Laughter, Fear and ‘Conversion’

Abstract

The idea of World Republic provokes 'laughing' at the idealism of the authors advancing it and ‘fear’ since, in their alleged naivete, these authors do not see the threats of a global Leviathan. The chapter examines criticisms of the idea of World Republic and shows the non-interference of arguments and counterarguments, because this idea is advanced from the perspective of methodological cosmopolitanism, while criticism is formulated from the perspective of methodological nationalism. It is impossible for cosmopolitan theorists to incorporate the premises of non-cosmopolitan arguments into their approaches and continue to be cosmopolitan, and vice versa. This gap is the perennial problem of cosmopolitanism, known as ‘the problem of motivation’ in normative political theory and as the need for ‘metamorphosis’ or ‘conversion’ in other styles of thinking about cosmopolitanism. The chapter examines the stipulation of the need for ‘conversion’ to avoid the potential destruction of the world by the atomic bomb in a polemic of Karl Jaspers and Maurice Blanchot, and which shows that in the face of threat, the cosmopolitan ‘conversion’ means not to fall back into the existing ways of thinking but to think the world with its own antagonisms.