Anyone

The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology

Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857455239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone – the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.

PART 1

What are the meanings of cosmopolitanism, past, present and future?

COSMOPOLITANISM AND COSMOPOLIS: DEFINITIONS AND ISSUES

‘Cosmopolitanism’, it has been noted, has gained wide currency in recent years.

For Seyla Benhabib it is a ‘key word’ of our time (Benhabib 2006: 17), once more a basis of debate in social science and social policy as well as philosophy and the humanities. ‘Once more’ because the term has a long and specific history – a long and painful history, in Ulrich Beck’s (2006: 2–3) description, recalling its recent discrediting under Nazism and Stalinism. And yet, cosmopolitanism remains an unexhausted tradition, relatively untapped: cosmopolitanism retains the promise of encouraging a ‘thinking of the unthinkable’ (R. Werbner 2008: 194), of a humanity without frontiers. There is a protean quality to the term ‘cosmopolitan’, Ulf Hannerz (2006: 5) suggests. Its appeal is that it exists beyond any precise or consistent usage.

Certainly it is the case that while ‘cosmopolitanism’ comes down to us with a specific conceptual history, with meanings and inferences that are definitive, arguments in favour of a variety of cosmopolitanisms and critical of a definition dependent on Western philosophical and Enlightenment roots have come to be widely, and fashionably, made. Nonetheless, we should beware a promiscuous usage, as Pnina Werbner (2008a: 60) puts it: cosmopolitanism is not everything that is no longer purely local or parochial. It would be my view that the term’s long-established, ‘Western’ significance should be preserved for current usage, and that there is no value in extending or transforming the definition of cosmopolitanism or inventing sub-types and versions. One states clearly that here is ‘cosmopolitanism’ and there ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘pluralism’, here is cosmopolitanism and there ‘ecumenism’, ‘hybridity’, ‘creolization’, ‘transculturation’, ‘transnationalism’, ‘diaspora’, ‘globalization’. One may even say that here is cosmopolitanism and there is ‘liberalism’.

The purpose of this part of the book is first to review the history of cosmopolitanism, including current writings and debates, and then to offer a prospectus concerning a possible future cosmopolitanism and its relation to anthropology.

1.1

A HISTORY AND OVERVIEW

Founding Moments

The term ‘cosmopolitan’ derives from a bringing together of two Greek words: cosmos, meaning the whole world or globe or universe, and polites, meaning a member of a local polity or society or community (a polis). A ‘cosmopolitan’ is someone whose perspective is global: he or she is a ‘world citizen’, belonging to the human world entire.

While a coming together of these two words, ‘cosmopolitan’ remains a site of tension: cosmos is dialectically related to polites and polis; global and local are brought together while insisting that one aspect cannot be conceived of except in relation to the other. One cannot comprehend a human condition except that local lives are regarded as versions of universal potentials, and give onto the possibility of global futures. One cannot be a world citizen except that one inhabits an individual consciousness which belongs both to localized settings and to global possibilities. Locality and globality, individual human being and humankind, are mutually constitutive and mutually implicated.

The term comes down to us from Greek because of its initial usage in Classical Greek philosophy. Diogenes claimed for himself the title of Kosmou polites (world citizen): he and his fellow so-called Cynics in the fourth century BC conceived of the paradoxical formulation of ‘cosmopolitan’ as a critique of the polites: the ones who were mired in the arbitrary customs and traditions of a polis. To be ‘civilized’, according to the Cynics, was to see beyond local community and place: Diogenes refused to be defined by his local origins and group memberships. The Cynics were, however, social outsiders, marginals in the Greek status hierarchy (Stade 2006). Their ideas foundered until the Stoics took them up a century later. Zeno and his fellows also described themselves as cosmopolitans and claimed that they were first and foremost human beings, living in a world of human beings, and only incidentally members of local polities. We inhabit at once two worlds, Stoic discourse promulgated: a local one assigned us at birth, and another global one, a human community deriving from, and guaranteed by, what is fundamental to all in the species: the equal worth of reason and humanity in every person. All ‘wise men’ should recognize that humanity constituted a single moral community, a ‘city of the world’ which was not spatially delimited or anchored; for all human individuals embodied the same ‘sacred’ or ‘divine’ spark, instantiated in their capacity for logos (reason).

More than simply recognizing human singularity, the Stoics urged an expansion in the practice of the circle of social inclusion so that it ultimately reached from the single individual to humanity as a whole: local laws, councils, currencies and temples would disappear in favour of a universal dispensation of reason, ideals, aspirations and argument. One should perhaps conceive of affiliations as a series of concentric circles: from self, leading through family and community, to species, the microcosm to the macrocosm. The aim, however, was always to ‘draw the circles somehow towards the centre’ (Hierocles): to live as an individual human being with an awareness of, and a rightful belonging to, the macrocosm.

Similar to the Cynics, however, Stoic philosophy occupied a marginal place in the Greek pantheon of metaphysical nostra; Stoical exponents were often metics (Semites or resident foreigners) rather than ethnic Greeks, and their credo – reason and the appreciation of humanity – offered what was felt to be a lonesome self-disciplined vision, and a remove from the rousing props of habit and locale. Homeric notions of primordial Greekness were brought to bear to paint Stoical philosophy as ‘heartless’ because it would transcend the ‘timeless’ law and tradition of the clan.

Resonances of Stoic ideas did nevertheless reappear among Roman statesmen and philosophers. Cicero’s legal injunctions, in the second century BC, had a cosmopolitan logic: all human beings were subject to ‘a single law of nature’. This translated into a necessary equality under the law in any local community (irrespective of wealth or learning), and also, ideally, into the universal recognition that they were thereby ‘bound not to harm anyone’. There is one ‘truly great and truly common’ universal human society to which universally we should see ourselves as belonging, Seneca contended in the first century AD. Here, Plutarch concurred, ‘we should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and neighbours’.

These are somewhat isolated sentiments, notwithstanding, and it is not until the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that one finds a concerted effort to re-engage with Classical Greek cosmopolitan notions. Influenced by the rise of modern science and by the aftermath of the long religious conflict that followed the Reformation, Enlightenment thinkers combined a reappropriation of cosmopolitanism with a commitment to secularism and a confidence in human rationality – in the capacity of the individual to examine, discover and understand – as affording a basis for changing beneficially every area of human planetary life.

Foremost among these Enlightenment voices was that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his works ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (1784), ’On the Common Saying “This May Be True in Theory but it Does Not Apply in Practice”’ (1793), ‘Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795/6), ‘International Right’ (1797) and ‘Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View’ (1798). Kant’s ideas developed over the span of these writings, and not always in a coherent fashion; there is a wavering of emphasis, for instance, between internationalism and supranationalism (cf. Ree 1998). Nevertheless, these writings (see Kant 1991, 1996) came to represent the single most important source of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of civil society and normative globalism.

Kant begins by identifying three kinds of right: ‘republican right’ entails domestic laws within a state; ‘international right’ entails treaties between nations; and ‘cosmopolitan right’ entails the relations of persons anywhere – ‘global citizens’ – to one another and to states. Cosmopolitan rights were held by individuals by virtue of their humanity not their community memberships, and were to be regarded as superior to those pertaining to states; cosmopolitan right overrode claims of national sovereignty and could bend the will of communities since these latter were intrinsically sentimental manifestations: particularistic, arbitrary and non-rational.

Kant exemplified cosmopolitan right in terms of hospitality. An individual had the right to present himself or herself before others without harm, both within and across different communities, and to be heard. Whether a local or a stranger, the individual had the right not to be treated with hostility even though he or she placed himself or herself in the home space of another with a view to local interaction (such as commerce). Two duties attached to this right: not to harm the guest, and not to exploit the host. In our own terms, Kant can be seen to foreshadow a critique of identity politics: interaction not separation or the preservation of cultural integrity is the norm to be enshrined as a right, and visiting is not to be hedged about with restrictions or quarantine. The logic of Kant’s argument derived from the limited space of the globe. We must accommodate one another, put up with being near one another, because as a species we possess in common the surface of the globe – and no other. All human individuals were attached equally to the globe. One was a world citizen, member of the Commonwealth of Nature, and entitled to enter into dialogue with any human others in an open and uncoerced fashion.

Kant envisaged a world where all of humanity would be participants in a global legal order of civil coexistence. ‘Cosmopolitan right’ here came to sit alongside ‘cosmopolitan law’ in a ‘cosmopolitan order’. The arbitrarily defined local society or polis gave way to a global polis or ‘cosmopolis’: a world state or federation, with universal law and rational governance. Its practices would be ‘enlightened’, eschewing dogma and unvindicated authority. Predominant would be the public use of reason to generate critical vantage points from which to scrutinize and improve civil relations. Even the status of states would depend on their behaviour in terms of common human values and democratic and legal principles. The so-called ‘Westphalian’ political ordering, where states were sovereign over their territories and people, and engaged only in voluntary relations with one another on an ideal basis of equal might, gave way to a notion of liberal internationalism. Here, cosmopolitan law guaranteed the rights of every individual human being whether or not these individuals and these rights were originally or traditionally respected by their ‘own’ communities.

The cosmopolitan order provided a matrix within which all the potential capacities of humanity for creative expression might find fulfilment. The global society of equal citizens would represent a ‘kingdom of ends’ whose fundamental principle could be enunciated thus: ‘Always behave so as to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and of moral judgement in every human being’.

Kant’s writings were coeval with the rise of nationalism in Europe, and were intended as a critique and antidote: insisting on the universal over the particular, the human as against the local community, the individual as end not means. The term ‘cosmopolite’ had already figured in the 1577 treatise by the English polymath John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation. Here, a cosmopolite was: ‘a Citizen, and Member, of the whole and only one Mystical City Universal’ (cited in Knapp 1994: 102). Then, a 1738 French dictionary has ‘a cosmopolite’ as ‘a person who moves comfortably in diversity: comfortable in situations which have no links or parallels to what is familiar’ (cited in Sennett 2000: 42). In Kant’s time, however, ‘cosmopolite’ would come to be contrasted, often unfavourably, with ‘patriot’, and ‘the old home feeling’ (Thomas Carlyle). Esteeming the cosmopolitan, for Kant, however, was not a matter of abstracting human beings from history and society but of recognizing the human capacity, disposition indeed, to transcend present and past in reaching for forms of life better informed by current scientific knowledge and the better accommodating of individual needs and desires. Focus was on the future and the potential for human betterment and individual fulfilment. In this regard it was not true, claimed Kant, that every existing tradition, culture, nation or society was equally deserving of respect: some were better placed to deliver the ‘kingdom of ends’, while some were more expressive of human sentimentalism, arbitrariness, cruelty and caprice than others.

Kant’s faith in the possibility of a cosmopolitan order derived from his estimation of the human capacity for reason: a means for humanity to come to an enlightened appreciation of itself and its world. Reason was a universal capability, something inhering in the inner life of every human individual. Reason was the highest and most independent human faculty. It freed human beings both from instinct and from cultural traditions and social structures, and allowed for ends and laws which transcended the particularity of their origins. Moreover, human beings were equally rational, equally capable of directing their lives through reasonable principles, and this commanded respect. One respected the intrinsic potential for reason which all humans possessed, even if sickness, slavery or oppressive circumstance limited their practice of it in regard to their own lives. One hoped, nevertheless, for situations where individuals should fully exercise their capacities and realize the deliverances of reason. It was on the basis of reasonable action that the dignity of human beings was most and best espied: the dignity of human beings as absolute and incomparable worth as ends in themselves.

It was also the case, however, that dignity consisted largely in autonomy: each person determining for themselves versions of the good and the right. But then, since cosmopolitanism recognized the individual to be always an instantiation of the human species whole, in individuals acting as free agents Kant saw a human destiny as being ultimately fulfilled: the victory of reason in history. Human history was a natural process – ‘Natural History’ – and the end was the complete development of human faculties and dispositions, of which rationality was the highest.

Progress could be slow and painful, notwithstanding, and it was made not by violent revolution but via the spirit of enlightenment. ‘Enlightenment’ was that stage – an adolescence – when humanity broke free from nature and tradition alike and used reason to deliver law. ‘Critique’ was another name Kant gave to this turning point; and ‘autonomy’ a third. One adjudicated legitimate from illegitimate cognitive claims and critiqued those, such as religious superstitions, that based themselves on sentiment or sloth. One bound oneself, as rational beings, only by laws which reason had delivered.

Reason would cause a progress towards the ‘end’ of human history, Kant contended: a perfect civil union, an ideal community of mutuality, an organic whole. This would represent a universal cosmopolitan existence in which the capacities of the human race were fully developed and expressed. The foundation of this civil society would be justice and not loyalty – and the difference was absolute. Justice sprang from reason while loyalty was an expression of sentiment. Use of reason enabled humanity to conceptualize and impose universalizable and unconditional moral obligations. Loyalty was particularistic and ensured affectional relations and community attachments; loyalty dwelled in arbitrary differentiations (status, class, religiosity, geography). The indiscriminate commands of justice ought to give rise to a liberal politics that was ‘blind’ to arbitrary and accidental distinction (skin colour, gender, place and situation of birth) and see only the organic human beneath.

Clearly, cosmopolitanism was an idealistic project for Kant. He had written an outline, an intellectual ethic, but it was open-ended and it would be improved upon by its readers in historical course. He was confident, however, that knowledge and morality could alike be formulated beyond the polis or state, beyond tradition and sentiment, on a global human scale, by individual human beings, so as to give rise to a real political enterprise. Was not international trade a form of sociability between states? Was not the stranger in the midst, the alien, the trader and refugee, evidence of the universal capacity for hospitality and guesthood, for existing beyond the ontological security of the given? To guarantee peace, however, and to secure the cosmopolitan right of individuals to venture out as strangers and sojourn hospitably in other territories, one needed a ‘league of peace’: a constitutional universalism alongside localism. One needed universal procedures by which the rule of law could be seen to operate equally everywhere. What was called for was a world federation of states whose constitution transcended ethnic and racial values. This was the balance that might deliver universalism without despotism.

Kant’s writings represent the clearest formulation of a cosmopolitan vision since the Cynics and Stoics, and the foundation of later elaborations. He aimed to outline binding principles of collective international engagement which might give onto a ius cosmopoliticum: all humanity recognized as a single, universal political community, based on universal human rights, and recognizing the universal state of the human that is embodied in each human individual. Kant saw his audience as humanity in general; he took pains to avoid Eurocentrism, and to distinguish between global rights to travel, interact and trade, and colonialism (cf. Wood 1998). And yet one finds a ready dismissal in contemporary communitarian and relativistic contexts of Kantian nostra; ‘few are now convinced of a rational-universalist grounding’ to cosmopolitanism, according to one commentator (Cheah 1998: 291). It is time to ask what the ‘cosmopolitan’ signifies now.

Contemporary Voices and Issues

Some have asserted that, far from being a known entity with a clear genealogy, cosmopolitanism, as a practice and a concept alike, is fuzzy or fluffy. It is an undelineated project which must ever remain thus: too positive and definite a specification would itself be ‘uncosmopolitan’ (Breckenridge et al. 2002: 1; Parry 2008: 327). There is, nevertheless, a burgeoning literature on things cosmopolitan: ‘cosmopolitanism is back’ (Harvey 2000: 529). There may not be agreement on the precise meaning of the term, its provenance, value and implications – there remains disagreement on how present-day ‘cosmopolitanism’ ought to position itself vis-à-vis Classical Greek philosophy and the European Enlightenment – yet contemporary phenomena such as globalization, transnationalism, multiculturalism, religious fundamentalism and pan-nationalism have provided a context for renewed cosmopolitan concern: a testing ground for an old ideal (Bauböck 2002: 111).

One might characterize contemporary literature on cosmopolitanism as an exploration of five key claims:

i) Cosmopolitanism is a specific kind of morality;

ii) Cosmopolitanism is a specific kind of normative programme;

iii) Cosmopolitanism is a specific kind of social condition;

iv) Cosmopolitanism is a specific kind of attitude or orientation;

v) The cosmopolitan is a specific kind of actor.

Let me elaborate on each of these in turn, surveying the literature by way of the voices of some of the main protagonists.

Cosmopolitanism is a Specific Kind of Morality

‘Contemporary cosmopolitanism … is a moral stance consisting of three elements: individualism, equality and universality. Its unit of value is individual human beings; it does not recognize any categories of people as having more or less moral weight; and it includes all human beings.’

—Brian Barry (1999)

‘Cosmopolitanism is a moral perspective. The cosmopolitan standpoint is impartial, universal, individualist, and egalitarian, [and] individuals are the basic units of moral concern.’

—Charles Jones (2001)

‘A cosmopolitan point of view [is one] that considers all human beings as individuals equally entitled to certain rights.’ A cosmopolitan point of view imagines a moral conversation which potentially includes all of humanity: anyone whom my actions potentially affect and whose interests the consequences of my actions can impact upon is a potential moral conversational partner of mine, and I have a moral obligation to justify my actions to this individual through reason. We are now all potential participants in a ...