promoted by trans-
national corporations and banks, as well as currency dealers and
casino capitalists, is to risk indulging a contemporary of
fuzzy innocence. A credible cosmopolitanism has to be
with a critique of the ethically deficient globalIsm embodied in
neoliberal modes of thought and the globalism IS bemg en-
acted in a manner that minimizes the ethical and visionary content
of conceiving of the world as a whole.
The structures of regional and global economic governance are
taking root in a variety of settings, including the European Com-
.ty NAFTA the economic summits of the Group of Seven, muru , ,
the nascent World Trade Organization, IMF/World Bank. The ra-
tionale for such frameworks is almost entirely market-oriented and
1
economistic, emphasizing contributions to trade and Investment,
efficiencies of production and distribution, and for.re-
ducing the relevance of sovereign states, especially their intrusion
of people-oriented protectionist, social, and local factors that help
the weak withstand the strong. Such a globalism has almost no
affinity with the Stoic moral imagination projected so by
Martha Nussbaum it is a perspective of the whole that IS totally
oblivious to the ethical imperatives of human solidarity. It is typi-
fied by the McDonald's arch, the homogeneity of international ho-
tel chains and worldwide auto rental agencies, CNN's presentation
of political reality, and the universal presence on logos of
the animated characters created by Walt Disney StudIOS. Without
a more careful clarification, there is a danger of conflating the
emergent regionalisms and globalism that are reconstituting the
world with those exalted cosmopolitan expectations and hopes
RICHARD FALK
My contention is that for social-democratic and left-liberal
;"orld vi:ws the humane state is being displaced by a reality that
IS as yet msufficlently understood, which I provocatively label "the
neurotrc state." globalizing pressures induce governing
leaders and aspmng political parties to embrace policies that Con-
tradicr their own defining etbical identity: structural factors Over-
whelm value preferences. Bill Clinton's presidency illustrates and
confirms this trend: the scandalous neglect of homelessness and
poverty combined with the ardent, unconditional embrace of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Gen-
eral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as indispensable in-
gredIents of American well-being Of course fCI t 'd . .
. , I In ons evration
from the moral expectations ofliberal Democrats were an isolated
phenomenon, it would be natural to explain this embrace of the
consensus as episodic or a reflection of the peculiar turn
to the right in America, but what has Occurred, with variations
here and there, is truly a worldwide pattern, characteristic ofevery
government and political party in recent years. Mit-
terand s soclahsm veered similarly midway through bis final presi-
dential term, and Tony Blair's spectacularly successful redirection
ofthe British Labour Party is a further case in point. Such a trend
traditional patriotism, basing itself on the human-
IstIc potentIalities of the national community; is now a self-
posture, making its line of anticosmopolitan argu-
mentatIOn to. the extent that it evades the challenges
ofglobalIzatIOn, mcludmg Its own submission.
But surprisingly, the cosmopolitan orientation is not much
more satisfactory on these matters. The Stoic-Kantian vectors of a
cosmopolitan orientation assume an ethical context for globalist
affirmatIOns that IS mcreasingly difficult to reconcile with the actu-
of contemporary globalism. True, the cosmopolitan outlook
IS exphcltly ethIcal and humanistic Ona global scale, but it is not
Revisioning Cosmopolitanism
57
To take better account of globalizing tendencies (from above and
below) we need to disengage the practice of democracy from its
traditional state/society nexus, and to acknowledge and promote
what David Held has usefully identified as "cosmopolitan democ-
racy." The global conferences organized under the auspices of the
United Nations on sucb topics as women, development, popula-
tion, and the environment are vivid expressions of this innovative
democratic ethos, involving more dynamic forms ofinteraction be-
tween people and structures of authority, with both the participa-
tion and locale situated in a manner that contrasts with traditional
domains of democratic practice centering on electoral rituals and
representative institutions. These conferences do not themselves
manifest cosmopolitan governance, but are rather early experi-
ments in global or cosmopolitan democracy. They suggest new
styles of and potentialities for participation, accountability, and
representation, but do not yet embody these styles in distinct au-
thority structures that normalize practice and expectations.
The extensions of cosmopolitan democracy suggest a possible
reconciliation of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. If global eco-
nomic governance structures are reoriented to express a kind of
equilibrium between market-oriented (g1obalization-from-above)
and people-oriented (globalization-from-below), then it is possible
that political space will be recreated to enable the reemergence of
the humane state. It is worth recalling that the earlier manifesta-
tions of the humane state emerged as a consequence of an equilib-
rium within territorial states that balanced the logic of the market
against the social logic of the labor movement, and that the capital-
ism of the early nineteenth century rested on predatory behavior of
unregulated market behavior that produced such social ills as child
labor, unsafe working conditions, and job insecurity, while regu-
lated capitalism later introduced workplace standards, labor
unions and strikes, as well as minimum wages and social security.
At present, the neurotic state is trapped between the compromises
RICHARD FALK
that invoke the prospect of a genuine "species consciousness" and
draw upon classical images of an ethically unified human com-
munity.
Two SORTS OF PROPOSALS SEEM RESPONSIVE TO THESE
considerations. First, inquiry into education, ethical ambition,
and political loyalty needs to be recast to avoid a polarizing choice
between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. Such recasting envi-
SIOns continuous political conversation and an ethos of inclu-
siveness rather than an emphasis on the exclusive correctness of
either pole. The shape of world order can no longer be reduced to
the relations between parts (conceived as states) and the whole
(conceived as the world). Transnational and grassroots partici-
pants and processes, including voluntary associations of citizens,
now engage in many varieties ofaction covering the spectrum from
the extreme local to the global commons and beyond, and are often
animated by an ethical consciousness that gives contemporary re-
ality to the cosmopolitan outlook. Because this consciousness is
created out of this fabric of transnational social forces, it could per-
haps be identified as neocosmopolitanism. Its characteristic em-
bodiment can be illustrated by either the Greenpeace efforts to
prevent Shell Oil from sinking an oil rig with toxic properties in
~ h e N o r ~ h Sea, or by the worldwide campaign in 1995, especially
mtense m the South Pacific, to protest the resumption of French
nuclear weapons tests. It is a type of globalization-from-below that
is people- (and nature-) oriented and contrasts with globalization-
from-above that is capital-driven and ethically neutral.
The second modality of recasting focuses on the framework of
political participation that follows from this type of ethical trans-
nationalism. Patriotism in the traditional sense assumes the poten-
tial moral agency of the sovereign state. If that agency is being
eroded, then the grounds ofloyalty are undermined, at least from
the perspective of human betterment and meaningful community.
Revisioning Cosmopolitanism
59
RICHARD FALK
produced by social regulation of marketplace behavior and the new
dynamics of essentially unregulated economic globalism. These
competing forces commonly produce divergences between prom-
ises and performance of a depth and consistency that transcend
the typical behavior of politicians who promise too much or who
tilt their performance to satisfy an array ofspecial interests.
Citizens are now being challenged to reconfigure the outmoded
dichotomy between undifferentiated patriotism and cosmopoli_
tanism. If this challenge is met, then the vitality of traditional pa-
triotism can be restored, but only on the basis of extending ideas
and practices of participation and accountability to transnational
sites of struggle. If ethical, and with it political, revitalization is
thwarted by the sheer weight of economic globalism-a kind of
negative cosmopolitanism-then citizens with humanistic agendas
will find little comfort in either patriotic or cosmopolitan poles of
the current debate. If, by contrast, the debate is recast, then patrio-
tism and cosmopolitanism will be able to share a common commit-
ment to refashioning conditions for the humane state, the humane
region, and, depending on the success of transnational social
forces, a decent, inclusive globalism.
Nat""l" Glazer
Limits of Loyalty
IN 1994 PRESIDENT CLINTON ANNOUNCED A
h
. ' ur Cuban refugee policy. Cuban refugees
cangemo .. h
had for thirty years been favored, and this .
been criticized as both racist-when comparde Wl
I
.t
6 pie-an po 111-
treatment of Haitian refugees, or exam . d d
. . I d uniform stan ar
all biased rejecting a unrverea an
of from Communist regi:es..I
what one can make of this change of po cy m Ig 0
the standard Martha Nussbaum would have replace the
d
ding which she considerately calls
common un erstan , "h .
. ." Vln-
" tri 11' sm" rather than or c
pa no h. h t olitical
. "In this prevailing standard, the Ig es p .
Ism. .nI P sident Clinton
I alt is to one's country. Certai y re
::d interests of the United States in when:e
made this change. Were he truly citizen, w at
wonld this imply about refugee .. 1-
h t political as in "hIghest political oy
I use t e erm ld b
It "because I acknowledge that no loyalty e
a y, I. . t baSIC human
higher than loyalty to one's re IglOn or o. nI
val
But as I read Martha Nussbaum, she IS not 0 y
ues.
NATHAN GLAZER
arguing against the principle My country, right or wrong. We
would all, patriots and cosmopolitans, allow that there comes a
time when our country's policies must be resisted (which policies,
and how resisted, would of course raise further difficult questions).
She clearly IS after something more than this, as one sees when she
presents as questionable the sentiment, "I aman Indian first, a citi-
zen of the world second." This Suggests that something like world
citizenship should replace American citizenship.
I practical objections to this, but also, I believe, principled
obJectIOns. The practical objections are immediately raised by the
example of the Cuban refugees, and they are numerous. Is our gov-
to t:eat the fleeing Cubans the way it would, for example,
Amencan CItizens, permanent residents, immigrants who have
gone through the proper procedures, or refugees who have estab-
lished their bona fides as escaping from persecution? If so, then
what distinctions should it make among those who wish to settle in
this country? Should it make none? Should it defer in the matter
of immigration policy to some world body, a committee of the
United Nations, perhaps? Is this what the status of world citizen-
ship suggests or requires?
Any immigrant or refugee policy presupposes a state with rules
that differentiate among those who are allowed entry, in what sta-
tus and with what rights. This presupposition does not mean that
those outside the boundaries of the state are without human
indeed rights-rights that have been in large measure spec-
ified and defined by international protocols. So, we will join in
feeding the Rwandan refugees, perhaps join in protecting them
but we will not, for example, give them rights to enter the United
States..All these commitments to others' claims and rights involve
costs, In money and lives, and these costs are not assessed against
the world, but against the citizens and soldiers of a specific coun-
try, the only entity that can lay taxes and require soldiers to obey
Limits of Loyalty
orders. It is perhaps this reality that also gives the citizens of a state
the ethical right to make distinctions. It is hard to see, practically,
how to move beyond a situation in which the primary power to
grant and sustain rights rests with constituted sovereign states. I
suspect that one reason why cosmopolitanism could make sense to
the philosophers Martha Nussbaum has studied is that they were
citizens of a "cosmopolis"-a near-universal state and civiliza-
tion-whose uniformity in rights and obligations was mirrored by
a uniformity in city layouts and architecture. (Even their cosmo-
politanism, however, may have been stretched when they thought
about barbarians and Parthians.) But our situation is radically
different.
The issue is more than practical. It is a problem of how far
bonds of obligation and loyalty can stretch. In some respects, as
I've indicated, they can encompass all men and women. Do we not
sense, though, whatever the inadequacy of our principled ethical
arguments, that we owe more to our family members than to oth-
ers? The greater closeness of bonds to one's country and coun-
trymen need not mean denigration and disrespect for others. Cer-
tainly there can be no argument with the position that we should
know more about other countries, that we learn more about our-
selves in studying them, that knowing more may help in dealing
with international problems, that there are moral obligations to the
rest of the world.
But there is a meaning and significance to boundaries, in per-
sonal life and in political life, as well as a practical utility. Most
people around the world seem to want their govermuents to be
smaller and less distant than they are now, rather than give power
to larger, more cosmopolitan power centers. Consider how in this
century empires have been reduced to a host of squabbling coun-
tries-the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, with per-
haps the Chinese next. In our own country, federalism shows sur-
NATHAN GLAZER
prising life, and many want to devolve more and more functions
that have been taken on by the national government to the states,
and beyond that, to cities, counties, even individual schools.
Cosmopolitan values have made considerable headway, cer-
tainly in the more developed part of the world, where, for example,
European loyalty slowly gains on national loyalty. But in the devel-
oping world, we should realize, resistance to cosmopolitan values
is strong. The advocacy of cosmopolitan values is often viewed
suspiciously as an arrogant insistence by formerly colonial powers
that their values, Western values, be adopted. Even Singapore, that
model of successful modernization and Westernization in the eco-
nomic sphere, is no candidate for cosmopolitanism in the political
arena, or when it comes to culture.
Cosmopolitan political loyalty is a difficult concept to make real
and to free from its inevitable connection with the Western cultural
tradition. That, after all, is where it comes from. We see fragments
of cosmopolitanism emerging as various international treaties and
commitments begin to limit the behavior of states for the good of
the entire world, as in agreements on the environment, on the
treatment of refugees, on the rights of women, but all are contested
vigorously, all depend on the acceptance of sovereign states to
make them effective, and even the oldest international agreements,
on the use of violence to settle international disputes and on the
kind of weapons that may be used in warfare, are regularly trans-
gressed.
Ideally, one can envisage on one hand an extension of such un-
derstandings, and their greater effectiveness in time, together on
the other hand with a devolution of many powers and functions to
lower levels of government, not as remote as the national govern-
ment or the even more remote international agencies, and closer to
people, which is what it seems most people want.
Daniel Bell once wrote that our national states seem too small
for some functions, too large for others. In an age of powerful mul-
Limits of Loyalty 65
. . 'ng multinational institutions, and a
ti nal corporatIons, aspm . .. h
a o. d d s: the recognition of distinctive identities t at
dmg eman lor h B
rea I. u1 r " that certainly seems to be t e case. ut
e call "mu uc tura Ism, b diated by the only institutions
ss of change must e me h
e proce
l
.. nd power national states. There is no ot er
have egllImaey a, aI
at . 1 ment those aspects of cosmopolitanism that appe to
ay to many other aspects (for example, political
s. Regar g I . k ptical whether a cosmopolitan
"ulture) we may proper y remam s e
would be better than the one we have.
Amy Gutmann
Democratic Citizenship
"P
ROPONENTS OF NATIONALISM IN POLITICS
and in education," Martha Nussbaum writes, "fre-
quently make a weak concession to cosmopolitanism."
They ~ a y that "although nations should in general base
education and political deliberation on shared national
values, a commitment to basic human rights should be
part ~ f any national education system...." Nussbaum
identifies my defense of democratic education with this
position, which she says is "a fair comment on practical
reality" but not a sufficient moral ideal. The nationalism
she describes is not compatible with democratic educa-
tion. It neither fairly reflects practical reality nor ex-
presses an attractive moral ideal. Practical reality is far
worse, and a moral ideal of democratic education de-
mands far more .
.Most nations do not teach, let alone practice, any-
thmg close to hasic human rights, which include rights
to freedom of speech and religion, due process and
equal protection under the law, education and eco-
Democratic Citizenship . 67
nomic security, and equal representation in a genuinely demo-
cratic politics. As this incomplete list indicates, basic human rights
are so extensive that teaching them cannot be fairly characterized
as a weak concession to anything. If most nations effectivelytaught
basic human rights, practical reality would be immeasurably better
than our present reality.
The same cannot be said for basing education and political de-
liberation on shared national values, whatever those values happen
to be. This nationalistic view is abhorrent. It's strange, to say the
least, that Nussbaum associates a defense of democratic humanism
and democratic education with such a view. How does she manage
to do so? She identifies as nationalistic the idea that a public edu-
cation system should teach children the skills and virtues of a dem-
ocratic citizenship that dedicates itself to furthering liberty and
justice for all. She then translates this idea into the advocacy of
teaching national values, whatever they happen to be. But such ad-
vocacy would clearly be incompatible with a commitment to the
teaching of democratic humanist values.
What are democratic humanist values? They subsume basic hu-
man rights but also go beyond them in morally important ways. All
children-regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, race, or c1ass-
should be educated to deliberate together as free and equal citizens
in a democracy that is dedicated to furthering social justice for all
individuals, not just members of their own society. Are democratic
humanist values "national values," as Nussbaum suggests byway
of criticism? Only in the innocuous sense that they recommend
themselves to be taught within the United States and every other
society as part of common public education. But in this sense,
Nussbaum's cosmopolitan values are also national values, and can
be misleadingly tarred by the same nationalistic brush. Putting la-
bels aside, I suspect that Nussbaum and I agree children should be
taught to respect the dignity of all individuals. They should also be
all, citizens of the United States" (another repugnant position that
Nussbaum seems to attribute to me)? Far from being a sufficient
standard for a democratic humanist education, such teaching is
clearly antithetical to it. It is one thing to say that publicly subsi-
dized schooling should teach students the rights and responsibili-
ties of democratic citizenship (something Nussbaum never clearly
recognizes) and quite another to say it should teach them that they
are "above all, citizens of the United States." Our primary moral
allegiance is to no community, whether it be of human beings in
our world today or our society today. Our primary moral alle-
giance is tojustice-to doing what is right. Doingwhat is right can-
not be reduced to loyalty to, or identification with, any existing
group of human beings. Morality extends even beyond the current
generation, for example, requiring that we consider the well-being
of future generations.
Suppose that we leave behind both the view that Nussbaum ar-
ticulates-that the community of human beings in the entire world
commands our primary allegiance-and the view she mistakenly
attributes to democratic humanists, that "national boundaries are
morally salient." We are left with an important distinction, which
Nussbaum collapses in her criticism, between taking national
boundaries as morally salient and recognizing them as politically
salient, and likely to be so for the foreseeable future. A philosophy
of democratic education rejects the idea that national boundaries
are morally salient. If they are politically salient, however, then
public education ought to cultivate in all students t h ~ skills a ~ d
virtues of democratic citizenship, including the capacity to delib-
erate about the demands of justice for all individuals, not only for
present-day citizens of the United States. Deliberating about the
demands ofjustice is a central virtue of democratic citizenship, be-
cause it is primarily (not exclusively) through our empowerment as
democratic citizens that we can further the cause ofjustice around
the world.
AMY GUTMANN
empowered as democratic citizens. Both arc necessary (and com-
patible) conditions for a just democracy. The constitution of just
democracies, in turn, is necessary to achieve justice in the world.
This is also the cosmopolitan view of Kant, but it is a cosmopol-
itanism that roundly rejects Nussbaum's claim that our "allegiance
is to the worldwide community of human beings." Yes, we have
duties to respect the rights of individual human beings the world
over, and schools the world over should teach children (not in-
doctrinate them) to appreciate these duties. But it does not follow
that we are "citizens of the world" or that our "fundamental
allegiance" is to the community of human beings in the entire
world. This cosmopolitan position might be attractive were our
only alternative to give our primary allegiance to the United
States of America or to some other politically sovereign cornmun-
ity. But we have another alternative, which Nussbaum neglects
(and does not recognize as the position defended by democratic
humanism): to reject the idea that our primary allegiance is to any
actual community, and to recognize the moral importance of being
empowered as free and equal citizens of a genuinely democratic
polity.
Why not empower individuals as citizens of the entire world?
We can truly be citizens of the world only if there is a world polity.
Given what we now know, a world polity could only exist in tyran-
nical form. Nonetheless, we need to be citizens of some polity to
be free and equal, and we need therefore to be educated to those
(particular as well as universal) skills, understandings, and values
that secure full participation and equal standing in our own polity.
Being empowered as a free and equal citizen of some democratic
polity should be an opportunity open to all individuals. Demo-
cratic citizenship is an essential demand ofjustice in the world as
we know it, and individuals the world over recognize it as such.
Does this emphasis on democratic citizenship imply that stu-
dents in our society should therefore "learn that they are, above
Democratic Citizenship 69
why democratic citizenship is morally important. Our obligations
as democratic citizens go beyond our duties as politically unorga-
nized individuals, because our capacity to act effectively to further
justice increases when we are empowered as citizens, and so there-
fore does our responsibility to act to further justice. Democratic
citizens have institutional means at their disposal that solitary indi-
viduals, or citizens of the world only, do not. Some of those institu-
tional means are international in scope (the United Nations being
the most prominent example), but even those tend to depend on
the cooperation of sovereign societies for effective action.
By teaching students to deliberate about justice as democratic
citizens, not only as individuals, schools can encourage citizens to
support effective institutional ways of moving toward a better soci-
ety and a better world. Schools should also teach students that
there are demands of morality and justice that do not depend on
democratic citizenship for their realization-for example, the de-
mands of family and friendship. But to teach either lesson with in-
tellectual integrity, schools must move beyond the morally mis-
guided and politically dangerous idea of asking us to choose
between being, above all, citizens of our own society or, above all,
citizens of the world. We are, above all, none of the above.
AMY GUTMANN
What is Nussbaum's cosmopolitan alternative? To teach stu-
dents that their primary allegiance is to the community of human
beings in the entire world. Where is there any such community?
There are human beings throughout the world and they are enti-
tled to be treated as equals, according to principles of right and
If this is what Nussbaum means by community, she is
agreemg Withwhat democratic humanists say. If she means to refer
to a with claims that take precedence over these rights,
a commumty that requires its members to respect those claims
"above all" because they are "above all" citizens of the world then
she is recommending a vision that we should reject. It is another
parochial form ofnationalism, this time on a global scale. Its paro-
chialism may be concealed by the fact that Nussbaum supplies lit-
tle or no content to the world community's values. She talks about
how we should understand more about other people's "histories
problems, and comparative successes," but this does not address
the question of what the world community's moral values are. Un-
derstanding other people's situations, although undoubtedly im-
portant, IS the main aim of moral education. Respecting every
person's claims of justice is. What are those claims? Nussbaum
does not say. Were she to give cosmopolitanism content it would
look alot like democratic humanism. By giving content to these
potentially compatible ideals, we can find the common ground
that we need to move beyond more abstract slogans.
. humanism supports an education that encourages
deliberate about justice as part of their political cul-
ture-ejustice for their fellow citizens as well as their fellow human
beings, are citizens of other societies. What is the cosmopoli-
tan alternative? Publicly subsidized schools could teach students
that it is their duty as individuals, regardless of their role as citi-
zens, to further justice. We do have duties of justice quite apart
from our role as citizens. But this lesson is incomplete, both mor-
ally and politically speaking, and its incompleteness helps explain
Democratic Citizenship
7
1
Gertrude Himmelfarb
The Illusions
of Cosmopolitanism
I WAS INOCULATED AGAINST COSMOPOLITAN-
ism at an early age. In a freshman history course shortly
after the outbreak of the Second World War, the profes-
sor explained that what we were witnessing was the last
gasp of nationalism-nationalism in its death throes.
Nationalism had been a nineteenth-century phenome-
non, the romantic by-product of the nation-state in its
prime. It had barely survived the First World War, and
the Second would surely bring it to an end, ushering in
a cosmopolitan order committed to the universalist ide-
als of the Eulightenment. The professor, a scholar of
much distinction, spoke with great authority, for he had
personal as well as professional knowledge of his sub-
ject. A recent German emigre, he had intimate, tragic
experience of that anachronism known as nationalism.
Yet even then, as a sixteen-year-old, I knew some-
thing was wrong with his scenario. I recalled, from ear-
lier lectures in the course, that the Enlightenment itself
had given birth to an aggressive nationalism. And as a
The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism 73
Jew I was painfully conscious of the virulent nationalism that had
recently transformed an eminently eulightened, civilized country
into a barbarous, murderous one.
Neither did my flirtation with Trotskyism, in my early college
years, allay my skepticism about the imminent triumph of COsmo-
politanism. I was prepared to believe in much of the Marxist doc-
trine-the class struggle, the inevitability of revolution, the tri-
umph of the proletariat-but not in the withering away of the state.
The example of the Soviet Union, reinforced by a reading of Mi-
chels and Pareto, hardly inspired confidence in that particular
tenet.
If I had any lingering cosmopolitan fantasies, they were dis-
pelled after the war, when I attended an Independent Labour Party
convention in London. The convention unanimously and enthusi-
astically approved a resolution in favor of a United Europe. Visas,
passports, and all the other stigmata of citizenship would be abol-
ished, and Englishmen and Europeans would be united in a com-
mon brotherhood. (This was when "brotherhood" was still a per-
missible term.) Immediately thereafter the convention was called
upon to approve another resolution-in favor of an independent
Scotland. As I remember it, that motion too was unanimously ac-
cepted.
MARTHA NUSSBAUM'S ESSAY BRINGS BACK THOSE
youthful memories. At a time when the European Union is con-
fronting a multitude of problems and "Euroskepticism" is rife in
all the countries belonging to that Union, when the British Com-
monwealth barely exists, when hloody nationalist wars have been
raging in what used to be Yugoslavia and what remains of the So-
viet Union, when nationalism allied with religious fundamentalism
is a perpetual threat in the Mideast, and when multiculturalism in
the United States challenges the very idea of E Pluribus Unum,
NUSSBAUM'S CATALOGUE OF COSMOPOLITAN VALUES
strikingly omits two that she herself must hold dear: democracy
ues? And what are they, specifically, concretely, existentially? To
answer those questions is to enter the world of reality-which is
the world ofnations, countries, peoples, and polities.
Nussbaum seems to be on the verge of entering that world when
she asks us to consider "howvariously they [the common aims, as-
pirations, and values of humanity] are instantiated in the many
cultures and many histories." The Stoics, she tells us, insisted that
an essential task of education is the "vivid imagining of the differ-
ent." But she herself does not engage in the imagining of the
different. If she had, she might discover that her cosmopolitan val-
ues-'justice and right," 'justice and reason," "reason and the love
of humanity"-are not "variously" instantiated in the many cul-
tures and histories that make up the world. What are instantiated
are quite different values, which have little in common with her
own.
At the risk oflowering the tone of discourse, we might translate
these exalted concepts into mundane terms to find out whether
they are in fact shared by all of humanity. ':Justice" might be ren-
dered as the rule oflaw; or "right" as the civil rights ofminorities;
"reason" as the exercise of rational discourse; or "love of human-
ity" as the humane treatment of human beings. Not even the most
ardent cosmopolitan would claim that these are the values of "hu-
manityas a whole." On the contrary. They are not only violated in
practice by a good part ofhumanity; they are not accepted in prin-
ciple-as values-by all of humanity. They are, in fact, predomi-
nantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values. And it is nations
founded on Western principles and traditions that have tried to
give them existential reality by incorporating them into their gov-
ernments, laws, and institutions.
75
The illusions of Cosmopolitanism GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB
Nussbaum boldly calls upon us to reassert the ancient ideal of cos-
mopolitanism. OUf "allegiance," she says, should be to "the
worldwide community of human beings." This ideal, rather than
national identity, is "more adequate to our situation in the contem-
porary world."
Cosmopolitanism, Nussbaum assures us, does not involve the
creation of a "world state." But in the following sentences (and re-
peatedly thereafter), she speaks of "the world citizen" and "world
citizenship," terms that have little meaning except in the context of
a state. This is not a quibble, for it goes to the heart of her essay,
her effort to ground a universal morality in a universal-and state-
less-community. If nationality, as she says, is "morally irrelevant"
to the cosmopolitan ideal, so is the polity that defines the nation,
and so is the idea of citizenship. And so too is all of history. And
not only modern history, whose fundamental categories are nation-
ality and statehood, but even the ancient history that is her special
forte.
Nussbaum quotes the Stoics at some length as proponents of the
idea of a universal "moral community" and "world citizenship."
But she quotes Aristotle not at all. Yet Aristotle's dictum, "Man is
by nature a political animal," has proved to be far more prescient
than the Stoic doctrine. Aristotle's polis, to be sure, is not the
modern state. But it is a polity. And not a world polity but a spe-
cific, historic polity, a government of laws and institutions by
means of which-and only by means ofwhich, Aristotle believed-
man can consciously, rationally try to establish a just regime and
pursue the good life.
Nussbaum speaks of the "substantive universal values ofjustice
and right," the "world community of justice and reason," the
"moral community made up by the humanity of all human be-
ings," the "common aims, aspirations, and values" of humanity.
But where can we find those substantive, universal, common val-
--------------
ity and a secure legal system. And at their worst, they pall in con-
trast to the deficiencies and evils of non-Western, noncapitalist
countries.
77
The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism
ABOVE ALL, WHAT COSMOPOLITANISM OBSCURES, EVEN
denies, are the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, reli-
gion, heritage, history, culture, tradition, community-and nation-
ality. These are not "accidental" attributes of the individual. They
are essential attributes. We do not come into the world as free-
floating, autonomous individuals. We come into it complete with
all the particular, defining characteristics that go into a fully
formed human being, a being with an identity. Identity is neither
an accident nor a matter or choice. It is given, not willed. We may,
in the course of our lives, reject or alter one or another of these giv-
ens, perhaps for good reason. But we do so at some cost to the self.
The "protean self," which aspires to create an identity de novo, is
an individual without identity, just as the person who repudiates
his nationality is a person without a nation.
To pledge one's "fundamental allegiance" to cosmopolitanism
is to try to transcend not only nationality but all the actualities,
particularities, and realities of life that constitute one's natural
identity. Cosmopolitanism has a nice, high-minded ring to it, but
it is an illusion, and, like all illusions, perilous.
GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB
and liberty. Perhaps it is because these are even more "culture-
bound," as the invidious phrase has it, than the abstract concepts
of right or reason-more distinctive of Western culture than of any
other. They are also more "polity-bound," one might say-more
dependent on national and political institutions and, again, of
Western nations and governments than of any other.
As for more specific principles and policies that Nussbaum pre-
sumably cherishes-the social programs associated with a welfare
state, or public education, or religious liberty and tolerance, or the
prohibition of racial and sexual discrimination-these depend not
on a nebulous cosmopolitan order but on a vigorous admini-
strative and legal order deriving its authority from the state. The
first requirement of a welfare state is a state. So too the first re-
quirement of international cooperation, which Nussbaum regards
as essential for economic development, environmental protection,
and "quality-of-life issues," is the existence of states capable of un-
dertakingand enforcing international agreements. "International"
has "national" as its necessary and primary ingredient.
There are other omissions here-no mention, for example, of Is-
lamic fundamentalism, which might evoke disagreeable images of
female subjugation and abuse, religious intolerance and persecu-
tion, despotic governments and caste systems, child labor and illit-
eracy, and other unsavory practices that are hardly consonant with
the vision of a universal "moralcommunity."
Cosmopolitanism obscures all such unwelcome facts-ob-
scures, indeed, the reality of the world in which a good many hu-
man beings actually reside. It is utopian, not only in its unrealistic
assumption of a commonality of "aims, aspirations, and values,"
but also in its unwarranted optimism. One might object that the
Western-style, capitalist nation-state has its own deficiencies and
evils. And so it does. But they are deficiencies and evils that are at
least partly remediable within the framework of a democratic pol-
Michael W. McConnell
Don't Neglect
the Little Platoons
WE DO NOT SUFFER TODAY FROM AN EXCESS OF
patriotism. It is true that young Americans know re-
markably little about the cultures, histories, religions,
and aspirations of other nations. But this is not because
they are preoccupied with their own. Fewyoung Ameri-
cans know much, or care much, about the cultures, his-
tories, religions, and aspirations even of their own na-
tion. Our problem is a loss of confidence in any vision
of the good, and a lack of passion for anything beyond
material gratification.
How can publicly accountable schools educate in
such an intellectual climate? Every affirmation of princi-
ple is simply an attempt to "impose values" on someone
else. The teaching of any perspective (whether cosmo-
politan or patriotic or something else) is deemed re-
futed by the mere existence ofanother perspective. Cos-
mopolitans and patriots alike are silenced bythe sneers
of the village skeptic and the sensitivities of the dis-
senter.
Don't Neglect the Little Platoons 79
Martha Nussbaum's call for a self-consciously "cosmopolitan"
moral education is therefore welcome: at least she recognizes the
need to provide a coherent moral education of some sort, But in
presenting cosmopolitanism in opposition to "patriotism" or "na-
tional pride"-in proposing to teach children that their "funda-
mental allegiance" is as "citizens of a world of human beings"
rather than as citizens ofthe United States, indeed that citizenship
in the United States is "morally irrelevant"-Nussbaum's cosmo-
politanism may turn out to be more destructive than constructive.
It is more likely to undermine coherent moral education, which in
the real world is rooted in particular moral communities with dis-
tinctive identities, by substituting a form ofmoral education that is
too bloodless to capture the moral imagination.
An alternative view, going back at least to Edmund Burke, per-
haps to Aristotle, holds that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are
not at odds. Human affections begin close to home; wider circles
of affection grow out of, and are dependent upon, the closer and
more natural ties. Aristotle envisioned society as a hierarchy of at-
tachments-family, household, village, and finally the polis itself-
and was skeptical of the ability of any community larger than the
polis to serve as a locus offellowship or ofcitizenship in the strong
sense. Burke put it this way: "To be attached to the subdivision, to
love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle
(the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the
series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to
mankind."
The key to moral education is to fuse the sentiments (especially
love) to a teaching of the good. We begin to do good because we
love our preceptors (especially our parents); we want to please
them and we want to be like them. We continue to do good be-
cause that is the kind of person we have grown up to be. Later we
learn that our parents (and neighbors, and church, and nation)
have flaws and moral blemishes, but our affection teaches us toler-
ance and forgiveness.
None of this is head knowledge. It involves relationships, time,
example, ceremony, play, rebuke, and most of all, love. It is, in
short, not the work of the world at large. Moral education of neces-
sity begins with those close enough to engage in these loving rela-
tionships: with parents and family, expanding to neighbors,
churches, synagogues, and local schools-communities that are fa-
miliar and that are able to provide a unifying focus to the moral
life. Through the study of history it extends to the nation, and ulti-
mately to worthy objects in the world. But its source of strength
lies in the affections, which must begin close to home and radiate
outward.
Effective cosmopolitanism is therefore a by-product of moral
education in a great tradition. It comes when students recognize in
other cultures a parallel to that which they love in their own and
tolerate the flaws in other cultures just as they tolerate flaws in
their own.
A student who cares not a whit for his own culture's accom-
plishments is unlikely to find much value in the accomplishments
of others. A student who has no religion is unlikely to respect the
religious commitments of others. One who knows no heroes in his
own land will feel nothing but contempt for the naivete of those
who honor heroes elsewhere. Before a child can learn to value oth-
ers he needs to learn to value.
Burke himselfwas a great illustration of the connection between
national pride and regard for others. Devoted husband and father
and great defender of the tradition of the English constitution,
Burke was the very embodiment of the patriot. Yet he devoted the
bulk of his career-at enormous political cost to himself-to de-
fending Irish Catholics, the masses of India, and American colo-
nists from exploitation and oppression at the hands of his compa-
triots. And like Martin Luther King]r. in our time, Burke did this
80
MICHAEL W. MCCONNELL Don't Neglect the Little Platoons . 81
not by appealing to universal principles against the patriotic im-
pulses of his own nation, but by appeal to the national tradition it-
self. Burke, like King, invoked universal principles of natural right,
but not as a perspective alien to the national character. Both sought
to educate their countrymen in the idea that the principles of their
national identity were betrayed by violations of human right. They
thus appealed to the better part of our nature, and avoided the role
of the outsider, critic, or scold.
Teach children instead to be "citizens of the world," and in all
likelihood they will become neither patriots nor cosmopolitans,
but lovers of abstraction and ideology, intolerant of the flaw-ridden
individuals and cultures that actually exist throughout the world.
Humanity at large-what we share with other humans as ratio-
nal beings-is too abstract to be a strong focus for the affections.
Since "the world" has never been the locus of citizenship, a child
who is taught to be a "citizen of the world" is taught to be a citizen
of an abstraction. Abstract cosmopolitanism may well succeed in
introducing skepticism and cynicism regarding the loyalties that
now exist, but it is unlikely to create a substitute moral community.
Nussbaum appears to recognize this difficulty when she com-
ments that the writings of Marcus Aurelius create a feeling of
"boundless loneliness, as if the removal of the props of habit and
local boundaries had left life bereft of any warmth and security."
Cosmopolitanism, she admits, "offers no such refuge; it offers only
reason and the love of humanity, which may seem at times less col-
orful than other sources of belonging." But she does not recognize
that this is inherent in the project of directing the affections toward
objects so distant that they have no reality in the life of a child.
Love cannot be directed toward "humanity"; it can be directed
only toward real people, with whom one can have a real rela-
tionship.
Moral education in a cosmopolitan vein is thus likely to turn out
not only too weak to be useful in its own right, but destructive of
MICHAEL W. MCCONNELL
the moral communities that have managed to persist in the face of
Western materialism and cynicism. In his Tract Relative to thePop-
ery Laws, Burke wrote:
To commiserate the distresses ofall men suffering innocently, perhaps
meritoriously, is generous, and very agreeable to the better part of our
nature,-a disposition that ought byall means to be cherished. But to
transfer humanity from its natural basis, OUf legitimate and home-
bred connections,-to lose all feeling for those who have grown up by
OUf sides, in our eyes, the benefit of whose cares and labors we have
partaken from OUf birth, and meretriciously to hunt abroad after for-
eign affections, is such a disarrangement of the whole system of OUf
duties, that I do not know whether benevolence so displaced is not al-
most the same thing as destroyed, or what effect bigotry could have
produced that is more fatal to society.
If cosmopolitanism is seen as opposing localized attachments, it
will most likely prove destructive of these ends. To call these closer
ties of nation, community, or religion "morally irrelevant" (Nuss-
baum's words) is to undermine the very basis of our natural social-
ity. Such a teaching is more likely to be received as a justification
for selfish individualism than as an inspiration to generous cosmo-
politanism. We will not love those distant from us more by loving
those close to us less.
Anabstract cosmopolitanism, moreover, is not just "less color-
ful" (hence less likely to form the basis for an effective moral edu-
cation). It also has the danger of breeding contempt for our actual
fellow citizens, who likely will remain mired in their parochialism,
as well as for good people elsewhere, similarly mired. No actual
culture is cosmopolitan, in the sense that Nussbaum uses the term.
Each is parochial in its own way. The moralistic cosmopolitan,
therefore, is not one who everywhere feels comfortable but who
everywhere feels superior.
We get a faint hint of this in Nussbaum's claim that cosmopoli-
Don't Neglect the Little Platoons
tanism "offers only reason and the love of humanity." This might
be taken to suggest-wrongly-that the various noncosmopolitan
moral systems that flourish on the earth reject "reason" and the
"love of humanity." Nussbaum cannot possibly mean that; if she
did, it would be a sign of a parochialism far more profound than
that she denounces in her essay. Surely a part of any serious cos-
mopolitanism is the recognition that (at least some) other cultures
and belief systems are striving, in their own way, after reason and
goodness, even if their method and conclusions differ from the
cosmopolitan's own.
Nussbaum's advice is particularly perverse for the nation most
likely to adopt it: the United States. Whatever might be true of the
cultures of other lands, American culture already affirms universal
norms of natural justice, rather than the pride and honor of any
particular race or nation. Even America's propensity for self-
criticism and recognition of past and present moral failings stands
in the great tradition of the Puritanjeremiad. What better models
of cosmopolitan virtue can we find for our children than those we
celebrate in our public holidays, whether Washington or Lincoln
or King? The particular pride of being an American is based on
self-evident truths of universal application and in the appropria-
tion of parts of the cultures of peoples, our ancestors, from every
corner of the globe. What a mistake it would be to cast this aside!
Another particular problem with Nussbaum's position is her
dismissal of one of the most powerful resources available for com-
batting selfishness and narrow national self-interest: religion. Reli-
gion, like cosmopolitanism, cuts across national boundaries and
enjoins us to care for the alien and the stranger. Yet Nussbaum
treats religion as nothing more than one of our "special affections
and identifications," in the same category with "ethnic or gender-
based" ties, all of which should be subordinated to cosmopolitan
allegiance. She does not know her allies. There is something pecu-
MICHAEL W. MCCONNELL
liar about invoking the ancient teachings of the Stoics and the
Cynics in support of ideas that are taught every week in Sunday
school.
In the cultural crisis of OUf time, solutions are not to he found
in abstractions like cosmopolitanism, hut in renewal ofOUf various
intact moral communities. I predict that those in the next genera-
tion who have the greatest knowledge of and respect for other cul-
tures, as well as commitment to their own, will not be the products
of an explicitly cosmopolitan education, but of home schooling, of
religious schooling, of schooling in culturally and morally self-
confident communities. They will be the students who learn to
love the good and to recognize and respect visions of the good in
others. Let us stop making life so difficult for them.
Robert Pinsky
Eros against Esperanto
WHEN I SAW THE TITLE OF MARTHA Nuss-
baum's essay, I was excited because I admire the author
and because the two words yoked as her topic raise es-
sential matters. My disappointment with what she has
written is balanced by respect for what she begins to
open.
The patriotic and the cosmopolitan: these are not
mere ideas, they are feelings, indeed they are forms of
love with all the terror that word should imply. In many
, . .
ways they are opposed forms of love, suggestmg a pn-
mal conflict: if patriotism suggests the pull of a parental
home, cosmopolitanism suggests the pull of the market-
place, the downtown plaza. (I am told that the oldest
meaning of kosmos is "village.") Nussbaum's essay ex-
presses fear toward the eros of patriotism, but fails to
imagine a counterbalancing eros of the cosmopohtan.
For the cosmopolitan she substitutes the universal, a
more abstract, less historical conception. This error is
like confusing an historical tongue such as English with
a construct like Esperanto.
ROBERT PINSKY
The cosmopolitan is local, and it is historical.
The conflict between home and marketplace hearth and agor
, a,
known and unknown, may have some special poignancies for the
Umted States. we invented, like the Western and the gang-
ster movie, appeal in an almost formulaic way to rapid change
across generations that migrate outward and away from what was
home. The forms ofjazz and rock embody the eclectic, syncretic
mterchange of colliding origins. Never united by being a single
folk culture, united under any ancient aristocracy, we have
our best improvised an ever-shifting culture palpably in mo-
lion-a culture, I would say, that clarifies the fact that all cultures
are as,the chauvinist refers to any human group or
making as a static punty, the chauvinist elevates an illusion.
At OUr best, we contain multitudes-multimdes not merely of
souls, but of patrias. the paradox of a culturally polyglot, ever
more syncretic homeland-a cosmopolitan patria. At our worst
we protect some thin idea of our homeland with the fierce de:
. . . ,
spamng paranoia of the profoundly rootless. This is a basic an-
cient conflict. The paradoxical ideal of reconciling the pull of
and of market, the patriotic and the cosmopolitan, is an un-
derlymg energy of the Odyssey, epic of seagoing pirate-traders who
believed both in venturing out on Poseidon's ocean-the hero
learns the ways of many different peoples, say the first lines-to
seek profit and gloss, and in coming home to Ithaca. Martha Nuss-
baum raises the pertinent question of what this conflict should
mean in the present.
But alas, her essay is provincial; it stays within the language and
conceptions of a narrow place. In her first paragraph, she defines
the cosmopolitan as "the person whose allegiance is to the world-
wide . of human beings." Based on her "experience
working on mternational quality-of-life issues in an institute for
development economics connected with the United Nations" she
defines knowledge of other countries as "their histories, problems,
Eros Against Esperanto
and comparative successes." She suggests that the young study
these problems and comparative successes and that they "be
taught that they are, above all, citizens of a world of human beings
with the citizens of other countries." She sees India, of all places-
India, container of many universes of mores, arts, sights, smells,
languages, dances, poetries, sexualities, colors, gods, horrors and
ecstasies-c-as one of a series of concentric circles, withits problems
of hunger and pollution related to "larger problems of global hun-
ger and global ecology." On behalf of the largest, outer circle of the
universal, she reassures us that "we need not give up our special
affections and identifications, whether ethnic or gender-based Or
religious."
My criticism of these arid formulations is not merely stylistic,
though their sterility points to their weakness. Nussbaum is a
gifted writer, but the sentences she lapses into here present a view
of the world that would be true only if people were not driven by
emotions. These formulas about concentric circles and global
community would be valid only if cultures and nations were as
static and lucid as so many bar graphs and pie charts. We do share
only one world and set of resources, but we cannot deal with such
facts by declaring, as by UN resolution, that we are a community.
I have the impression that some of the fiercest nationalisms and
ethnocentrisms of the world are fueled in part by resentment to-
ward people like ourselves: happily situated members of large,
powerful nations, prosperous and mobile individuals, able to serve
on UN commissions, who participate in symposia, who plan the
fates of other peoples while flying around the world and staying in
splendid hotels. Shouldn't this reality be the starting place of such
discussions-or at least included in them? Shouldn't we recognize
that our own view, too, is local?
In short, Nussbaum falls into the formulation of one peculiar
province, the village of the liberal managerial class. I do not mean
to be excessively scornful toward this conceptual village, a realm
piques by positing the idea that the marketplace removes differ-
ences reduces distinctions, and effaces delicate structures. Does
,
the place of interchange destroy cultures by homogenization, or
does it foster culture by a kind of chemical reaction? Unwittingly,
the aridity of Nussbaum's Universal-a realm where even "copula-
tion" becomes a matter of principle-suggests the bleaker like-
lihood.
Nussbaum presents her ideas as a set of suggestions for educat-
ing the young. The utopianism of her formulations is so bloodless
that I would sooner stick with what is: with the varying, feeble
mixture of vague "basics" and half-hearted, constantly changing
special area "studies" that the young presently get from-well,
from the marketplace. By omission, Nussbaum makes an inadver-
tent argument for studying works of imagination. .
As to the threat of our own patriotism, the erotic spirit of the
cosmopolitan does exist, to balance it or temper it. Maybe it is the
powerful seduction of the marketplace that creates a defensive, vi-
ciously paternal protectiveness in nationalism, ethnocentrism, and
other "patriotic" ideologies. Yet certain other instances of region-
alism, ethnic pride, afici6n, even outright patriotism, can seem
cosmopolitan to me-maybe because I grew up when many immi-
grant families routinely flew the flag on national holidays, with no
meaning of self-righteousness or reactionary politics. Even the
very flagitself: This summer, in the hilly farm country around Sar-
atoga, New York, near the Erie Canal, I saw a line oflaundry hung
between a telephone pole and the window of a tidy-looking apart-
ment over a country grocery store-the classic procession of clean
clothes in the sun, and pinned at the end nearest the window an
American flag. The informality and idiosyncrasy of this gesture-
practical, intuitive, inventive, and resourceful in the way of O ~ Y ~
seus-seemed in the spirit of the cosmopolitan to me, as patnotIc
gestures go, because it put the flag into the world of daily life,
flapping above the market downstairs.
ROBERT PINSKY
where the folk arts are United Nations institute reports and curric-
ulum reform committees and enlightened social administration:
like other villages it has within it valuable customs and individuals.
But its inhabitants characteristically fail, as Nussbaum so spectac-
ularly fails, to achieve precisely what she calls for-understanding
others, comprehending the eros of what is different from home
through the eros of home. To put it very simply, I think that her
essay fails to respect the nature of patriotism and similar forms of
love.
Nussbaum quotes Marcus Aurelius: "Accustom yourself not to
be inattentive to what another person says, and as far as possible
enter into that person's mind.... Generally, one must first learn
many things before one can judge another's action with under-
standing." The weight of these quotations, for me, is to warn us
how extreme an act of imagination paying attention to the other
must be, in order to succeed even a little. Embedded in what Mar-
cus Aurelius says is a caution against the arrogance that would cor-
rect your provinciality with the cosmopolitanism of my terms. The
Muslim or Marxist or Rastafarian might draw Nussbaum's same
Stoic diagram of concentric circles, but the labels would build to-
ward a different, less cozy idea of the universal.
Lecturing us about 'jingoism" is but another form of provin-
ciality. Attachments to homeland or group are forms oflove. I have
spoken of the terror that word entails. When patriotism takes hor-
rible forms, the ruling force is not some logical error, but the dis-
tortions of passion. Until Nussbaum follows the advice of Marcus
Aurelius and understands "as far possible" the erotic component
of the assassination of the World Cup player whose blunder caused
his country's defeat, she is ouly talking to her fellow villagers-
which is to say she is only talking.
Yet her project is noble, for she is asking, implicitly, whether
there is in fact an eros of the marketplace equal to the eros of pa-
tria. Levi-Strauss raises this question more darkly in Tristes To-
Eros Against Esperanto
89
ROBERT PINSKY
In order to discuss afici6n, it may be necessary to risk the accu-
sation of sentimentality. For me the spirit that reconciles the home-
ward and outward forms of eros was represented, before I had any
of these terms, by the Brooklyn Dodgers: the team ofjackie Robin-
son and of Roy Campanella, the Italian-African-American catcher,
the team adored by a borough that was in certain ways to New
York what New York was to the country: historic and raw, vulgar
and urbane, many-tongued and idiosyncratic, a borough of His-
panic blacks and Swedish carpenters, provincial enough to have its
own newspaper yet worldly beyond measure, commercial and out-
ward, a marketplace if there ever was one.
This ideal is not universal but historical. It is not provincial, yet
it is local. It is not chauvinistic but generous and egalitarian. It is
an act of the imagination, and it corresponds to reality.
One might object that actual Brooklyn was far uglier than I sup-
posed in my aficidn. for the Dodgers. One might add that not only
was I a child, but except for trips to Ebbetts Field I was not even in
Brooklyn-s-I was in a small town on the Jersey Shore. Nevertheless,
that Brooklyn of the Dodgers is a cultural reality shared by many,
and I am proud to be among them. Call it patriotism.
The Brooklyn of the Dodgers has changed, it is gone, as gone as
the Dodgers are gone. But it was always gone, everything is going,
going, gone, because culture is change, it is movement: that is the
knowledge of the cosmopolitan, and only the embrace of this form
of change has the erotic appeal to counterbalance patriotism. And
there is a present, successor Brooklyn that presumably contains
some excellence that we can predict no more than the aged Henry
James could predict, in the streets of the East Side that over-
whelmed and depressed him, the already living soul of George
Gershwin. It is the appeal of unknown coasts and islands that
counterbalance the love of our Ithaca-which is itself an unknown
island, terrible and alluring.
Hilary Putnam
Must We Choose between
Patriotism and
Universal Reason?
As I READ IT, MARTHA NUSSBAUM'S STIMU-
lating essay is concerned to defend two ideas: first, that
patriotism' has a strong tendency to produce national
chauvinism and racism (or at least indifference to other
nations, cultures, and peoples) and should therefore be
marginalized, if not completely abandoned. We should
think of ourselves first and foremost not as American, or
French, or Black, or Chicano, or Jewish but as "citizens
of the world." The second idea is that we need not (and
should not) look to our various national and ethnic tra-
ditions for moral guidance at all; instead we "citizens of
the world" should look to something she calls "univer-
sal reason."
The first idea bears a striking similarity to a thesis I
have often heard advanced (I do not know whether Mar-
tha Nussbaum herself subscribes to it, however): that
all the various realizations of the human religious im-
pulse-ali of the religious traditions, and the many
different communities of faith within each that try to
keep their traditions alive while interpreting them in an
HILARY PUTNAM
ever-changing world-should be discouraged, indeed scrapped if
possible, because religion, it is said, always leads to fundamental-
ism and intolerance (some secular thinkers simply identify religion
with fundamentalism and intolerance), and these, as we know,
manifest themselves in the marginalization of other traditions, as
well as, in the worst case, all the horrors of religious persecution
and "holy war." (To see how great the similarity is to Martha Nuss-
baum's thesis, imagine someone saying, "All the various realiza-
tions of the human patriotic impulse-the national traditions, and
the many communities within each national tradition that try to
keep the national traditions alive while interpreting them in an
ever-changing world-should be discouraged, indeed scrapped if
possible, because patriotism always leads to chauvinism and in-
tolerance, and these, as we know; manifest themselves in the mar-
ginalization of other peoples, as well as, in the worst case, all the
horrors of ethnic cleansing and wars of extermination or subjuga-
tion." Is this not close to Nussbaum's argument for cosrnopol-
itanism?)
What this argument does in either of its forms-the militant
atheist form or the militant cosmopolitan form-is confuse a pre-
text for human aggression and cruelty with human aggression and
cruelty themselves. "Remove this or that pretext, and we will have
a less cruel and aggressive world," we are, in effect, being told in
each case. But there is not the slightest reason to believe this. The
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, while it existed, was sup-
posed to be completely "internationalist" (i.e., cosmopolitan). In-
deed, in principle, it was hoped that one day all countries would
be "Soviet Socialist Republics." It was also, of course, militantly
atheist. Vet current Russian estimates of the victims of Stalin's
crimes run upwards of 50 million persons! "But it is unfair to
bring in the Soviet Union;' it will be objected; "the Soviet Union
wasn't really socialist, wasn't really internationalist, wasn't really
antireligious, because communism was itself a religion," etc. But
Must We Choose? . 93
the fact remains that Stalin found plenty of supporters, even with-
out the pretexts of religion' and nationalism.' "But;' it might be
d
"the Soviet Union wasn't a democracy." Presumably, the
argue,
oint of saying that would be that when one does have a democracy,
p I' lici r.
one doesn't get aggression unless nationa 1St or re glOuS ervor
have been whipped up. But that isn't true, either" .
Still, it could be said, if patriotism is even a major pretext for
marginalizing other peoples (when we do not actually make
war upon them), why shouldn't we get rid of it? What good IS It.
And this brings me to Martha Nussbaum's second idea, the idea of
universal reason.
Let me say, first of all, that it is strange that this idea comes from
her pen. Indeed, it is so out of keeping with what she has written
about the moral life in her many wonderful books that I am puz-
zled as to whether she can really mean what she wrote; perhaps she
was overreacting to Rorty. . .
It seems to me that a besetting problem with philosophIcal dIS-
cussions for and against the idea of universal reason is that moral
philosophers tend to be partisans either of "the good" (by which I
mean to gesture vaguely at the whole area of "the good life") or of
"the right" (by which I mean to gesture equally vaguely the
whole area of 'Justice"). Even when they acknowledge that neither
sphere-neither the sphere of the good life, nor the sphere of JUS-
tice (or "duty," or "obligation," actually be reduced to
the other, they often tend to regard the less favored sphere as sub-
jective (as Kant, in the SecondCritique, regarded the ,sph.ere of the
good,' and as utilitarians regard any talk of or JustIce that IS
not reduced to calculations of happiness or utility). But-and here
I feel sure that Martha Nussbaum and I are in agreement-both
spheres are essential to our moral lives, and neitheris simply sub-
jective (which is not to say that we are not often subjective about
the good and the right).
The reason this is relevant is that although maxims" concerning
HILARY PUTNAM
justice are often universal, in the sense of being found wherever re-
flection on the moral life takes place, maxims that make it the rule
not to murder, steal, commit rape, commit adultery, or lie, and en-
join us to cooperate with our fellow humans, be loyal to friends,
and so on, are examples, although of course what is a permissible
exception to these rules is something on which there is no univer-
sal agreement-there is no such thing as a universal conception of
"the good life."
Why is this? First, of course, because there isn't just one form of
life that is "good." The life of a genuinely spiritual religious com-
munity, the life of a group of inspired bohemian artists, the life of a
dedicated group of community organizers, the life of a creative
group of computer programmers, and many other lives cau all be
good in utterly incompatible ways (of course, they can also be terri-
ble). And second, because good lives do notjust spring from ratio-
nal insights, in the way in which the proof that the area of a circle
is 'IT times the square of the radius sprang independently to the
minds of ancient Greek and ancient Chinese mathematicians. Like
forms ofpainting or music or literature, ways oflife require centu-
ries of experimentation and innovation to develop. But in the ab-
sence of such concrete ways of life, forms of what Hegel called
Siitlichkeit, the universal maxims ofjustice are virtually empty, just
as in the absence of critical reason, inherited forms of Sittlichkeit
degenerate into blind tenacity and blind allegiance to authority.
Tradition without reason' is blind; reason without tradition is
empty.
Martha Nussbaum speaks of a pair of "cosmopolitan" philoso-
phers who demonstrated their reliance on what she calls universal
reason-by copulating in public! But her own example tells against
her thesis, for the sense or senselessness ofsuch an act depends on
its relation to the surrounding ways oflife and their value or lack of
value; one cannot simply decide that it is silly to wear clothes, or
Must We Choose? . 95
silly to refrain from copulating in public because universal reason
did not dictate the ways of life one is deliberately flouting. The
philosophers of Martha Nussbaum's own example confuse the two
very different ideas of a universal ethics (universal principles of
right) and a universal way of life, and in effect, that an!
Sittlichkeit that is not part of a universal ethic construed as a um-
versal way oflife is simply absurd. (To see the error, imagine what
we would say to someone who argued that good music should not
presuppose any prior acquaintance with a musical tradition, but
only universal reason.) . .
It is because this notion of universal reason-as sometiling inde-
pendent of all traditions-is so that Nuss-
baum's notion of cosmopolitanism has, in the end, so little appeal
for me. Like most of my contemporaries, I have inherited or ac-
quired more than one "identity": I am an American, a practicing
Jew, a late-twentieth-century philosopher. But it would never oc-
cur to me to say that I am a "citizen of the world." If! were asked,
for example, why discrimination is wrong, I would not say "be-
cause we are all citizens of the world."
To a theist, I might say "because we are all made in the of
God." To someone to whom this would seem absurd, I might
quote Dickens's beautiful remark (in A Christmas Carol) about
Scrooge coming to see other people as "fellow passengers to the
grave," or I might mention Primo Levi's haunting statement that
the look an official in the concentration camp gave him "was not
the look a man gives a man," That someone is a fellowhuman be-
o
ing a fellowpassenger to the grave, has moral weight for me; cin-
of the world" does not. And that has to do, I think, with the
fact that appeals to the notion that we are made in the image of
God, or to sympathy with all other human beings, while they ap-
peal to potentials, which are indeed universal, :!so have. a
history in the traditions to which I belong, tradItIOns we inherit.
than armchair reflection, but the kind of critical learning from
experience that John Dewey advocated (which he called "intelli-
gence," precisely because of the connotations of "reason" in the
philosophical literature). The alternative to the kind of universal
reason that Martha Nussbaum's Cynics thought they had available
to them is situatedintelligence.
I am no relativist. Like Martha Nussbaum, I believe that there is
such a thing as reasoning well about moral issues. But, I repeat,
actual reasoning is necessarily always situated within one or an-
other historical tradition. To be sure, members of different tradi-
tions can and do enter into discussion and debate. But (as Dewey
also stressed) in such discussions we typically find ourselves
forced to renegotiate our understanding of reason itself. Because
reason calls for such endless renegotiation, it cannot function as a
neutral source of values for "world citizens" to live by, while they
view their own cultural inheritances as if they were merely the
loved (to be sure) but regrettably parochial families one happens to
have. We all have to live and judge from within our particular in-
heritances while remaining open to insights and criticisms from
outside. And that is why the best kind of patriotism-loyalty to
what is best in the traditions one has inherited-is indispensable.
In sum, we do not have to choose between patriotism and univer-
sal reason; critical intelligence and loyalty to what is best in our
traditions, including our national and ethnic traditions, are inter-
dependent.
HILARY PUTNAM
It may be that "citizen of the world" will one day have that kind
of moral weight and that Martha Nussbaum will have been the
prophet of a new moral vision. But it doesn't today.
My appeal to traditions, and my defense of their necessity,
should not be misunderstood. As I have argued elsewhere," some-
thing we have learned from the conduct of moral inquiry itself is
that inherited moral beliefs can be criticized, and that discovery is
the truly precious legacy of the Enlightenment. But without inher-
ited ways oflife there is nothing for criticism to.operate on,just as
without critical reason there is no way for us to distinguish be-
tween what should be saved (perhaps after reinterpretation) and
what should be scrapped from our various traditions. We should
not make the mistake Isaiah Berlin warns us against, of accepting
"Voltaire's conception of enlightenment as being identical in es-
sentials wherever it is attained"; a conception that implies that
"Byron would have been happy at table with Confucius ... and
Seneca in the salon of Madame du Deffand." But this is just the
conception of enlightenment shared by Martha Nussbaum's pair of
ancient philosophers.
An example may help to make my position clear. I believe that
we need to condemn the conditions that poor people everywhere
daily experience as unjust, as contrary to the most elementary
principles ofmorality, and not simply as contrary to "our" values,
in the style of Richard Rorty. Indeed, traditional morality has
plenty of resources for justifYing such a condemnation (recall that
Augustine rejected the rationalizations offered for Roman imperi-
alism by saying that they presupposed that the Roman Empire was
a moral institution, but in fact it was no such thing-"The great
Empire is a great piracy"). But it is one thing to say that poverty is
an injustice that people inflict on other people, and not a lawof na-
ture; it is another thing to say what can and should be done about
it. This latter requires not "universal reason" in the traditional
philosophical sense, which is supposed to require nothing more
Must We Choose?
97
Elaine Scarry
The Difficulty of
Imagining Other People
THE WAY WE ACT TOWARD "OTHERS" IS
shaped by the way we imagine them. I Both philosophic
literary descriptions of such imagining show the
dIfficulty of picturing other persons in their full weight
solidity. This is true even when the person is a
friend or acquaintance; the problem is further magni-
fied when the person is a stranger or "foreigner." Cru-
elty to strangers and foreigners has prompted many
people to seek ways to prevent such actions from recur-
Some solutions envision a framework of Cosmo-
politan largesse that relies on the population to sponta-
neously and generously "imagine" other persons, and
to do so on a day-by-day basis. Alternative solutions in
,
contrast, attempt to solve the problem of h
"h
.e
rness
" through constitutional design: they seek to
altogether the inherently aversive structural
posruon of "foreignness."
have the obligation to commit ourselves to both
solutI,ons: But I weight my comments to the sphere of
consneuuonal design, because if this solution is inplace
The Difficulty of Imagining Other People . 99
then the spontaneous acts of individuals have a chance of produc-
ing generous outcomes. By contrast, if constitutional solutions to
foreignness are not inplace, then the daily practice of spontaneous
largesse will have little effect, and all our conversations about
otherness will be idle. It may at first appear that the constitutional
alternative only protects people within the borders of a given coun-
try, but we will eventually see that ensuring a deep regard for "for-
eigners" outside the borders also requires constitutional design.
Are there large numbers of people who advocate the imaginative
solution over the constitutional one? The answer is yes. Even
many of those German intellectuals most passionately dedicated to
stopping injuries to Turkish residents often ignore altogether any
discussion of altering German citizenship laws and concentrate
instead on practices that can be summarized under the heading
of "generous imaginings." Meetings among international scholars
dedicated to human rights often express an indifference to, or im-
patience with, national protections on rights, and rely exclusively
on international formulations. And discussions about foreignness
among American intellectuals-like Martha Nussbaum's defense of
cosmopolitanism-display an increasingly shared animus against
"nationalism," which is perceived to be an impediment to "inter-
nationalism."
But on close inspection such attempts to replace nationalism by
internationalism often turn out to entail a rejection of constitution-
alism infavor of unanchored good will that can be summarized un-
der the heading of generous imaginings. It is therefore important
to come face to face with the limits on imagining other people,
since in several different spheres an overly optimistic account is
used to legitimate the bypassing of legal provisions and constitu-
tional procedures. My worry about the cosmopolitan bypassing of
constitutionalism is twofold. The first is the erasure of any autho-
rizing base for the ethical principle one wants to see enforced: if
twenty scholars from twenty different countries believe a certain
ELAINE SCARRY
right should be protected, they may feel, as they speak with one
another, that their views rise above "mere" nationalism; but in fact
their views ouly represent the beliefs of twenty people (a much
smaller number than the population of even the smallest country),
unless the populations of the various geographical areas from
which they come have themselves voted to uphold the given right.
Human rights are universal in content, but they are particular in
their base of authorization and enforcement.
My second ground of concern, the one to which I address my-
self here, is the misconception of the imagination that often in-
spires the wish to rise above parochial constitutionalisms.
I. The Difficulty 0' Imagining Others, The Case 0' "Enemies"
The difficulty of imagining others is shown by the fact that one can
be in the presence of another person who is in pain and not know
that the person is in pain. The ease of remaining ignorant of an-
other person's pain even permits one to inflict it and amplify it in
the body of the other person while remaining immune oneself
Sustained and repeated instances of this are visible in political re-
gimes that torture.
I focus on physical injury here because other forms of well-
being-voting rights, access to education, the daily possibility of
interesting work-are all premised on bodily inviolability. Indeed,
the social contract comes into being precisely to minimize bodily
injury. Locke, a physician as well as a political philosopher, repeat-
edly uses the word "injury" in his Second Treatise of Government.
Though the "injury" is not specified as, or limited to, bodily in-
jury, it takes its force from that original context. Locke uses the
verb "injures" both where the object is the material reality of the
body and where the object is freedom; just as he speaks of invad-
ing another's body, invading another's property (the "annexed
body"), or instead invading another's rights.' When Locke uses
The Difficnlty of Imagining Other People . IOI
the idiom of vinvasion" for a nonphysical object, he often immedi-
ately follows it by the word rapine, to restore the physical referent.
The strong relation between the social contract and the diminu-
tion of injury is visible in social contracts that long antedate the
Lockean contract. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, many of
the five hundred major European cities came into existence
through explicit acts of oath taking and contract making" Often
" .. " c
called "sworn communes," conJuratlOnes, or communes ror
peace;' their very names memorialized the extraordinary verbal
process by which they had come into being. In the language of
these city compacts, as in the Lockean compact, we can hear the
key association between self-governance and the diminution of in-
jury. The founding of Freiburg, for example, emphasizes the
antee of "peace and protection.'" The Flemish charter of Aire
promises, "Let each help the other like a brother," And one oath
for mutual assistance from the Bologna region states that the mem-
bers should "maintain and defend each other against all men,
within the commune and outside it.,,7
The town's commitment to protecting its members from outside
aggression by no means implied that outsiders were
subjected to aggressive treatment. Outsiders who entered the CIty
could become insiders at their own discretion. Harold Berman
writes that "immigrants were to be granted the same rights as citi-
zens (the right to vote, to bear arms, to ajury trial] after residence
for a year and a day."s The relatively swift transformation from im-
migrant to citizen suggests that bearing the status of "foreigner:'
was itself seen to be an injurious condition and hence one that It
was the obligation of the commune to remove.
Bodily injury is, then, what necessitates the social contract in
both theory and practice, in both the Lockean contract and the
earlier city contracts. The contract comes into being to put con-
straints on the act. The ease of inllicting injury (as well as the om-
ELAINE SCARRY
nipresence of the impulse to injure) shows the difficulty of know-
ing other persons. There exists a circular relation between the
infliction of pain and the problem of otherness. The difficulty of
imagining others is both the canse oj, and the problem displayed by,
the action of injuring. The action of injuring occurs precisely be-
cause we have trouble believing in the reality of other persons. At
the same time, the injury itself makes visible the fact that we can-
not see the reality of other persons. It displays our perceptual dis-
ability. For if other persons stood clearly visible to us, the infliction
of that injury would be impossible.
II. The Difficulty of Imagining Others, The Case of Friends
Ifwe take as our starting point the action of injuring, we have taken
the imagination at the moment when its failures, its limitations, al-
ready stand fully exposed. Let us turn instead to the "best case"
picture of imagining. How fully we are able to imagine other per-
sons can best be measured by moving away from the category of
"enemy" to the category of "friend." (It is unlikely that a foreign
population can ever achieve the fullness in one's imagination that a
single personal friend achieves, but let us assume for the moment
that such a thing would be possible.) How capacious is the imagi-
nation at its most capacious? When we speak in everyday conver-
sation about the imagination, we often attribute to it powers
greater than ordinary sensation. But Sartre's study of the imagina-
tion powerfully underscores its limits. He asks us to perform the
concrete experiment of comparing an imagined object with a per-
ceptual one-that is, of actually stopping, closing our eyes, con-
centrating on the imagined face of a friend or a familiar room, then
opening our eyes and comparing its attributes to whatever greets
us when we return to the sensory world. We find at once that the
imagined object lacks the vitality and vivacity of the perceived.
Even ifthe object we select to imagine in this experiment is the face
The Difficulty of Imagining Other People .
10
3
of a beloved friend, one we know in intricate detail (as Sartre knew
in detail the faces of Annie and Pierre), it will be, by comparison
with an actually present face, "thin," "dry," "two-dimensional,"
and "inert,"?
This description of imagining a friend illuminates the problems
that await us when we rely on the imagination as a guarantor of
political generosity. Transport the problems of trying to imagine a
single friend to the imaginative labor of knowing the other-not an
intimate friend, not any single person at all, but instead five, or ten,
or one hundred, or one hundred thousand; or x, the number of
Turks residing in Germany; or y, the number of illegal aliens living
in the United States; or z, the estimated number of Iraqi soldiers
and citizens killed in our bombing raids; or 70 million, the scale of
population that stands to suffer should the United States fire a nu-
clear missile (a conservative estimate). Philosophic discussions of
the other typically contemplate the other in the singular. 10
What we do not do well in the singular we do even less well in
the plural. The human capacity to injure other people has always
been much greater than its ability to imagine other people. Or per-
haps we should say, the human capacity to injure other people is
very great precisely becanseour capacity to imagine other people is
very small.
It might be objected that the "best case" for the powers of the
imagination should be made not by assessing the daydreaming
mind but the mind as it produces images under the instruction of
an author.'! To be sure, this is the place-the place of great litera-
ture-where the ability to imagine others becomes very strong.
Great novels, great poems, great plays often do incite in our imag-
inings the vivacity of the perceptual world. During the hours of
reading Thomas Hardy's Tess ofthe D'Urberodles, Tess comes be-
fore the mind with far more fullness, surprise, vivacity, and viv-
idness than Sartre's two-dimensional images or our own day-
dreams. But while novels and poems are better able than
daydreams to bring other persons to press on our minds, even here
we must recognize severe limits of imaginative accomplishment.
One key limit is the number of characters. A novel or poem may
have one major character. Or perhaps four. It is impossible to hold
rich multitudes of imaginary characters simultaneously in the
mind. Presented with the huge number of characters one finds in
Dickens or in Tolstoi, one must constantly strain to keep them
sorted out; and of course their numbers are still tiny when com-
pared with the number of persons to whom we are responsible in
political life.
A second constraint concerns OUf tolerance for imaginary fea-
tures that are different from our own actual features. The latent na-
tionalism or tribalism of great literature may make it a seductive ve-
hicle for an exercise in self-reflection and self-identification rather ,
than reflection upon and identification with people different from
oneself. Despite, for example, the emphasis on artistic multicul-
turalism in the United States, it sometimes appears that Asian-
American literature is being read by Asian Americans, Afro-
American literature by Afro-Americans, and Euro-American liter-
ature by Euro-Americans,
A third limit is the lack of any anchor in historical reality. More
often than not, fictional others lack referents in material reality. It
has often been a criticism ofliterature that the very imaginative la-
bor of picturing others that we ought to expend on real persons on
our city streets, or on the other side of the border, instead comes to
be lavished on King Lear or on Tess. Pushkin provided a stunning
portrait of how we come out of the opera, absorbed with compas-
sion for those on stage, not seeing the cabdriver and horses who
are freezing from their long wait to carry us home.P
I have been calling attention to the limits on solving real-world
otherness through literary representation alone. There are, of
course, exceptional cases. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's
III. Equality of Weightlessness
When we seek equality through generous imaginings, we start
with our own weight, then attempt to acquire knowledge about the
weight and complexity of others. The alternative strategy is to
achieve equality between self and other not by trying to make one's
knowledge of others as weighty as one's self-knowledge, but by
making one ignorant about oneself, and therefore as weightless as
all others.
This strategy of imaginative recovery has been developed by
Cabin made Blacks-the weight, solidity, injurability of their per-
sonhood-imaginable to the White population in pre-Civil War
United States. E. M. Forster's Passage to India is almost the only
other novel that has had an equivalent claim made for it: the book,
overnight, according to Stephen Spender, enabled the British pop-
ulation to begin to reimagine India's population as independent.
But the Stowe and Forster examples are extremely rare, both be-
cause theyrequired readers to imagine not just "a person" but "a
people," and above all hecause they modified the well-being of ac-
tual persons to bring about greater freedom and hence a diminu-
tion of the status of otherness. More often we must say ofliterature
what Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats: "Poetry makes nothing
happen: it survives I In the valley of its saying.""
Finally and most important, even in these exceptional cases
where a novel incites in one population the ability to imagine more
fully a second population, the test of that new imaginative capa-
ciousness is not in the pleasurable feeling of cosmopolitan largesse
but in the concrete willingness to change constitutions and laws:
the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the U.S.
Constitution; the Independence of India Act of 1947 How can
such constitutional and legal changes be made if the polity, the
nation-state, comes to be regarded as an object of cosmopolitan
disdain?
"1
10
5
The Difficulty of Imagining Other People
ELAINE SCARRY
104
ELAINE SCARRY
Bertrand Russell, aud more elaborately and influentially by John
Rawls. Russell argued that when reading the newspaper each day,
we ought routinely to substitute the names of alternative countries
to test whether OUf response to the event arises from a moral as-
sessment of the action or instead from a set of prejudices about the
country?" This ethical practice, which obligates us to detach a
given action from country Xand reattach it to country Y, might be
caned "the rotation of nouns." Rawls imagines a social contract
made behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents people from
knowing any of their particular traits. The veil of ignorance fosters
equality not by giving the millions of other people an imaginative
weight equal to one's own-a staggering mental labor-but by the
much more efficient strategy of simply erasing for a moment one's
own dense array of attributes. Through it we create what Rawls de-
ib
" h ser es as t e symmetry of everyone's relations to each other,"!"
Constitutional arrangements, too, rely on this strategy of imagined
weightlessness, since they define rights and powers that are inde-
pendent of anyone person's personal features.
The problem with discussions of "the other" is tbat they char-
acteristically emphasize generous imaginings, and thus allow the
fate of another person to be contingent on the generosity and wis-
dom of the imaginer. But solutions ought not to give one group the
power to regulate the welfare of another group in this way. Picture,
for example, a town in which third-generation light-skinned resi-
dents can vote but third-generation dark-skinned residents cannot
vote. The light-skinned residents-through goodwill and large-
mindedness-take into consideration, before they vote, the posi-
tion of the dark-skinned residents. (This is a utopian assumption,
of course, given the difficulty of imagining other people; but for
the sake of argument, let us suppose they are able and willing to do
it.) Thus they have acted to minimize the problem of foreignness
or otherness or heterogeneity by holding in their minds a picture
The Difficulty of Imagining Other People .
10
7
of those other people on the basis of which they make their politi-
cal decisions.
Now contrast this with a situation in which the dark-skinned
third-generation residents are citizens and vote for themselves.
Light-skinned residents no longer need to act on behalf of the oth-
ers. Because a constitutional provision enables each group to act
on its own behalf, no group any longer occupies the legal position
of the other. Even ifwe stipulate that in the first solution the light-
skinned third-generation residents act with maximum generosity
and largesse, the second solution is obviously much stronger. They
would, even at best, be acting paternally, and hence operating out-
side the frame of social contract whose purpose, as Locke argued
in his Second Treatise of Government, was precisely to decouple pa-
ternal power from political power.
What differentiates the first and second strategies of inclusion
(let us call them Town One and Town Two) is the principle of self-
representation: to endorse that principle is to reject the idea of pro-
tecting people by empowering an enfranchised group to look after
them by means of generous imaginings.
To stress the importance of creating laws that eliminate the
structural position of the other, I have presented the acts of imag-
ining others and unimagining oneself as two separate alternatives.
Although when each is considered in isolation the second is
stronger than the first, together the two are far stronger than either
alone. Town Two only fully works when supplemented with Town
One's magnanimous imaginings, especially when reciprocated
across mutually enfranchised groups. And the importance of
Town One's commitment to the imagination is particularly clear
when we consider the existence of borders. While it is possible to
eliminate the legal position of the Other within a country, it is not
possible to do so for people outside its borders. Here the problem
of otherness, with its steady danger of injury, cannot be addressed
nored in the name of high-minded internationalism. International
congresses snch as the United Nations have a crucial role to play if
and only ifany act of national aggression requires their authoriza-
tion in addition to the constitutionally mandated congressional or
parliamentary authorization of the home country. But the delibera-
tive actions of the UN are instead often taken as a substitute for
congressional action. Any cosmopolitan who believes this is an ad-
mirable outcome should read the private papers ofU. S. presidents
throughout the second half of the twentieth century: again and
again, a president will openly acknowledge how much easier it is to
secure UN authorization than Congressional authorization for an
act of international aggression he has wished to initiate.
Legal provisions to distribute the rights of citizenship across a
country's internal population do not guarantee that those citizens
will abstain from injuring one another; so, too, legal provisions to
ensure that foreigners-those outside the country's borders-will
be carefully imagined before a willful infliction of injury takes
place cannot necessarily guarantee that their own specifications
will be followed. But such legal arrangements at least objectify an
aspiration; they set the standard of action, and they provide the
mechanism for holding the population to its promises.
Civil society can only exist if it is produced by the constituents
of that country. The major constitutive act is the making of a con-
stitution. The Federalist Papers continually asked the question:
What kind of arrangement will produce a noble and generous
people? Perhaps every group of constitution-makers has asked this
same question. Nor is it restricted to the liberal democratic ethos.
Marx, in the Grundrisse, contrasts the question asked by contem-
porary economic societies-What kind of arrangements will make
the most money?-with the question asked by more ancient societ-
ies, what kind of city-state will produce the best citizens? But he
concludes that our present interest in production and distribution
is only a partially veiled manifestation of the ancient concern with
l
ELAINE SCARRY
through voting rights but might seem dependent on the largess of
the imagination alone. Even this cosmopolitan practice of the
imagination, however, can be constitutionally encouraged and
safeguarded.
Right now, for the United States has a nuclear policy
that permits a president, acting almost alone, to anthorize the fir-
ing of nuclear weapons. How should people in the United States
protect other populations from the sudden use of this monarchic
weapons system? Should we hope that at the moment of firing, the
president WIll suddenly have the imaginative powers to picture
other people in their full density of concerns, picture not one cari-
catured leader but the men and women and young people of that
country? But the U. S. Constitution was written to ensure that the
fate of other populations would never be left up to the accident of
a U. S. president (or any solitary person, or forty or fifty
sohtary persons that might make up a presidential councilor a
weapons crew) happens to be resourceful at imagining other popu-
lations. It anticipates, and attempts to diminish, the problem of
otherness by building in elaborate requirements for debate and de-
liberation both in the Congress and among the citizens, require-
ments that ensure that voices speaking on behalf of the about-to-
be-injured population will be heard.!" In other words, it distrib-
utes the responsibility to imagine other people to a large portion of
the population. Since the invention of atomic weapons, these con-
stitutional safeguards have disappeared. Yet within the U. S. Con-
stitution at this very moment are the provisions-the legal tools-
to prohibit, to make impossible, mass destruction.
Alarm over the disappearance of these constitutional safeguards
has been muted by many factors, among them the sense on the part
of mtellectuals that any site bound up with the polity-such as
Congress or the Constitution-is somehow a piece of parochial na-
tionalism, hence not something whose disappearance need worry
us. Thus the very agency that would constrain our weapons is ig-
The Difficulty of Imagining Other People
10
9
ELAINE SCARRY
the creation of good people. Audible in works as different as the
Federalist and t.he Grundrisse is the assumption-present
everywhere m the social contract theorists-that the social con-
tract. recreates that it is a lever across which we act on, and
revise, ourselves. More self-revision is needed as we
continue to repair OUf laws and prepare for a more generous fu-
And that self-revision will best proceed through our constitu-
tional and aspirations, and not simply through a reli-
ance on expandmg our imaginings.
.The work accomplished by a structure oflaws cannot be accom-
plished by a structure of sentiment. Constitutions are needed to
uphold cosmopolitan values.
Amarlya Sen
Humanity and Citizenship
IF MARTHA NUSSBAUM'S INTENTION WAS TO
provoke people, she has certainly managed to do that.
This must count as success. The failure to provoke any-
one in a deeply divisive subject would be good evidence
of banality. I would like to comment on an issue about
which Nussbaum has been particularly attacked. This
concerns her endorsement of Diogenes' norm, (,(,1 am a
citizen of the world," which carries the implication that
a person's "allegiance is to the worldwide community of
human beings."
Critiques of Worid Citizenship
Several objections have been raised to the idea of world
citizenship. I shall consider three. First, Sissela Bok is
worried that the norm Nussbaum endorses seems to
support the conclusion-which may be taught to chil-
dren-that "all claims to national or other identity" are
"morally irrelevant." Bok finds Nussbaum perilously
close to William Godwin's view that "if two persons are
drowning and one is a relative of yours, then kinship
AMARTYA SEN
[or, presumably, nationality-Bok's addition] should make no
difference in your decision as to whom to try to rescue first," Bok
argues cogently, quoting Rabindranath Tagore, whom Nussbaum
had also quoted, that "there is nothing wrong with encouraging
children fully to explore their most local existence in order eventu-
ally to reach beyond it."
Second, Hilary Putnam attacks the rejection of patriotism that
is entailed by Nussbaum's position, and argues that "the best kind
of patriotism-loyalty to what is best in the tradition(s) one has in-
herited-is indispensable."
Third, Gertrude Himrnelfarb presents the argument, among
others, that the terms world citizen and world citizenship have "lit-
tle meaning except in the context of a state." Michael Walzer takes
a similar view. The implication of Nussbaum's position, Himmel-
farb argues, is to render irrelevant "the polity that defines the na-
tion" and even the normal idea of "citizenship"-and even "all of
history." Himmelfarb also notes the importance of "justice,"
"ht"' "d"l I humani . ng, reason, an ave 0 umanity," and claims that "not
even the most ardent cosmopolitan would claim that these are the
values of 'humanity as a whole.'" She argues that these are "pre-
dominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values."
I consider these arguments in turn.
Th" Rol" of localld""titles
Bok's critique raises several interesting questions, but I believe that
her concerns are not irreconcilable with Nussbaum's ethical frame-
work. Why should a belief that one's "fundamental allegiance" is
as a citizen ofthe world deny all sensitivity to other identities? The
demands offundamental allegiance need not be identical to those
of exclusive allegiance. Indeed, as Nussbaum notes, "The Stoics
stress that to be a citizen of the world one does not need to give up
local identifications, which can be a source of great richness in
life." We allhave, in this view, a sequence of identities, but outside
Humanity and Citizenship
all is "the largest one, that of humanity as a whole." She does not
dispute that we may have reasons for other, more particular, con-
cerns; for example, as a city dweller, we may have particular obliga-
tions to our "fellow city dwellers." Her proposal is to make "our
task as citizens of the world" include "making all human beings
more like our fellow city dwellers" [emphasis added]. If being a
world citizen would entail that we have no loyalty at all to our fel-
low city dwellers, then the project of making all human beings
more like these uncherished creatures would scarcely help.
The point that Nussbaum is making is not unlike one Adam
Smith presented. He, too, was attracted by the Stoic idea ofworld
citizenship. Smith explained, "Man, according to the Stoics,
ought to regard himself, not as something separated and detached,
but as a citizen of the world, a member of the vast commonwealth
of nature,"! The kind ofissue that motivates this norm is similar to
Nussbaum's. Smith puts it thus:
If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he will not sleep tonight;
but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most pro-
found security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren,
and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an ob-
ject less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To
prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of
humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his
brethren, provided he had never seen them?2
Smith answers the rhetorical question in the negative, thereby
characterizing "a man of humanity" and proceeds then to consider
the Stoic norm ofregarding oneself as a citizen of the world.
Sissela Bok's concern, I would argue, should relate ultimately
not to the diagnosis of our primary allegiance, which is compatible
with additional concerns for kinship and other relations, but to the
need to accept multiplicity ofloyalties. In the absence of such plu-
ral concerns, problems of the kind Bok describes would arise no
Loyalty to What Is Best in the Tradition
I turn now to Hilary Putnam's objection regarding the value ofloy-
alty to the best things within a tradition. Once again, it is not ob-
vious why such a value, or the consequences of such a ~ a 1 u a t i ~ n ,
must be rejected by what Nussbaum recommends. The inclusion
of everyone in the domain of ethical concern-the main point of
To sum up, the kind of problems that worry Sissela Bok need
not arise despite the primary allegiance of world citizenship, so
long as the existence of a primary allegiance does not eliminate the
possibility of other allegiances. And if only one kind of allegiance
is permitted, then we would run into problems of the type that
worry Bok, no matter where that primary allegiance is placed-on
humanity, nationality, locality, or kinship. . .
While I have been trying to show that the kind of pnonty Bok
recommends is consistent with a general system of having primary
allegiance to being a citizen of the world, that primary allegiance
does not, of course, entail that we must accept the priorities identi-
fied by Bok. There is a serious ethical issue as to whether we have
good reasons to try to save our kin and relations first, over others.
And even when we agree to give that preferential treatment a place,
there can be several alternative grounds for doing this. There can
be instrumental arguments in favor of a relational priority (for ex-
ample, it may be better for "division oflabor," or informationally
more economic), which need not rest on any additional weight on
the interests of relations (or neighbors, fellow citizens). These fur-
ther ethical issues remain, and are not closed, one wayor the other,
by the declaration of one's fundamental allegiance to being a citi-
zen of the world.' The focus on world citizenship outlmed by the
Stoics, Adam Smith, and Martha Nussbaum is effectivein encoun-
tering a different problem: that of not excluding any person from
ethical concern. It is a momentous assertion, and it seems to me to
be justifiable precisely for the reasons they have identified.
115
Humanity and Citizenship
AMARTYA SEN
matter where our primary allegiance lies, since the primary alle-
giance would then end up being our unique allegiance. Suppose
our primary allegiance relates to nationality (not to all of human-
ity), and it is our unique-not just primary-moral concern. Then
again, to stick to Bok's example, a person may not have reason
enough to save first the person who has kinship relation with him
or her (vis-it-vis a person who shares a nationality but is not other-
wise related to her). Problems will continue to occur even if the
primary and exclusive commitment is to relations because then
, ,
given the choice, a person would save a relation, even if that in-
volved the sacrifice of the lives of thousands of nonrelations (to
whom there is no commitment). No matter where the primary alle-
giance is placed, so long as plural concerns are not admitted (so
that primary becomes also exclusive), we would end up with prob-
lematic cases ofvarious kinds.
The importance of Nussbaum's focus on world citizenship lies
in correcting a serious neglect-that of the interest of people who
are not related to us through, say,kinship or community or nation-
ality. The assertion that one's fundamental allegiance is to human-
ity at large brings every other person into the domain of concern,
without eliminating anyone. There are indeed good grounds to re-
gard this to be primary, if our common humanity has perspicuous
moral relevance. If after acknowledging that, and after a basic ac-
ceptance of concern for all, we find grounds for giving some addi-
tional weight to the interests of those who are linked to us in some
significant way (such as kinship), then that can be done through
the identification ofa supplementary allegiance. Since the primary
allegiance applies to the interests of all in a nondiscriminating way,
any additional weight-no matter how small and secondary-
would make the picture asymmetric (in the direction desired by
Bok). The primacy of the general allegiance to humanity does not
have to be disputed for this, so long as the exclusiveness of that
moral reasonis avoided.
prelegal concepts, but Smith's and Nussbaum's contentions are not
based on any very eccentric use oflanguage.
I have no great difficulty with Himmelfarb's claim that the im-
portance of such things as justice, right, reason, and love of hu-
manity, are not "values of humanity as a whole" (that would be a
tall claim). But I do have a problem with her belief that these are
"predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values." I should
first say that nothing much may turn on this belief, since Nuss-
baum's claim is not that 'these ideas are already shared by all, but
that all people have reason to respect them. (To see that not all
people, evenin the West, actually respect them, we need not look
much beyond the history of this century.) But I would also argne
that Himmelfarb's argument has internal problems, because of the
factual weaknesses in her sharp distinction between Western and
non-Western values.
Because I have gained so much in the past from reading Him-
melfarb's careful analysis of historical literature, I can only con-
clude that she simply has not yet taken much interest in the not in-
substantial literature on these and related matters in Sanskrit, Pali,
Chinese, and Arabic. For example, one mayor may not agree with
Ashoka that gratnitously harming person A for whom another per-
son B has affection is also to harm B, and that justice requires that
this not be done for the sake of both A and B (as he claimed in one
of his famous inscriptions in the fourth century B.C.), but it would
be hard to know what he was discussing if it were presumed that
nothing about justice was being discussed (in a land far away from
the West). As I was reading Himmelfarb's comments, I was re-
minded of a Bengali poem I encountered some time ago, which
can be freely translated as "After all, they are not Bengali / What
can they possibly know/ About the meaning of such terms as
mother, father, brother and sister?"
The absence of ideas of liberty and justice in so-called Asian
AMARTYA SEN
the world citizenship claim-need not militate against valuing ele-
ments in one's own tradition.
Here, too, the possibility of additional valuations remains open
even when the basic claims of all human beings are given recogni-
tion. Indeed, Adam Smith goes on to spell out the possibility of
combining different values with the basic Stoic claim about world
citizenship. And we know from Nussbaum's literary and philo-
sophical work how much importance she substantively attaches to
the enriching role of traditions and culture. Nussbaum's criticism
is clearly aimed at certain manifestations of patriotism. The de-
bunking of those features, which is a separate issue, may have
much to commend it, but that debunking is not entailed by the
claim of primary allegiance to world citizenship. For this reason, it
seems important to distinguish between Nussbaum's world citi-
zenship claim, and the rejection of some forms of patriotism, for
which arguments beyond the demands of world citizenship are to
be presented.
State, Values, and the World
Can one be a citizen of the world without there being a world
state? There is a legal form oflanguage that excludes this possibil-
ity. And yet so many "mixed" concepts-human rights, libertarian
entitlements, just deserts-seem to communicate well enough
without being fully tied to the legal sense. When Adam Smith
quoted the Stoics to support the view of a person as a citizen of the
world, it was not altogether unclear what he was communicating,
even though that communication was not parasitic on the pre-
sumption of a world government. His view provided one way of
seeing the prior demands of our common humanity, which can of
course be supplemented by additional concerns. I do not doubt
that Bentham and Marx would spurn this practice, which would
appear to them as the dressing up of post-legal understandings as
Humanity and Citizenship
117
AMARTYA SEN
values has been recently presented with much force by governmen-
tal spokesmen of several Asian countries, including China and
Singapore (for example, in the Vienna conference ofl993, to dis-
pute the relevance of human rights in Asia). Confucius is vigor-
ously invoked to justify that belief. But Confucius is not the only
thinker in Asia, not even in ancient China (and it is not even clear
to me that Confucius is entirely more authoritarian than Plato or
St. Augustine). It is true, of course, that many-though not all-of
the exponents of justice or tolerance or freedom in Asian classical
literature tended to restrict the domain of concern to some people,
excluding others, but that is also true of the ancient West. Aristot-
le's exclusion of women and slaves does not make his works on
freedom andjustice irrelevant to the present-day world. We have to
see the origin and exposition of ideas in terms of their factored
components.
The liberty that is increasingly taken in quick generalizations
about the past literature of non-Western countries to justify au-
thoritarian Asian governments seems to have its analogue in the
equally rapid Western belief that thoughts about justice and de-
mocracy have flourished only in the West, with the presumption
that the rest of the world would find it hard going to keep up with
the West. The world is perhaps less doomed than that.
Charles Taylor
Why Democracy
Needs Patriotism
I AGREE WITH SO MUCH IN MARTHA NUSSBAUM'S
well-argued and moving piece, but I would like to enter
one caveat. Nussbaum sometimes seems to be propos-
ing cosmopolitan identity as an alternative to patrio-
tism. If so, then I think she is making a mistake. And
that is because we cannot do without patriotism in the
modern world.
This necessity can be seen from two angles. The
most important is this: The societies we are striving to
create-free, democratic, willing to some degree to
share equally-require strong identification on the part
of their citizens. It has always been noted in the civichu-
manist tradition that free societies, relying as they must
on the spontaneous support of their members, need the
strong sense of allegiance that Montesquieu called
vertu. This reliance is, if anything, stronger in modern
representative democracies, even though they integrate
"the liberty of the moderns" with the values of political
liberty. Indeed, the requirement is stronger just because
they are also "liberal" societies, which cherish negative
lization around a common identity-as against, say, being recruit-
able only for universal causes-but which of two or more possible
identities will claim their allegiance. Some of these will be wider
than others, some more open and hospitable to cosmopolitan soli-
darities. It is between these that the battle for civilized cosmopoli-
tanism must frequently be fought, and not in an impossible (and if
successful, self-defeating) attempt to set aside all such patriotic
identities.
Take the example of India that Martha Nussbaum raises. The
present drive towards Hindu chauvinism of the Bharatiya Janata
Party comes as an alternative to the Nehru-GandhI secnlar defini-
tion of Indian national identity. And what in the end can defeat
this chauvinism but some reinvention of India as a secular republic
with which people can identify? I shudder to think of the conse-
quences of abandoning the issue of Indian identity altogether to
the perpetrators of the Ayodhya disaster. .
In sum, I am saying that we have no choice but to be cosmopoli-
tans and patriots, which means to fight for the kind of patriotism
that is open to universal solidarities against other, more closed
kinds. I don't really know if I'm disagreeing with Martha Nuss-
baum on this or just putting her profound and moving plea in a
somewhat different context. Bnt this nuance is, I think, important.
121 Why Democracy Needs Patriotism
CHARLES TAYLOR
liberty and individual rights. A citizen democracy can only work if
most of its members are convinced that their political society is a
common venture of considerable moment and believe it to be of
such vital importance that they participate in the ways they must
to keep it functioning as a democracy.
Such participation requires not only a commitment to the com-
mon project, but also a special sense of bonding among the people
working together. This is perhaps the point at which most contem-
porary democracies threaten to fall apart. A citizen democracy is
higWy vulnerable to the alienation that arises from deep inequal-
ities and the sense of neglect and indifference that easily arises
among abandoned minorities. That is why democratic societies
cannot be too inegalitarian. But to forestall excessive inequality,
they must be capable of adopting policies with redistributive effect
(and to some extent also with redistributive intent). And such poli-
cies require a high degree of mutual commitment. If an outsider
can be permitted to comment, the widespread opposition to ex-
tremely modest national health care proposals in the United States
doesn't seem to indicate that contemporary Americans suffer from
too great a mutual commitment.
In short, we need patriotism as well as cosmopolitanism be-
cause modern democratic states are extremely exigent common en-
terprises in self-rule. They require a great deal of their members,
demanding much greater solidarity toward compatriots than to-
ward humanity in general. We cannot make a success of these en-
terprises without strong common identification. And considering
the alternatives to democracy in our world, it is not in the interest
of humanity that we fail in these enterprises.
We can look at this from another angle. Modem states in gen-
eral, not just democratic states, having broken away from the tradi-
tional hierarchical models, require a high degree of mobilization of
their members. Mobilization occurs around common identities. In
most cases, our choice is not whether people will respond to mobi-
Immanuel Wallerstein
Neither Patriotism
Nor Cosmopolitanism
THE MERITS OF PATRIOTISM AND COSMOPOLI-
tanism are not abstract, and certainly not universal. We
live in a deeply unequal world. As a result, our options
vary according to social location, and the consequences
of acting as a "world citizen" are very different de-
pending on time and space. Had there not been sioade-
shi; India would still be a British colony. Would this
have served Kantian morality more? This Gandhi
understood, but Tagore did not.
Those who are strong-strong politically, economi-
cally,socially-have the option of aggressive hostility to-
ward the weak (xenophobia) or magnanimous compre-
hension of "difference." In either case, they remain
privileged. Those who are weak, or at least weaker, will
only overcome disadvantage (even partially) if they in-
sist on the principles of group equality. To do this
effectively, they may have to stimulate group conscious-
ness-nationalism, ethnic assertiveness, etc. Mandela's
nationalismwas not morally the same thing as Afrikaner
Neither Patriotism Nor Cosmopolitanism . 123
nationalism. One was the nationalism of the oppressed (Blacks op-
pressed by Whites) seeking to end oppression. The other started
as the nationalism of the oppressed (Afrikaners oppressed by En-
glish-speakers) but developed into the nationalism of the oppres-
sor (apartheid).
What is the concrete situation in the United States today? In
1945, the United States became the hegemonic power in the world-
system-by far the most powerful nation economically, militarily,
politically, and even culturally. Its official ideological line ~ s
threefold: America is the world's greatest country (narrow nation-
alism); America is the leader of the "free world" (the nationalism
of the wealthy, White countries); America is the defender of the
universal valnes of individual liberty and freedom of opportunity
(justified in terms of Kantian categorical imperatives).
The United States government and moral spokesmen saw no
difficulty in making all three assertions simultaneously. Most per-
sons were unaware of the internal inconsistency of this triple
stance. But others-at least certain others-saw the stance as noth-
ing more than ajustification, a legitimation of United States privi-
lege and domination. They often found it easiest to attack the hy-
pocrisy of American Kantianism by asserting the liturgy of
national liberation.
The world has moved on. The United States is not as strong as
it was. Western Europe and]apan have caught up to, even over-
taken, the United States in economic terms. They are in the pro-
cess of detaching themselves politically. The collapse of the USSR
has further weakened the United States, insofar as it has under-
mined the major political hold the United States had over Western
Europe and]apan.
Within the United States the voice of oppressed groups has be-
come more stridently "ethnic;' relying far less on appeals to uni-
versal values than it previously did. In response to both geopoliti-
IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
cal decline and the more ethnocentric style of oppressed groups in
the United States, the defenders of privilege have resorted to de-
mands for an "integrating" patriotism.
But the response to a self-interested patriotism is not a self-
congratulatory cosmopolitanism. The appropriate response is to
support forces that will break down existing inequalities and help
create a more democratic, egalitarian world. The stance of "citizen
of the world" is deeply ambiguous. It can be used just as easily to
sustain privilege as to undermine it. One needs a farmore complex
stance, constantly moving toward and away from defensive asser-
tion of the group rights of the weak as the political arena changes
the parameters of the battle.
What is needed educationally is not to learn that we are citizens
of the world, but that we occupy particular niches in an unequal
world, and that being disinterested and global on one hand and
defending one's narrow interests on the other are not opposites but
positions combined in complicated ways. Some combinations are
desirable, others are not. Some are desirable here but not there,
now but not then. Once we have learned this, we can begin to cope
intellectually with our social reality.
Michael Walzer
Spheres of Affection
I THINK I AGREE WITH EACH OF MARTHA
Nussbaum's arguments for a "cosmopolitan education";
they are quite specific and sensible. I am less convinced
by her underlying and overriding world view-perhaps
because I am not a citizen of the world, as she would like
me to be. I am not even aware that there is a world such
that one could be a citizen of it. No one has ever offered
me citizenship, or described the naturalization process,
or enlisted me in the world's institutional structures, or
given me an account of its decision procedures (I hope
they are democratic), or provided me with a list of the
benefits and obligations of citizenship, or shown me the
world's calendar and the common celebrations and
commemorations of its citizens. I am wholly ignorant;
and although a cosmopolitan education would be a very
good thing, I don't see, from Nussbaum's account, that
it would teach me the things any world citizen would
need to know. It would, however, teach me things that
American citizens need to know: Why isn't that good
enough? Can't I be a cosmopolitan American (along
MICHAEL WALZER
with all the other things that I am)? I have commitments beyond
the borders of this or any other country, to fellowJews, say, or to
social democrats around the world, or to people in trouble in far-
away countries, but these are not citizen-like commitments.
Nussbaum's image of concentric circles is more helpful than her
idea of world citizenship-precisely because it suggests how odd it
is to claim that myfundamental allegiance is, or ought to be, to the
outermost circle. My allegiances, like my relationships, start at the
center. Hence we need to describe the mediations through which
one reaches the outer circles, acknowledging the value of, but also
passing through, the others. That is not so easy to do; it requires a
concrete, sympathetic, engaged (but not absolutely engaged) ac-
count of the inner circles-and then an effort not so much to draw
the outermost circle in as to open the inner ones out. I would read
the Plutarch line that Nussbaum quotes as an opening of this sort:
"We should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and
neighbors." That is, we begin by understanding what it means to
have fellow citizens and neighbors; without that understanding we
are morally lost. Then we extend the sense of moral fellowship and
neighborliness to new groups of people, and ultimately to all
people. Nussbaum's cosmopolitan works by analogy: "regard ...
as ..." No doubt commitments and obligations are diminished as
they are extended, but the extension is still valuable, and that, I
take it, is the value ofa "cosmopolitan education."
I suspect that Nussbaum wants something more than this, and I
am a little surprised by the confidence of her cosmopolitan convic-
tions. She is quick to see the chauvinist possibilities of Richard
Rorty's patriotism, and she worries that he makes no proposal to
cope with this "obvious danger." Shouldn't her readers worry that
she makes no proposal to cope with the obvious dangers of cosmo-
politanism? The crimes of the twentieth century have been com-
mitted alternately, as it were, by perverted patriots and perverted
cosmopolitans. If fascism represents the first of these perversions,
Spheres of Affection lQ7
communism, in its Leninist and Maoist versions, represents the
second. Isn't this repressive communism a child of universalizing
eulightenment? Doesn't it teach an antinationalist ethic, identi-
fying our primary allegiance (the class limitation, "workers of the
world," was thought to be temporary and instrumental) much as
Nussbaum does? A particularism that excludes wider loyalties in-
vites immoral conduct, but so does a cosmopolitanism that over-
rides narrower loyalties. Both are dangerous; the argument needs
to be cast in different terms.
I
III
t
I
~ - - - - - - - -
Martha C. Nussbaum
Reply
As A VISITOR WALKS INTO YAD VASHEM, THE
Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, she comes upon a
long avenue of trees. Each of these trees bears a number,
a name or names, and a place. As of December '995,
there are, I believe, II72 such trees. Each tree honors a
person (or couple or family) who risked death to save a
Jew or Jews. These people were gtryim-French or Bel-
gian or Polish or Scandinavian or Japanese or German,
and atheist or Christian or members of some other reli-
gion. They had their own local identities and nationali-
ties and, often, religions. They had friends and, in many
cases, families. Sometimes some of these loyalties sup-
ported their actions; religion was frequently among
their sources of support. Sometimes these loyalties op-
posed their choices-local politics always opposed
them. These "righteous goyim," however, risked the loss
of all that was near and dear to them to save a stranger.
They did not need to do so. Everything pointed the
other way. But somehow, against all odds, their imagina-
tions had acquired a certain capacity to recognize and
respond to the human, above and beyond the claims of nation, reli-
gion, and even family.
The sight of this avenue of trees can strike the visitor with a pe-
culiarly stark terror, made all the more searing by the peaceful
leafiness of the young trees, in such contrast to the monumental ar-
chitectnre that surrounds them. The terror, which persists, is the
terror of the question they pose: Would one, in similar circum-
stances, have the moral courage to risk one's life to save a human
being, simply because he or she is human? More generally, would
one, in similar circumstances, have the moral courage to recognize
humanity and respond to its claim, even if the powers that be de-
nied its presence? That recognition, wherever it is made, is the ba-
sic act of world citizenship.
We have so many devious ways of refusing the claim of human-
ity. Rousseau speaks of the imagination's tendency to engage itself
sympathetically only with those who resemble us, whose possibili-
ties we see as real possibilities for ourselves. Kings don't pity sub-
jects because they think they never will be subjects. But this is a
fragile strategem, both false and self-deceptive.' We are all born
naked and poor; we are all subject to disease and misery of all
kinds; finally, we are all condemned to death. The sight of these
common miseries can, therefore, carry our hearts to humaniry-i-if
we live in a society that encourages us to make the imaginative leap
into the life of the other.
We also easily suppose, Rousseau adds, that people who are not
like us do not really suffer as we suffer, do not really mind their
pain. These obstacles in the mind were powerfully manipulated by
Nazi antisemitism, which situated Jews at a distance from other
citizens, constructed their possibilities as different from those of
others, and encouraged citizens to imagine them as vermin or in-
sects, who would really not suffer the way human beings suffer.
And of course they let people know that to recognize human
suffering would bring heavy penalties. Despite these obstacles, the
people represented by the 1,172 trees recognized the human, and
made this recognition the benchmark of their conduct.
My essay in defense of cosmopolitanism argues, in essence, that
we should follow them and try as hard as we can to construct soci-
eties in which that norm will be realized in as many minds and
hearts as possible and promoted by legal and institutional arrange-
ments. Whatever else we are bound by and pursue, we should rec-
ognize, at whatever personal or social cost, that each human being
is human and counts as the moral equal of every other. To use the
words of John Rawls, "Each person possesses an iuviolability
founded on justice."2
To count people as moral equals is to treat nationality, ethniciry,
religion, class, race, and gender as "morally irrelevant'<-as irrele-
vant to that equal standing. Of course, these factors properly euter
into our deliberations in many contexts. But the accident of being
born a Sri Lankan, or a]ew, or a female, or an African-American,
or a poor person, is just that-an accident of birth. It is not and
should not be taken to be a determinant of moral worth:Human
personhood, by which I mean the possession of practical reason
and other basic moral capacities, is the source of our moral worth,
and this worth is equal.To recognize these facts is a powerful con-
straiut on what one may choose and on the way in which one at-
tempts to comport oneself as a citizen. What I am saying about ed-
ucation is that we should cultivate the factnal and imaginative
prerequisites for recognizing humanity in the stranger and the
other. Rousseau is correct when he says that ignorance and dis-
tance cramp the consciousness.What I am sayiug about politics is
that we should view the equal worth of all human beings as a regu-
lative constraint on our political actions and aspirations.
Reply 133
WHAT CAN THIS MEAN, WHEN THERE IS NO WORLD
state? This question seems a little odd to me, given the fact that a
very long tradition in concrete political thinking, beginning with
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
132
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
Cicero's De Officiis and extending through Grotius to Kant and
Adam Smith and straight on to modern international law, has ap-
pealed to Stoic norms to justify certain maxims of both domestic
and international political conduct.' Some of these include: the re-
nunciation of wars of aggression, constraints on the use of lies in
wartime, an absolute ban on wars of extermination, and the hu-
mane treatment of prisoners and of the vanquished. In peacetime,
both Cicero and Kant recognize duties of hospitality to aliens
working on their soil; Kant insists on a strict denunciation of all
projects of colonial conquest.
4
For the entire tradition, individuals
bore duties of benevolence that were loosely defined, in most
cases, but understood to be extremely important and relatively de-
manding. Giving one's money is a major way in which, in the ab-
sence of a world state, individuals can promote the good of those
who are distant from them. To say "I cannot act as a world citizen,
since there is no world state" would have been seen by this tradi-
tion as a cowardly way of avoiding thinking about howhigh a price
one will pay to help others who are in need. For one can always
find ways to help, if one thinks as a member of that virtnal com-
monwealth, which Kant called "the kingdom of ends." To quote
John Rawls again, "Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be
to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from that
point ofview.,,5
In our own world, moreover, there are many practical opportu-
nities for world citizenship that were simply not available to the
Stoics, or even to Kant and his contemporaries. As Richard Falk
points out, nongovernmental organizations of many kinds are
mobilizing to influence government action on issues ranging from
ecology to domestic violence; one may support or join such or-
ganizations. Through such groups one may pressure national gov-
ernments to take action toward certain global aims. The delibera-
tions of governments, moreover, are becoming ever more inter-
twined and international: the population conference in Cairo and
Reply 135
the women's meeting in Beijing are just two examples in which
governments recognized the existence of problems that cross na-
tionallines. The information revolution is rapidly multiplying the
possibilities for action as a world citizen. Mymorning newspaper
today brings information about the deaths of thousands of (mainly
female) orphans in China from malnutrition." The very existence
of such news opens possibilities of action for the world citizen,
possibilities ranging from financial support for Human Rights
Watch to thinking and writing to (where it is open to individuals)
more direct participation in deliberations abontthe welfare of chil-
dren and women. One can do all these things, and the fact that
there is no world state is no excuse for not doing them. Increas-
ingly, too, we are all going to have to do some tough thinking about
the luck of birth and the morality of transfers of wealth from richer
to poorer nations. The fact that the nation-state is the fundamental
political unit does not prevent one from discovering to what an as-
tonishing degree the luck of being born in a particular country in-
fluences life chances. To take just a single example, life expectancy
at birth ranges from 78.6 years in Hong Kong and 78.2 years in Ice-
land and Sweden to 39.0 years in Sierra Leone.' This is not just,
and we had better think about it. Not just think, do.
The absence of a world state does not thwart cosmopolitan con-
duct, then, for those who are genuinely committed to it. But cos-
mopolitanism does not require, in any case, that we should give
equal attention to all parts of the world. None of the major thinkers
in the cosmopolitan tradition denied that we can and should give
special attention to our own families and to our own ties of reli-
gious and national belonging. In obvious ways, we must do so,
since the nation-state sets up the basic terms for most of our daily
conduct, and since we are all born into a family of some sort. Cos-
mopolitans hold, moreover, that it is right to give the local an addi-
tional measure of concern. But the primary reason a cosmopolitan
should have for this is not that the local is better per se, but rather
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
that this is the ouly sensible way to do good. Appiah's moving ac-
count of Ills father's Career makes this point wonderfully. Had Joe
Appiah tried to do a little good for all the people of the world, he
would have contributed far less to the world than he did by his in-
tense,commItment to Ghana. The same holds true of parenthood:
If I tried to help all the world's children a little bit, rather than to
devote an immense amount oflove and care to Rachel Nussbaum
I would be no good at all as a parent (as Dickens's portrait of Mrs:
Jellyby mordantly showed). But that should not mean that we be-
lieve Our own country or family is really worth more than the chil-
dren or families of other people-all are still equally human, of
equal moral worth.
A useful analogy is one's own native language. I love the English
language. And although I have some knowledge of SOme other Ian-
whatever I express ofmyself in the world I express in En-
glish. If! were to try to equalize my command of even five or six
and to do a little writing in each, I would write poorly.
But this doesn't mean that I think English is intrinsically superior
to I, recognize that all human beings have an in-
nate ImgUlstic capacity, and that any person might have learned
any language; which language Onelearns is in that Sensemorally ir-
relevant, an accident of birth that does not determine one's worth.
That recognition of equal worth has practical consequences for the
ways in which I react to and speak about others. Similarly, in the
moral I may focus disproportionately on the local. But my
recogmtron of equal humanity does supply constraints on my con-
duct toward others .. What are these constraints? May I give my
daughter an expensive college education, while children all over
the ,,:prld are. and effective relief agencies exist? May
Amencans enJoy their currently high standard of living, when
there are reasons to think the globe as a whole could not sustain
that level of consumption? These are hard questions: and there
\ , .
Reply .
will and should be much debate about the proper answers. My
point is that we must ask the questions, and we must know enough
and imagine enough to give sensible answers.
As WE POSE THESE QUESTIONS, WE SHOULD VALUE HU-
man diversity. As Appiah says, the cosmopolitan ideal includes a
positive delight in the diversity of human cultures, languages, and
forms of life. This pluralism prompts cosmopolitan liberals to in-
sist on what is called "the priority of the right to the good;' that is,
on giving first priority to structures-prominently including struc-
tures of equal liberty-that will protect the ability of people to
choose a form oflife in accordance with their own lights, whether
cultural or religious or personal. The very principles of a world cit-
izenship in this way value the diversity of persons; they value it so
much that they make liberty of choice the benchmark of any just
constitutional order, and refuse to compromise tills principle in fa-
vor of any particular tradition or religion. McConnell and I differ
deeply on the issue of public funding for religious education. We
do not differ, however, about the profound importance of religion,
and respect for religious difference, in ajust society. Our difference
concerns the right way for a liberal regime to value diversity. In my
view, valuing diversity entails strong support for a shared public
culture that makes the right prior to the good. I believe that this
goal would be subverted by public funding of religious schools,
and I therefore oppose such funding. In his view, valuing diversity
entails giving parents the chance to use public funds to choose a
religious education for their children; to give the public schools an
advantage is not fair to those who prefer religious schools. But
these are differences within a larger agreement about the impor-
tance of strong protections for religious liberty. Of course, in say-
ing this I am doing what Putnam rightly advises, valuing what is
best in U.S. constitutional traditions, as well as what is best in the
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
traditions ofIndia" and, no doubt, many other places; in general, a
world citizen will always try to find the seeds of the commendable
universal in the local, but he or she also will be prepared to dis-
cover that some of them are missing.
, The crucial question for a world citizen is how to promote di-
versity without hierarchy. Liberals are committed to diversity, but
also to equality: They view equality as a constraint on the forms of
diversity that may reasonably be fostered. Some forms ofdifference
have historically been inseparable from hierarchical ordering: for
example, racial differences in America, gender differences almost
everywhere, differences ofdialect or ofliterary and musical taste in
many parts of the world. Some forms of diversity are clearly sepa-
rable from hierarchy: most religious and ethnic differences, and
many cultural differences. 'The challenge of world citizenship, it
seems to me, is to work toward a state of things in which all of the
differences will be nonhierarchically understood. We have no way
of knowing what some of them will look like under true equality.
Were gender differences to become more like the differences
among ethnic groups in America or the differences between bas-
ketball fans and lovers ofjazz, what would be left of them? We sim-
ply do not yet know. But that is the ideal to which the world citizen
aspires. It is, of course, much better to be in a world that has both
Dennis Rodman and Wynton Marsalis than in a world that has
ouly one or the other. Both are great, and no doubt they would be
less uniquely great were they more similar. We should value diver-
sity in that way. But we should not value tbat part of it that is de-
fined in terms of dominance and subordination. (This does not
mean that the world citizen cannot believe that the Bulls are better
than all other teams. World citizens never deny what is self-
evidently true.t
World citizenship, then, places exacting demands on the imagi-
nations ofeach ofus. To be sure, the imagination is not enough. As
Adam Smith noted, compassion for others is a fragile and incon-
Rep0J
stant device. If we left our world citizenship to the vagaries
own daily reflections, we would act less well than if we were to
stitutionalize our best ideas. I agree with Elaine Scarry, therefore,
that the imagination needs laws-especially constitutional arrange-
ments-that do as much as possible to institutionalize the equal
worth of persons. But these laws must take their impetus from the
imagination, and they will prove unstable to the extent that people
become obtuse. We must, therefore, cultivate world citizenship in
our hearts and minds as well as our codes of law. I agree with
Scarry, for the reasons she gave and a few others, that works of
imaginative literature playa pivotal role in that cultivation.l"
WE HAVE MANY WAYS OF AVOIDING THE CLAIM OF COM-
mon humanity. One way, I think, is to say that the universal is bor-
ing and could not be expected to claim our love. I am astonished
that so many distinguished writers should make this suggestion,
connecting the idea ofworld citizenship with a "black-and-white"
world, a world lacking in poetry. The world of the cosmopolitan
can seem boring-to those hooked on the romantic symbols of lo-
cal belonging. But many fine things can seem boring to those not
brought up to appreciate them. What my critics charge, however,
is that it is right to find the love ofhumanity boring, that powerful
art cannot be made about it, that it is bloodless and characterless
somewhat the way fast food is characterless. It seems to me, by
contrast that it would be difficult to find a powerful work of art
,
that is not, at some level, concerned with the claim of the common
and our tragic and comic refusals of that claim.
Ancient Athenian tragedy was not about a peculiarly Greek eth-
nicity-though of course, it derived from indigenous literary and
musical traditions and could best be understood by people steeped
in those traditions. It dramatized its aspiration to recognition of
humanity by situating itself in mythic times, or on the Trojan side
of the Trojan War-or on a desert island, home to an outcast whose
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
foot oozes pus, whom all good Greeks shun with a properly Greek
disgust. Shakespeare's deviously fictive places ("a seacoast in Bo-
hemia")indicate a similardesire to lure the imaginationaway from
its most complacent moorings in the local, causing it to venture
outward to some strange land, be it medieval Denmark or ancient
Rome, where human beings, not without poetry and not without
passion, attempt to love one another, often tragically. Even the
most apparently local ofliterary landscapes-say,]oyce's Dublin or
Walt Whitman's America-are landscapes of the imagination in
which the hnman body and its zestful surprising irregularities have
a more than local home. Consider, too, how much not-black-and-
white poetry and prose coucerns, in fact, the situation of the exile
and outsider-Philoctetes, Hamlet, Leopold Bloom, Molly
Bloom-people who, by virtue of their outsider status, can tell
truths about the political community, its justice and injustice, its
embracings and its failures to embrace. In engaging with such
works-and indeed with any works that depict a world of human
beings beyond the narrow one we know-in permitting these
strangers to inhabit our minds and our hearts, we are enacting the
love of humanity. This does not seem boring.
In Walter Scott's famous poem, on which I was raised, the non-
patriot is a man "with soul so dead" that he never could be the
subject of "minstrel raptures,"!' The poem suggests that all true
poetry is patriotic in inspiration and in theme. Several of my crit-
ics would appear to be followers of Scott, and I am cast as that per-
son whose empty humanism is destined to go to its grave "unwept,
unhonored, and unsung." I suggest, instead, that large-souled and
compelling art is generally concerned with the recognition of the
common in the strange and the strange in the common-and that
narrowly patriotic art, by contrast, is frequently little more than
kitsch, idolatry. Scott's poem is kitsch. Much of Rudyard Kipling's
poetry is kitsch. Most of the products of most poet laureates in
Reply
office are kitsch. What tragic drama could there be if one exalts
one's own people above others, refusing the moral claim of a Com..
mon humanity, with its common needs, failures, fears, and refus..
a1s? What lyric poetry of any depth? Tagore's point in The Home
and the World was that Sandip only seemed more interesting. As
both a sexual being and a rhetorical artist, he was utterly banal.
This of course does not require us to deny that all profound hu-
man matters are differently realized in different societies, or that
the full understanding of any artwork involves, therefore, engage-
ment with history, society, and the specificities of a local way of
life, as well as knowledge of a literary tradition. Nor does it require
denying that even the inner world of emotion, desire, and thought
is differently realized in different societies, or that any real-life hu-
m a ~ being is some concrete instantiation of some specific set of hu-
man potentialities. But that we can recognize one another across
these divisions-that we can even form the project of investigating
them-is also true, and fundamental. Dante was a poet of his time,
and we cannot read him well without learning a great deal about
his time. But if he were only a poet of his time, Pinsky would not
be producing his magnificent poemtranslating him, nor would any
of us care to read his works. In such generous engagements with a
stranger, we enact a duty of the moral imagination that we all too
frequently shun in real life. We never do meet a bare abstract "hu-
man being." But we meet the common in the concrete, as well as
the concrete in the common.
SEVERAL OF MY C,RITICS SUGGEST AN ACCOUNT OF
moral development that makes a mystery out of familiar experi-
ences of commonality. It goes like this: When a child is little, it rec-
ognizes and loves only its own particular pa:ents; then, afte: a
while it comes to know and love its other relatives, then Its regIOn
,
or local group, then its nation-and finally, if at.all, we get to hu-
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
manity on the outside. But we come to the larger only through the
smaller, and it is the moral emotions connected with the smaller
that can be expected to have the most force.
.. Consider an alternative account. At birth, all an infant is is a hu-
man being. Its needs are the universal needs for food and comfort
and light. Infants respond, innately, to the sight of a human face. A
smile from a human being elicits a reactive smile, and there is rea-
son to think this an innate capacity of recognition. At the same
time, in the first few months of life an infant is also getting close
experience of one or more particular people, whom it soon learns
to tell apart from others, roughly at the time that it is also learning
to demarcate itself from them. These people have a culture, so all
the child's interactions with them are mediated by cultural speci-
ficity; but they are also mediated hy needs that are in some form
common, and that form the hasis for later recognition of the
common.
At some point, the child understands that these givers of food
and comfort are also separate people, people who can go and come
at will. She is learning something about her parents' particularity,
hut at the same time discovering a common feature of human life:
that hodies are separate from other hodies, wills from other wills.
This discovery leads, it would seem, to fear and anger-experi-
ences that are always concretely shaped, but which also display
much crosscultural commonality. The extreme physical help-
lessness of the human infant, combined with its early cognitive
maturity, give human infancy a specific life course that creates a
poignant combination of deep need with the awareness of the un-
governability of the sources of need-making the ambivalence of
love ~ likely part of all human concern. A plausible view about the
origin of moral thinking is that it is, at least in part, an effort to
atone for and regulate the painful ambivalence of one's love, the
evil wishes one has directed toward the giver of care. In atonement
for having made the overweening demand to be the center of the
Reply
universe, the young child agrees to limit and regulate her demands
hy the needs of others. Again, this learning will he concretely
shaped in each different society-but the powerful motivations of
a child to overcome hatred of loved ones derive from features of a
common humanity. They also take the child hack to that human-
ity, by asking her to consider herself as one person among others,
not the entire world. Although this learning is about a specific
mother or father, its content carries the heart to humanity.
As the child grows older and hegins to hear and tell stories, she
investigates further the shape of the shared form of human life.
Most children's stories do not bind the mind to the local. Good
fairy tales are rarely about Cambridge, Massachusetts. They in-
spire wonder and curiosity by exploring the contours of things
hoth strange and surprisingly familiar. They ask children to con-
cern themselves with the insides of animals and trees, as well as
humans of many places and times. While inhabiting a particular
local" world, they are already learning about a far larger world.
(Children frequently have more intense moral concern for animals
than for the adults around them.P And anyone who has traveled
with a child in a place of great poverty will know that the impulse
of sympathy is simple and powerful in the child, devious and im-
perfect in oneself.) The imaginations of children are flexible and
suhtle instruments of acknowledgment, carrying them to the dis-
tant in the local and the familiar in the distant. All circles develop
simultaneously, in a complex and interlacing movement. But surely
the outer circle is not the last to form. Long hefore children have
any acquaintance with the idea of nation, or even of one specific re-
ligion, they know hunger and loneliness. Long before they en-
counter patriotism, they have prohably encountered death. Long
before ideology interferes, they know something of humanity.
This hrings me hack to the avenue of trees. These people were
ahle to function as world citizens because they had not permitted
the original awareness of common needs and vulnerabilities to he
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
eclipsed by the local. I imagine them retaining from childhood a
sense of the human face, and also of their own needy hungry hu-
manity. I imagine them retaining a vivid determination that ill
wishes would not triumph over good, that their desire to subordi-
nate their parents to their own needs would not triumph over the
claims of the separate other. Because they had not allowed them-
selves to become encrusted over by the demands oflocal ideology,
they were able to respond to a human face and form. In that sense,
it seems to me most just to represent them as young green trees,
bearers of a certain freshness, a living human thought-the
thoughts of adult children, rather than of the shriveled adults we
often, all too tragically, become.
Notes
Martha C. Nussbaum, Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
1. See Hackney's speech to the National Press Club, which was
circulatedto all participantsin the planning meeting.
2. This is an important qualification. A short essay of mine on in-
ternational issues was eventually included in the Scholar's Pam-
phlet issued by the project: ':A National Conversation on American
Pluralism and Identity: Scholar's Essays," MacArthur Founda-
tion.
3. A recent example of this argument is in Amy Gutmann's
"Multiculturalism and Democratic Education," presented ata con-
ference on "Equality and Its Critics" held at Brown University in
March 1994. My article originated as a comment on Gutmann's p a ~
per. For Gutmann's reply, see "Democratic Citizenship," this vol-
ume, pp. 66-69.
4. For some related questions about women and work, see the arti-
cles in Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover, eds., Vl'omen,
Culture, and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
5. I am grateful to Brad Inwood for permission to use his unpub-
lished translation of this section.
6. I exempt Hipparchia from criticism, since she was clearly try-
ing to show him up and she did not endorse the fallacious infer-
ence seriously.
Notes
Hilary Putnam, Must We Choose Between Patriotism
and Universal Reason?
1. I include loyalties to an ethnic group (even if it is not a national group) under
the term patriotism, because Martha Nussbaum's argument applies to these.
2. Although this is not relevant to Martha Nussbaum's paper, since I have dis-
cussed an argument against religion that parallels her argument against patrio-
tism let me remark that the variant of the former argument that claims that all
passionately held convictions are really "religions" simply changes the claim
that religion is responsible for human intolerance and violence to the very
different claim that passionately held convictions are. My own view-like Wil-
liam james's in The Will to Believe-is that what we want is not a world without
any passionately held convictions, but rather a world in which people recognize
that their right to their own passionately held convictions does not give them the
right to force those convictions on others.
3. It is, ofcourse, true that Stalin also appealed to nationalism, but this was pri-
marily after the Nazi invasion of the country, and not to justify his but
rather for the-presumably laudablet-e-purpose of mobilizing the Russians for
self-defense. The great purges were carried out in the name of defending "so-
cialist revolution," not nationalism.
4. The Vietnam War, in which we dropped more bombs on Vietnam-a coun-
try o!7 million people-than were dropped in all of World War II, is a case in
point. We never appealed to American nationalism (nor, of course, to religion)
to justify our actions, but rather to "democracy," "saving the Vietnamese from
communism" (by poisoning their land and napalming their children'}, etc. A
very popular, but completely false, claim is that "democracies do not go to war
with other democracies." In fact, the United States' interventions in Chile
(against Allende) and later in Costa Rica (which almost everyone seems to have
forgotten) were, in reality, acts of war against democratic regimes. Similarly, the
invasion of Egypt (the Suez Canal affair) by England, France, and Israel had
3. Etienne Balibar, "Racism as Universalism," in Masses, Classes,
trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994)
4. See the comparable views of ideals and idealization in Drucilla Cornell
Owen Fiss.
5. Much of this discussion is indebted to Homi Bhabha's use of Walter Ben-
jamin's notion of "translation" for thinking about the problem of exclusion in
cultural politics. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge,
1993)
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitan Patriots
L Joseph Appiah, Antiochus Lives Again (Political Essays ofJoe Appiah), ed.
Ivcr Agyeman-Duah [Kumasi, Ghana: 1. Agyeman-Duah, 1992).
2. Gertrude Stein, An American and France (1936) in fVhat AreMasterpieces?
(Los Angeles: Conference Press, 1940), p. 6l.
3 We don't all agree on where the rights come from. I favor a view in which
human rights are embodied in legal arrangements within and between states
rather than one in which they somehow antecedently exist or are grounded in
human nature.
4 E. W. Blyden in Howard Brotz, Negro Social and Political Thought (New
York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 197.
. 5 The in the anglophone world to sentimentalize the state by calling
It the nation IS so consistent that if I had earlier referred to the "state team" or
the "state anthem," they would have seemed cold, hard, and alien.
6. The expression "imagined community" was given currency by Benedict
Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNa-
tionalism (London: Verso, 1983).
7 For a discussion of Herder's views, see chapter 1 of my In My Father's House:
Africa in the Philosophy ofCulture (New York: Oxford University Press, 199
2).
Sissela Bek, From Part to Whole
1. Henry Sidgwick, "Some Fundamental Ethical Controversies," Mind, o.e. 14,
188
9, pp. 473-487.
2. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1907) (New York, Dover Publica-
tions, 1966), p. 246.
. 3 Tagore, "A Poet's School," in Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer
zn Education. Essays and Exchanges between Rabindranath Tagore and L. K.
Elmhirst (London:]ohn Murray, 1961), pp. 63-
64.
4 Rabindranath Tagore, "Siksha-Satra," in Rabindranath Tagore, P' 82.
Judith Butler, Universality in Culture
1. Mari]. Matsuda, "Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Vic-
tim's Story," in Words that Wound, eds. Mari]. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence
III, Richard Delgado, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1993), pp. 26-31.
2. The following discussion on universality is taken in revised form from a
forthcoming essay, "Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Ut-
terance," C;itical Inquiry.
NOTES TO PAGES 21-47
NOTES TO PAGES 93-101
nothing to do with whether Nasser's Egypt was undemocratic. Nasser was, in
fact, popularly elected. What is true so far is that democracies do not go to war
with powerful democracies. But it is just not true that, even under the condi-
tions of democracy, aggression and imperialism require religious or "patriotic"
pretexts.
5 The Critique afJudgment, however, seems to me to mark a radical change in
Kant's thought about the good.
6. I write "maxims" to bring out that it is not a question ofexceptionless rules.
7 I do not much like the term "universal reason," however-c-not because the
human capacity to reason isn't universal-of course it is!-but because the tradi-
tional associations with the notion are aprioristic and do not fit the fallible sort
of learning from experience that John Dewey stressed; it is the latter that is
needed in the criticism ofinherited traditions.
8. Cora Diamond called both of these passages to my attention.
9 Cf my "Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity," collected in Words and Life
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), Pragmatism: An Open
Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), and "Are Moral and Legal Values Made or
Discovered?" in Legal Theory, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1995) (and also my replies to
two critics in the same issue).
Elaine Scarry, The Difficulty of Imagining Other People
1. This brief response to Martha Nussbaum is adapted from my long essay,
"The Difficulty of Imagining Other People," which originated as a lecture for a
public meeting in Frankfurt about injuries to Turkish residents in Germany.
The full text appears in Germany as "Das schwierige Bild der Anderen," in
Schwierige Fremdheit Uber Integration und Ausgrenzung in Einwanderungsliin-
dem; ed. F. Balke, R. Habermas, P. Nans, P. Sillem (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag,
1993), Pp- 229-263; and will appear in English in Human Rights and Historical
Contingency, eds. Carla Hesse and Robert Post (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, forthcoming).
The essay, in its long and short forms, is dedicated to GUnther Busch.
2. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 19
80
) ,
p52.
.). Locke, Second Treatise of Government, pp. 115-116.
4 Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 393.
5 Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 375.
6. Henri, Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade,
Notes to Pages 1 0 1 ~ 1 C l i j
trans. Frank D. Halsey (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
For the full text of the remarkable n88 charter at Aire-which begins, ill1ttIO,,,,
who belong in friendship to the town ..."-see Petr Kropotkin,
Factor ofEvolution (New York: McClure Phillips, 1903), p. 177
7. Statute of the Spade compagnia, cited in Robert D. Putnamwith Robert Le-
onardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in
Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), P' 126.
8. Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 396.
q.jean-Paul Sartre, "The Psychology of Imagining," in Psychology ofImagina-
tion (Citadel Press, 1991), pp. 177-178.
10. For two overviews of the philosophic literature on "the other," see Michael
Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Busserl, Heidegger,
Sartre, and Buber, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
19
8
4); and Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott, eds., The Question of the
Other: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Albany, N.Y.: State Uni-
versity of New York Press , 1989).
11. For a fuller account of this distinction, see Elaine Scarry, "On Vivacity;
The Difference between Daydreaming and Imagining-Under-Authorial-In-
struction," Representations 52 (1995): 72-97
12. Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, rev. ed., trans. Vladimir Nabokov, Bol-
lingen Series LXXII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 44
13. W. H. Auden, "In Memory ofW. B. Yeats;' Collected Poetry (NewYork: Ran-
dom House, 1945), p. 48.
14. Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 195
0
) ,
P3
1

15. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1971), pp. 12, 137.
16. Article I, section 8, clause 11 and the Second Amendment. For a fuller dis-
cussion of these two provisions, see Elaine Scarry, "War and the Social Con-
tract: Nuclear Policy, Distribution, and the Right to Bear Arms," University of
Pennsylvania Law Review 139 (1991): 1257-1316; and "The Declaration of War:
Constitutional and Unconstitutional Violence;' in Law's Violence, eds. A. Sarat
and T. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 23-76. At
the time of the writing of the Constitution, the explanations given for these two
provisions focused on safeguarding the United States rather than on making for-
eign populations imaginable. But the two are close: It is by enabling a country
to think about the foreign population with whomit may wage war that the home
country itself is made safe.
NOTES TO PAGES 113-138
Amartya Sen, Humanity and Citizenship
1. Adam Smith, The Theory of MoralSentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L.
Macfie (1790; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), P' 140.
2. Smith, Theory ofMoral Sentiments, pp. 136-137.
3 I have, however, discussed that issue in "Evaluator Relativity and Conse-
quential Evaluation," Philosophy and PublicAffairs(1993), and in "Well-being,
Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984," Journal of Philosophy 82
(April 1985).
Martha C. Nussbaum, Reply
1. SeeJ.-J. Rousseau, Emile, bk. 4.
2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1971), p. 3.
.). See my discussion of some of these issues in "Kant and Stoic Cosmopoli-
tanism," in Journal of PoliticalPhilosophy (forthcoming 1996). On Grotius, see
Christopher Ford, "Preaching Propriety to Princes: Grotius, Lipsius, and Neo-
Stoic International Law," in Case Western Reserve LawJournal ofInternational
Law (forthcoming Spring 1996).
4 Himmelfarb (or rather, her history professor) seems wrong in asserting that
"the Enlightenment itselfhad given birth to an aggressive nationalism." The fact
that some people living at the time of the Enlightenment were aggressive nation-
alists hardly makes it right to blame their conduct on thinkers who energetically
denounced such projects.
5 Theory of]ustice, p. 587.
6. Patrick E. Tyler, "U.S. Rights Group Asserts China Lets Thousands of Or-
phans Die," NewYOrk Times, 6January 1996, pp. 1,4.
7 See Human Development Report 1995 (New York: United Nations Develop-
ment Program, 1995), p. 155. For those interested in the local, the figure for the
United States is 76.0, lower than all other countries in the top fifteen in the gen-
eral ranking, with the exception of Finland, at 75.7, and Germany, at 76.0.
8. On the tradition of religious toleration in India, see Amartya Sen, "Is Coer-
cion a Part of Asian Values?" (forthcoming). Sen establishes that the Indian tra-
dition of toleration is as old as the comparable "Western tradition."
g. Marcus Aurelius did say that Stoicism required one not to be a partisan of
the Green or Blue teams at the games-but he was speaking of a Roman context
in which such rivalries gave rise to delight in the murder ofhuman beings.
Notes to Pages 1 ~ 1 ~ - " [ 4 . ~
10. See my Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life \0<"".""
Mass.: Beacon Press, 1996).
n. Scott, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."
12. I am surprised that none of my critics have asked why I focus on the moral
claim of the human species, and they appear to neglect the claims of other forms
of life. From this direction one could imagine a serious challenge to my posi-
tion, one that I have not yet answered.
Contributors
gwame Anthony Appiah is professor of Afro-American Studies
and philosophy at Harvard University and author of In My Fa-
ther's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture and Color Con-
scious (with Amy Gutmann) (Princeton 1996).
Benjamin R. Barber is Walt Whitman Professor and Director of
the Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy
at Rutgers University, and author most recently of An Aristocracy
ofEveryone (Oxford) and Jihad vs. MeWorld (Times Books).
Sissela Bok is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard's Center for
Population and Development Studies, and author of several
books including Common Values (University of Missouri Press).
Judith Butler is professor of rhetoric and comparative literature
at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently writing
a book oninjurious language.
Joshua Cohen is professor of philosophy and Arthur and Ruth
Sloan Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology, and editor of Boston Review.
Richard fall( is professor of political science at Princeton Uni-
versity.
Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology
CONTRIBUTORS
at Harvard University, the author and editor of books on eth-
nicity and social policy, and coeditor of The Public Interest.
Amy Gutmann is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor
of Politics and Dean of the Faculty at Princeton University, and
author of Democratic Education, Color Conscious (with Anthony
Appiah), and Democracy and Disagreement (with Dennis
Thompson).
Gertrude Himmelfarb is professor emeritus at the Graduate
School of the City University of New York. Her most recent
book is The De-Moralization ofSociety: From Victorian Virtues to
Modern Values.
Michael W. McConnell is William B. Graham Professor at the
University of Chicago School of Law.
Martha C. Nussbaum is professor of law and ethics at the Uni-
versity of Chicago, and author of several books including Love's
Knowledge, The Fragility of Goodness, and Poetic Justice.
Robert Pinsky teaches at Boston University. His books of poetry
include An Explanation ofAmerica and The Inferno ofDante, a
verse translation. His most recent book is The Figured Wheel,
New and Collected Poems 1966-1996.
Hilary Putnam is John Cogan University Professor of Philoso-
phy at Harvard University. His most recent book is Words and
Life.
Elaine Scarry is professor of English at Harvard University and
author of The Body in Pain and Resisting Representation.
Amariya Sen is professor of economics and philosophy, and La-
mont University Professor, at Harvard University. His most re-
cent book is Inequality Reexamined.
Charles Taylor is professor of political science and philosophy at
McGill University and author of Sources of the Self and Multicul-
turalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein is director of the Fernand Braudel Center
at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and cooati'h,j,
of Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.
Michael Walzer is professor at the Institute for Advanced
in Princeton and author most recently of Thick and Thin: Moral
Arguments at Home and Abroad.