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Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 2003, 2 http://www.units.it/etica/2003_2PALMER.htm
Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and Personal Identity
Many critics of increasing freedom of trade
and of movement, and of the resulting phenomenon of “globalization”, insist
that we are witnessing a net loss of identity, of difference and variation,
and that that loss represents a net loss of value to humanity. Globalization has been identified with the
emergence of a cosmopolis, or universal civilization, that destroys all local
differences and robs peoples and persons of their distinctive
identities. Even the ability of
artists from otherwise obscure artistic traditions to expose their work to
the wider world and enrich themselves in the process is portrayed as merely
another form of loss of identity and submission to exploitation. (1) Much of that “cultural” critique of globalization
has been effectively answered by Tyler Cowen in his book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s
Cultures. (2) In this short essay, I address a related topic
that has been exploited by a wide variety of political philosophers and
theorists to advance an anti-cosmopolitan, anti-liberal, and
anti-globalization agenda: the alleged destruction of personal identity by
globalization and cosmopolitanism. I
believe that the charge is false and rests on a deeply flawed theory of
personal identity. I outline an
alternative understanding of personal identity that is, I believe, both more
consistent with the lived experiences of many millions of people and fully
compatible with globalization and cosmopolitanism. 1. The Critique of
Cosmopolitanism
In recent years cosmopolitanism has been
subject to a remarkable amount of uncharitable criticism. For example, in his extended meditation on
the relationship between nationality and obligations of distributive justice,
David Miller considers the cosmopolitan alternative only en passant and even then with evident disdain. Adherents to a
cosmopolitan worldview are described as “those who view the world as a kind
of giant supermarket, where place of residence is to be decided by the
particular basket of goods (jobs, amenities, climate, etc.) available there.”
(3) Unnamed cosmopolitans are portrayed as believing
that “they should regard their nationality merely as a historic accident, an
identity to be sloughed off in favor of humanity at large.” (4) Another quite hostile commentator on
cosmopolitanism indicates why collectivists find cosmopolitanism so
uncongenial. Max Hildebert Boehm asserts: Any influence, external or internal, which
operates independently of the individual’s choice to dissolve the organic
bonds between him and his native group and to undermine his feeling of
solidarity may create the a priori conditions for cosmopolitanism, inasmuch
as cosmopolitanism itself provides an escape from specific social
authority. That is, by standing, or
aiming to stand, in immediate communion with all men, an individual easily
avoids the risks and sacrifices which in view of the perpetual conflicts
between all particularistic groups beset a social life based on narrower
solidarities. The profession of
cosmopolitanism may, it is true, bring with it new decisions and trials, for
instance in time of war or in a conservative environment. But on the whole the actual obligations
which cosmopolitanism lays upon its adherents are comparatively negligible --
the more so because in practice it seldom goes beyond demonstration,
sentimentality, propaganda, and sectarian fanaticism. Hence it often exists among persons whom
fortune has relieved from the immediate struggle for existence and from
pressing social responsibility and who can afford to indulge their fads and
enthusiasms. (5) Thus, cosmopolitanism is typically
represented as a kind of adolescent and self-indulgent evasion of
responsibilities, something to be expected of shallow and pampered elites,
but not of mature people of sound judgment. But those representations are false. Cosmopolitanism is a tradition of great
depth and capable of sustained philosophical defense. It is also a viewpoint with much wider
appeal than merely intellectual or financial elites, as witness the many
millions upon millions of people who have left hearth and home in search of
“jobs, amenities, climate, etc.,” not to mention religious toleration, the
rule of law, the freedom to choose one’s spouse, the right to start a
business enterprise and offer products to willing buyers, and the right to
enjoy the fruits of one’s labors. Nor is cosmopolitanism a new philosophical
viewpoint. Although I cannot provide
here a comprehensive history of the cosmopolitan ideal, a brief overview is
in order, if only to demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is neither a passing
fad among pampered elites nor of recent provenance. 2.
Cosmopolitanism and Civilization Cosmopolitanism is nearly as old as recorded
history itself and may be the first coherently articulated political
philosophy of the western world (at least).
About the year 420 BCE the philosopher Democritus of Abdera wrote, “To
a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is
the whole earth.” (6) It is likely no accident that Democritus and others with similar
views were writing during the flourishing of one of the most open,
commercial, and scientific civilizations the world had yet seen. (7) The idea of a
cosmo-polis, or a universal polity, may come naturally to observers of
societies characterized by extensive commercial, scientific, and artistic
intercourse among peoples of various nations, religions, and political
systems, as the Greek world of the Fifth Century BCE most certainly was. Commercial contact with many different
civilizations, cultures, and languages inclined many thinkers (but by no
means all) to observe certain regularities in the activities of the many
foreigners (“barbarians”: people who could not speak Greek properly, and
whose speech sounded like “bar bar bar bar”) with whom they traded. Indeed, those who refused or failed to
engage in trade were portrayed as savages.
The identification of trade with civilization goes back even further,
to the early roots of Greek culture.
In Book IX of the Odyssey
Homer depicts the Cyclopean race as savages precisely because they do not
trade or have contact with others: For the Cyclops have no ships with crimson prows, no shipwrights there to build them good trim craft that could sail them out to foreign ports of
call as
most men risk the seas to trade with other men. (8) The observation of regularities is the
foundation of the idea of law, whether in the physical world or the social
world. Such observed regularities provide the kernel for the universalism
that characterizes cosmopolitanism.
There is one law, the law of nature (physis), that regulates the affairs of humans and that provides
the sameness (“the one”) to which “social convention” (nomos) provides the difference (“the many”), for difference can
only be displayed against a background of sameness, and sameness can only be
appreciated against a background of difference, as the Greek dialecticians
observed. (9) Human life manifests regularities that
transcend the many differences manifested among the peoples of the
world. That transcendent system of
regularity, of cause and effect, is the foundation for a law of nature that
imposes obligations on all, whether they acknowledge those obligations or
not. The universality of natural law
was a common feature of Greek culture.
Antigone in Sophocles’s play defies the law of the city and justifies
her action (burying her brother’s corpse) by invoking a higher law: Creon: And
so you dared to disobey the law? Antigone: It
was not Zeus who published this decree, Nor
have the powers who rule among the dead Imposed
such laws as this upon mankind; Nor
could I think that a decree of yours-- A
man--could override the laws of Heaven Unwritten
and unchanging. Not of today Or
yesterday is their authority; They
are eternal; no man saw their birth. (10) Some rules are universal, others not. The former are always and everywhere
obligatory on all who share the same nature; the latter are accounted for in
their multiplicity on the basis of consent and opinion, i.e., on the basis of
particular instantiations of universal principles. Aristotle neatly distinguished between the
two kinds in his Nicomachean Ethics. Political justice is of two kinds, one
natural, the other conventional. A
rule of justice is natural that has the same validity everywhere, and does
not depend on our accepting it or not.
A rule is conventional that in the first instance may be settled in
one way or the other indifferently, though having once been settled it is not
indifferent: for example, that the ransom for a prisoner shall be a mina,
that a sacrifice shall consist of a goat and not of two sheep. (11) That observation of unity within multiplicity
was further systematized by the Stoic philosophers, especially during the
period of Roman domination of mare nostrum and the emergence of an
extensive commercial civilization involving many cultures and nations and of
a systematized law -- the ius gentium
-- to govern it. The jurist Gaius
opened his Institutes with the
observation that All peoples who are governed by laws and
customs use law which is partly theirs alone and partly shared by all
mankind. The law which each people
makes for itself is special to itself.
It is called ‘state law’ [ius ciuile], the law peculiar to that
state. But the law which natural
reason makes for all mankind is applied the same way everywhere. It is called ‘the law of all peoples’ [ius
gentium] because it is common to every nation. (12) Cicero transmitted that ancient
cosmopolitanism to the medieval Latin West largely through his hugely
influential De Officiis, in which
he reminded his audience that “The great Hercules undertook extreme toils and
troubles in order to protect and assist all races of men” and concluded that
“a man who is obedient to nature cannot harm another man.” (13) The Hebraic and Christian traditions
strengthened such legal and philosophical considerations with theological
ones. The Hebraic belief that God is
transcendent to his own creation, and therefore could not be identified with
any part of the world, was expressed quite powerfully in Exodus 32, which
describes God’s anger at the worship by the Israelites of the Golden Calf, a
mere part of his creation. The lesson
was clear: no part of creation can be God, and, of course, that entailed that
no mere human could be God. There is a
higher law by which all are judged, a lesson taught again by Jesus of
Nazareth when he confounded the Pharisees and Herodians and enjoined all to
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that
are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21) Christian theologians transmuted that
message into the fundamental equality of all humans through references to
such passages of the New Testament as Matthew 5:43: You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? Innocent IV, one of the great “Lawyer Popes,”
concluded from that and other sources that “lordship, possession and
jurisdiction can belong to infidels licitly and without sin, for these things
were not made only for the faithful but for every rational creature as has
been said. For he makes his sun to
rise on the just and the wicked and he feeds the birds of the air, Matthew
c.5, c.6. Accordingly we say that it
is not licit for the pope or the faithful to take away from infidels their
belongings or their lordships or jurisdictions because they possess them
without sin.” (14) Even infidels are rational creatures who
are entitled to their rights. Nor is cosmopolitanism limited to the
worldviews of antiquity or the high middle ages. It constitutes a vitally important part of
modern culture, as well. Joseph
Addison’s description of his visit to the Royal Exchange of London in 1711
neatly illustrates the modern cosmopolitan viewpoint: “Sometimes I am jostled among a Body of Armenians:
Sometimes I am lost in a Crowd of Jews; and sometimes in a Groupe of
Dutch-men. I am a Dane, Swede, or
Frenchman at different times, or rather fancy myself like the old Philosopher,
who upon being asked what Country-man he was, replied, That he was a Citizen
of the World.” (15) Years later the editor of the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot, concluded
his definition of “COSMOPOLITAIN, ou COSMOPOLITE” with the pregnant phrase, “Voyez Philosophe.” (16) For Diderot and other figures of the
Enlightenment, there was a close connection between knowledge, enlightenment,
and cosmopolitanism. Universalist cosmopolitanism is deeply engrained
in the culture of the West and has become in recent years a staple of “world
culture,” itself a cosmopolitan ideal made real. The global migration of persons, of ideas,
and of capital has tied together the peoples of the world in a cosmopolis. (17) My purpose is not to chronicle or measure the
extent of this cosmopolitanization of the world; I do not intend merely to
applaud what others are busy decrying. (18) Rather, I wish to consider the implications
of globalization and cosmopolitanism for personal identity. First, however, a brief detour through the
theory of distributive justice is in order. 3. Exit
Rights as the Core of a Cosmopolitan Theory of Justice Let’s take up the suggestion of Max Hildebert
Boehm that “cosmopolitanism itself provides an escape from specific social
authority,” and focus our attention on the implications for distributive
justice of a robust right of exit. As
Viktor J. Vanberg and Roger D. Congleton note, “many of the social
interaction problems (to which the notion of morality is commonly applied)
arise in contexts where the persons involved actually have viable exit
options in the sense that they can refuse to interact with their respective
counterparts.” (19) The core of a cosmopolitan theory of
justice I take to be the right of exit.
Actual exercise of the right of exit will entail different costs for
different persons in different settings and at different times. For some the act of leaving an accustomed
environment is unbearable, for others it is not. But the variable costs of exercising the
right of exit have no effect on the moral justification of the right, pace the implications of David
Miller’s treatment of the issue. We
lack, as Hillel Steiner concluded in his treatment of the transnational
migration of people, “any non-contractual power to prevent her or him from
removing themselves [sic] and all their property from our jurisdiction.” (20) Consideration of exit rights and of
obligations not to harm strangers has played a prominent role in political
theory in the past. Philosophical
cosmopolitanism has long been associated with Immanuel Kant, who included an
explicitly cosmopolitan element in his proposal for a “Perpetual Peace,” viz. a “Cosmopolitan Right [which] shall be
limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.” (21) For Kant there is no guaranteed right of
entry into a territory, but there should be a guarantee of “the right of a
stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s
territory.” (22) This right of hospitality arises because
“The peoples of the earth have thus entered into varying degrees into a
universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of
rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is
therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the
unwritten code of political and universal right, transforming it into a
universal right of humanity.” That
right to be received without hostility (if one is received) is complementary
to the more fundamental right of exit.
In the Metaphysics of Morals
Kant argued that The subject (considered also as a citizen)
has the right of emigration, for the state could not hold him back as it
might a piece of property. (23) Thomas Jefferson, in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America, reminded the
British crown that our ancestors, before their emigration to
America, were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and
possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the
country in which chance, not choice has placed them, of going in quest of new
habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and
regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness. (24) If the right of emigration, or of exit
generally, is the core of the cosmopolitan position, it is fair to ask
whether such a right is compatible with plausible theories of personhood, or
of personal identity. Would one suffer
a loss of identity, or a loss of self, if one were to choose to exercise such
a right? Globalization and
cosmopolitanism would certainly lose much of their moral appeal if there were
no plausible account of personal identity that would be compatible with the
exercise of the right of exit from a social or political order. 4.
Cosmopolitanism and Personal Identity Critics of cosmopolitanism sometimes use the
term to refer to a kind of superior attitude, one that characterizes those
who have traveled and look down upon their neighbors who have not. Thus, Thomas Hood wrote, “I don’t set up
for being a cosmopolite, which to my mind signifies being polite to every
country except your own.” (25) David Miller and Max Boehm may have such a
cosmopolite in their sights when they extol national patriotism over
cosmopolitanism. But there is no necessary connection between such attitudes
and cosmopolitanism. Neither the
cosmopolitan identity (to be described below) nor the cosmopolitan standard
of right (discussed above) entails a lack of respect for any particular
country, social group, nation, ethnicity, or other affective social relation,
including “your own.” A cosmopolitan would, however, deny that affective
social relations are constitutive of identity in the way that certain communitarians
have used the term constitutive, i.e., to refer to inextricable and
completely inescapable linkages. (26) Michael Sandel argues, for example, that
individualism generally (and by implication individualist cosmopolitanism) fails
to deal adequately with the problem of personal identity, for “to be capable
of a more thoroughgoing reflection, we cannot be wholly unencumbered subjects
of possession, individuated in advance and given prior to our ends, but must
be subjects constituted in part by our central aspirations and attachments,
always open, indeed vulnerable, to growth and transformation in the light of
revised self-understandings. And in so
far as our constitutive self-understandings comprehend a wider subject than
the individual alone, whether a family or tribe or city or class or nation or
people, to this extent they define a community in a constitutive sense.” (27) Thus, each of us has certain “constitutive
self-understandings” without which we would simply have no fixed identity,
and those self-understandings are so connected with the “family or tribe or
city or class or nation or people” that what is really identified is not a
numerically and materially individuated human person, but a collective
person. What Sandel is arguing is that an
epistemological principle can be transformed into an ontological principle:
“this notion of community [the constitutive conception] describes a framework
of self-understandings that is distinguishable from and in some sense prior
to the sentiments and dispositions of individuals within the framework.” (28) Because shared understandings are necessary for
our self-understanding, i.e., because they are asserted to be an epistemic
criterion for self knowledge, it is asserted that those shared understandings
are constitutive of our identity, and that therefore “the bounds of the self
are no longer fixed, individuated in advance and given prior to experience.”
(29) That move is unjustified. As John Haldane remarks, “even if this were
granted it would not follow from it that subjects of these relationships are
anything other than distinct persons.
To suppose otherwise is to infer fallaciously that epistemological considerations
enter into the constitution of the object known.”(30) That individuals share notions of justice,
compassion, and self-understanding does not imply that the boundaries of
those individuals melt into a vast fondue of communal understandings, for, as
Haldane points out, “Features can only be shared if they attach to bearers
which at base are numerically diverse.” (31) Sandel makes a serious error in arguing
against numerically individuated agents: the epistemological conditions of a
certain kind of knowledge are unjustifiably transmuted into ontological
foundations of a certain kind of being, with serious results for political
theory. That move was anticipated by
Thomas Aquinas, who argued that “It is . . . one thing which is understood
both by me and by you. But it is
understood by me in one way and by you in another, that is, by another
intelligible species. And my
understanding is one thing, and yours, another; and my intellect is one
thing, and yours another.” (32) Thomas recognized the importance of such
epistemological and ontological confusion for morality and politics; he noted
that “If . . . the intellect does not belong to this man in such a way that
it is truly one with him, but is united to him only through phantasms or as a
mover, the will will not be in this man, but in the separate intellect. And so this man will not be the master of
his act, nor will any act of his be praiseworthy or blameworthy. That is to destroy the principles of moral
philosophy. Since this is absurd and
contrary to human life (for it would not be necessary to take counsel or to
make laws), it follows that the intellect is united to us in such a way that
it and we constitute what is truly one being.” (33) Further, the collectivist/communitarian
approach implies that cultures are hermetically sealed one from another, that
if you and I are in the “same culture,” we must have the same
“self-understandings,” such that together we form a “self,” differentiated
from other selves by “bounds that . . .
are not given by the physical, bodily differences between individual
human beings, but by the capacity of the self through reflection to
participate in the constitution of its identity, and where circumstances
permit, to arrive at an expansive self-understanding.” (34) (I do not claim to understand precisely
what Sandel is getting at here, and I have my doubts whether even he does,
but it does seem clear that a mystical collective self -- “whose bounds are
not given by the physical, bodily differences between individual human
beings” -- is being discussed.) Sandel is surely wrong to assert that people
who participate in the “same” culture have the same self, or even the same
self-understandings. There is not one
culture anyplace on the globe that could provide “constitutive
self-understandings” capable of constituting collective selves of the sort
Sandel attempts to describe, for each culture melts imperceptibly into the
others. There is no longer any culture
that could be identified as “pure,” i.e., that is not a mélange of bits and
pieces contributed by or drawn from other cultures. Jeremy Waldron subjects a strong claim of
the communitarian theorist Alisdair Macintyre to withering criticism:
Macintyre wrote lyrically in After
Virtue that It is through hearing stories about wicked
stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin
boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their way in the
world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go
into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what
a child and what is a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the
drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. (35) Waldron observes “these are heterogeneous
characters drawn from a variety of disparate cultural sources: from
first-century Palestine, from the heritage of Germanic folklore, and from the
mythology of the Roman Republic. They
do not come from some thing called
‘the structure of our culture.’” (36) As Waldron asks, “What if there has been
nothing but mélange all the way down?
What if cultures have always been implicated with one another, through
trade, war, curiosity, and other forms of inter-communal relation? What if the mingling of cultures is as
immemorial as cultural roots themselves?
What if purity and homogeneity have always been myths?” (37) And just as the identity of each necessarily
cosmopolitan culture may be a shifting focus within overlapping influences,
so the identity of the person may be a shifting focus within overlapping
influences.(38) That is not to say that there are no ethnic
or national characteristics, no commonalities among persons that distinguish
them from others. There clearly
are. But pointing that out is no
refutation of cosmopolitanism or of a theory of identity consistent with
cosmopolitanism. Indeed, it would be
impossible to recognize the common nature of humanity in the absence of any
identifiable differences; the “same” cannot be recognized without the
“other,” the “one” without the “many.”
Recognizing that we adopt beliefs and self-understandings that we
believe to be true, useful, interesting, moral, amusing, and so on from other
persons, other cultures, and other languages is not shameful; it is just a
recognition of reality. The communitarian approach implicitly denies
that one’s identity might be constituted by universalist, individualist,
cosmopolitan self-understandings. The
devout Moslem or Christian, for example, may very well see her attachment to
a universalist religious faith as constitutive of her identity in ways that
her being American, Albanian, or Arab is not.
Such identities are quite common -- and therefore possible -- and
collectivist and communitarian theorists have offered little reason to
believe that they are unhappier or poorer than are more localized identities. We can distinguish, then, among at least
three different broad understandings of personal identity: 1) “thick”
theories, which are associated with a wide variety of collectivists and
communitarians, according to which the individual is constituted by all (or
perhaps just by most, or by the most important) of the elements of a complex
culture, with all of those elements considered as necessary and unchangeable
conditions of identity; 2) “thin” theories, which are associated commonly
with Immanuel Kant and his followers, according to which individual identity
is associated with a purely formal characteristic of consciousness as such,
such as the transcendental unity of apperception; and 3) “focal” theories,
such as the “succession” theory of Aristotle and the “closest continuer”
theory of Nozick, which are both “thinner” than the collectivist theories,
for individual elements of identity may be added or subtracted without
obliterating the identity of the person, and “thicker” than the formal or
abstract theories, for each person is identified, individuated, and
distinguished from others by reference to contingent characteristics. Focal theories recognize that personal
identity can be a matter of both circumstance and choice. They capture better the way in which the
elements of one’s identity can change over time, without merely dissolving
into unconnected and disparate parts.
Unlike thick theories, they do not rule out the widely observed and
acknowledged movement of persons from culture to culture, without loss of
self. Unlike thin theories, they
acknowledge that one’s commitments are not simply phenomenal ornaments
somehow stuck on to a merely noumenal transcendental object (or subject),
which is posited as a kind of substrate – or pin cushion – that is itself
devoid of characteristics. Unlike both
thick and thin theories, focal theories of personal identity provide a plausible
part of the metaphysical foundation for an increasingly globalized world of
free persons. Notes (1) “Local musicians are of course excited
by the audiences, fame, and money that the international record companies can
provide, but some are concerned that their rich cultural traditions are being
mined and skimmed to make an international product. The companies, though much agitated about
protecting their own intellectual property from pirates, feel no compunction
about uprooting the music of indigenous peoples from its native soil and
treating it as a free commodity.” Richard Barnett and John Cavanagh,
“Homogenization of Global Culture,” in Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith,
eds., The Case Against the Global
Economy, and For a Turn to the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books,
1996), pp. 75-76. (2) Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s
Cultures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). (3) David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 14. (4) Ibid., p. 184. (5) Max Boehm, Hildebert,
“Cosmopolitanism,” in Encyclopedia of
the Social Sciences (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937), pp. 457-461,
p. 458. (6) Kathleen Freeman ed., Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), fragment 247, p. 113. (7) The similar conditions of the
eithteenth century are described, with an emphasis on the international
character of science, the growth of international commerce, and the extension
of European exploration, in Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). See esp. chapter five, “An Economic
and Political Theory of World Order.” (8) Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1997),
Book IX, 137-142, p. 215. (9) This seems to be the main message - if
there is a message - in The Parmenides
of Plato, esp. the passages around 165c to 166b. (10) Antigone, in Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, Edith Hal ed., trans. by H.
D. F. Kitto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 16-7. (11) Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, H. Rackham ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1934), Book V, vii, 1134b18-24, p. 295. (12) Gaius, The Institutes of Gaius, trans. by W. M. Gordon and O. F.
Robinson (London: Duckworth, 1988), p. 19.
This passage appears in the Digest
at I.1.9, The Digest of Justinian,
Alan Watson ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). In Digest I.1.1 Ulpian distinguishes
between jus naturale and jus gentium, the former extending to all
animals and the latter “that which all human peoples observe.” (13) Cicero, On Duties, M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins eds. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), III, 25, p. 109. (14) Innocent IV, “On Decretales, 3.34.8, Quod
Super, Commentaria (c. 1250), fol. 429-30,” in Brian Tierney ed., The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 155. James Muldoon traces out how this
cosmopolitan tradition, derived from classical and biblical roots, influenced
the formation of international law, with special attention to the case of the
Americas, where it was not barbarian or infidel invaders who posed a threat
to Europe, but “the Europeans who posed a threat to the peace and security of
the inhabitants of the Americas,” in James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification of
Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 64-82, quotation from p. 74. (15) Joseph Addison, The Spectator,
Saturday, May 19, 1711, reprinted in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Selected Essays from “The Tatler,” “The
Spectator,” and “The Guardian,” ed. by Daniel McDonald (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p. 238. (16) Denis Diderot,
“COSMOPOLITAIN, ou COSMOPOLITE,” in Encylopédie,
ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, par Une
Sociéte de Gens de Lettres, Mis en Ordre et Publié par M. Diderot
(Geneve: Jean-Leonard Pellet, Imprimeur de la République, 1779), Tome
Neuvieme, p. 600. As Sylvana Tomaselli notes, “To be a true
philosophe, far from entailing the
life of a recluse, was to be a lover of mankind actively engaged in civil
society wherever one happened to be.” Sylvana Tomaselli, “Cosmopolitanism,” The Blackwell Companion to the
Enlightenment, John W. Yolton et al eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). (17) On the increasing mobility of
capital, see Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee, Quicksilver Capital: How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the
World (New York: The Free Press, 1991). (18) See, for example, John Gray, False Dawn (London: Granta, 1998) (19) Viktor J. Vanberg and Roger D.
Congleton, “Rationality, Morality, and Exit,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 2 (June 1992), p.
419. (20) Hillel Steiner,
“Libertarianism and the transnational migration of people,” in Brian Barry
and Robert E. Goodin, eds., Free
Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of
Money (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p.
94. (21)
Immanuel Kant, Political Writings,
Hans Reiss ed., trans. by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), p. 105. (22) Ibidem. (23) Ibid., §50, p. 160. (24) Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of
British America,” in The Portable
Thomas Jefferson, Merrill D. Peterson ed. (New York: Penguin Books,
1977), p. 4. (25) Thomas Hood, Up the Rhine (1839), quoted H. L. Mencken ed., A New Dictionary of Quotations, on
Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1942), p. 224. (26) Jeremy Waldron refers to this as the
“One Person: One Culture” model of the relationship between culture and
identity. Jeremy Waldron, “Multiculturalism and mélange,” in Robert
Fullinwider ed., Public Education in a
Multicultural Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.
91. (27) Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), p. 172. (28) Ibid., p.174. (29) Ibid., p.183. (30) John J. Haldane “Individuals and the
Theory of Justice,” Ratio XXVII 2
(December 1985), p. 195. This is an
old debate, and the outlines can be traced quite clearly in the debate
between the “Latin Averroists,” notably Siger of Brabant, and St. Thomas
Aquinas over whether there is one “intellective soul” for all of
mankind. The Averroists argued that,
for two individuals to know the same thing, they have to have the same form
impressed by the agent intellect into the same material (or possible) intellect; to know the same
form, they must share the same material intellect; and, as some sources
reported, it was reported by some in the thirteenth century that that thesis
had radical implications for the moral responsibilities of the individual: if
Peter was saved, then I will be saved too, as we share the same intellective
soul, so I am free to engage in whatever sinful behavior I wish, in the
knowledge that I will be saved nonetheless.
Thomas responded that the impressed intelligible species is not
literally the very form of the thing raised to a higher level of
intelligibility, but rather that by
which we know the thing. See Siger
of Brabant, “On the Intellective Soul,” in John F. Wippel and Allan B.
Wolter, O.F.M. eds., Medieval
Philosophy: From St. Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa (London: Collier
Macmilan Publishers, 1969), and Thomas Aquinas, On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists (Milwauke:
Marquette University Press, 1968). (31) Haldane, op.cit., p. 196. A move
essentially identical to Sandel's is made by Anna Elisabetta Galeotti in
criticizing F. A. Hayek's liberal theory of isonomy and spontaneous order,
which, she claims, presupposes a notion of “community/membership”: “The
simple quest for negative liberty, for impartiality, isonomy, rule of law,
makes sense vis-à-vis a world of private individuals, each with his or her
own identity aims, and life plans, conceived of as autonomous micro-spheres
to be protected from disruptive influences.
But, Hayek's social theory holds that the single individual, in his or
her isolation, without rules and ties acting as connections to context and
environment, would lose his or her identity and common understanding; hence
one's resulting liberty would be devoid of any significance. If in Hayek's social theory the need for
community is recognized as crucial, is it then plausible in the political
sphere to assume that individuals act as independent entities?” (Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, “Individualism,
Social Rules, Tradition: The Case of Friedrich A. Hayek,” Political Theory, Vol. 15, No. 2 [May
1987], p. 178. See also the response
by Eugene Heath, “How to Understand Liberalism as Gardening: Galeotti on
Hayek,” Political Theory, Vol. 17,
No. 1 [February 1989]). Charles Taylor
connects this kind of claim directly with the question of political
obligation, by saying that the allegedly constitutive features of the
autonomous self that have broken down the boundaries between selves generate
a direct obligation to that greater self, and he ties this in with a view of
the state (“political society”) as the constitutive self to which we
constituted selves owe our allegiance: “Now, it is possible that a society
and culture propitious for freedom might arise from the spontaneous
association of anarchist communes. But
it seems much more likely from the historical record that we need rather some
species of political society. And if
this is so then we must acknowledge an obligation to belong to this kind of
society in affirming freedom.”
(Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Philosophy
and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, Vol. II [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985], p. 208.)
It is noteworthy that Hayek would disagree on both counts, first that
there is a wider constitutive community into which individuals must
inevitably melt, and second that it is the attainment of unified states,
rather than the “spontaneous association of anarchist communes” that is
responsible for the conditions of our liberty, isonomy, and law. As Hayek remarks in The Fatal Conceit
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), “the revival of European
civilisation” (and the attendant growth of order, law, and culture) “owes its
origins and raison d'être to
political anarchy” (p. 33), i.e., to the fragmentation of Europe into
competing and overlapping political and legal jurisdictions with relatively
low exit costs. Without a single
overarching “constitutive community” or political society to which allegiance
must be owed, the answer that would be given by Hayek (and by numerous legal,
economic, and political historians) to Galeotti's opening question (“Can a
political theory, in its conceptual framework, do away with any reference do
a notion of community/membership?”) would be, “Yes.” (32) Thomas Aquinas, op.cit., Chap. V, paragraph 112, p. 70. (33) Ibid., Chap. II, paragraph 82, p. 57. (34) Michael Sandel, op.cit., p. 144. (35) Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 216. (36) Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures
and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University
of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Vol. 25, 1994, p. 784. (37) Jeremy Waldron, “Multiculturalism and
mélange”, p. 107. (38) Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, ii. 24, “the unity is in some cases one of
reference and in others one of succession.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. by Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1933), 1005a11, p. 157.
The identity of the self may best be understood in terms of the
“succession” of which Aristotle wrote, which has been explicated in the form
of the “closest continuer” theory advanced by Robert Nozick in his criticism
of the “property” theory: elements of one’s identity may be deleted or added,
such that after a time no element remains from before, and yet the composite
remains diachronically identical. See
Robert Nozick, Philosophical
Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp.
29-114. |
