Polis, Cosmopolis, Politics

Abstract

Most debates about our collective futures remain in thrall to the polis, or at least to some vaguely remembered and creatively reimagined ideal of the polis expressed in modern statist claims to political community and identity - especially to the community of blood that we call the nation and the community of law that we engage as citizens. Some are content to declare or assume that this is what there is. Canonical traditions and grand theoretical assertions erase our sense of historical contingency. All ontological axiological, and epistemological possibilities are delineated in the stroke of an assertion, in the sovereign act of discrimination and authorization. Hobbes gave us what remains the most elegant modern account of how such an assertion might be achieved through the modern sovereign state. Kant gave us an altogether smoother, deeply ambivalent, but no less troubling, account of how it might be achieved once modern subjects learned to rule themselves, to minimize politics and maximize ethics. Other philosophers, and political economists, then taught us how to forget about what was involved in these declarations of modern possibility, these affirmations of the necessary freedom of the modern subject, allowing us to go looking for, or escaping from, politics in, say, the market, civil society, history, representation, and the personal. While claims about where and what political life is supposed to be have now been sharply contested over many centuries, we now keep catching ourselves affirming the natural necessity of the modern polis by reproducing the sovereign state's own self-affirming account of how it is both natural and necessary, and all other alternatives are impossible, even if in some sense they might be desirable. Most would nonetheless insist that this self-proclaimed natural necessity is a historical achievement, and perhaps even a rather fragile one at that. It is this historical achievement that supposedly distinguishes us from those living in tribes and empires, even from