Cosmopolitics and Its Sadian Discontents

Abstract

‘In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians etc.; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian; but as for man, I declare I have never met one in my life’. In part, because of its pithy dismissal of abstract universalism, several theorists of cosmopolitanism have resuscitated Joseph de Maistre’s quip.1 Those theorists who take their cue from de Maistre elaborate their cosmopolitan visions in the perceived absence of a transcendental principle that would apply equally to everyone — to ‘man’ — and legitimate moral and/or political action. Consequently, they seek a more variable and unexportable guide for action, one contingent upon those local mores, customs, histories and so on, that determine particular communities. When too unreflectively celebrated or too rigidly pressed into the service of politics, however, such contingencies can have unfortunate consequences for the way in which community is delineated. If ‘community’ is understood in narrowly cultural terms, for example, it sacrifices specific political definition to an etiolated, aestheticised definition, while if understood in narrowly ethno-regional terms, it becomes vulnerable to the exclusionary, potentially incendiary ideology of Volksgeist. In either case, the difficult question arises of what can motivate and legitimate moral and/or political action, for when universalism is traded for a more particularist principle of affiliation, such action can no longer be legitimated — or contested — with reference to norms upon which ‘we’ can all agree.