For a Radical Universalism

Abstract

No discussion of the world at 2000 can avoid an analysis of values, global and national, about how people, individually and collectively, judge the present and what they aspire to in the future. In this regard, there are two great illusions that haunt contemporary debate. One, to which we were treated in excess over the millennium itself, is that utopianism is dead. It is as if we could hear a sigh of global relief, that the age of ideologies, of extreme views, of alternatives was over. Now we are entering a period when a sensible, managerial consensus can prevail, where all problems can be calmly addressed. Francis Fukuyama has argued that, in the sense of the exhaustion of ideological conflict over fundamentals, history is over. François Furet, in his autopsy on communism, has stated that, for the first time in 200 years, humanity does not have an alibi, there is no glorious, alternative future in the name of which the present may be rejected outright, and humanity be called to make radical or revolutionary sacrifices.¹ They mistake a point of method, the possibility of reasoned debate, with one of substance, the end of major differences of value. The second great illusion is that of relativism, the argument building on the role of culture that, in relations between states and societies, shared values are not possible. Here there are two variants, a ‘relativism from above’, promoted by states who wish to fend off international criticism, and a ‘relativism from below’, by those who see universalism as a threat by powerful forces outside their own society. Each of these illusions, the end of utopia and relativism, merits attention in its turn.