Abstract
Commenting in 1795 on the interstate system inaugurated with the Peace of Westphalia a century and a half earlier, Immanuel Kant expressed familiar misgivings concerning the principle of state sovereignty and the right of states to resort to arms to protect their vital interests, both of which remained cornerstones of international law into the twentieth century: The concept of international right becomes meaningless if interpreted as a right to go to war. For this would make it a right to determine what is lawful not by means of universally valid external laws, but by means of one-sided maxims backed up by physical force. It could be taken to mean that it is perfectly just for men who adopt this attitude to destroy one another, and thus to find perpetual peace in the vast grave where all the horrors of violence and those responsible for them would be buried’.1 And in the next breath he proposed an idea of legal pacifism that is still the principal alternative to the state of nature in international affairs: ‘There is only one rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare. Just like individual men, they must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapting themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international tate (civitas gentium) which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth’.2
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Notes
Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, trans. H.B. Nisbet in H. Reiss (ed.) Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93–130, at p. 105.
See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996).
I make this argument in the context of ‘postmodern’ anthropology in ‘Doing the Right Thing in Cross-Cultural Representation’, Ethics 102 (1992) 635–49.
See for instance James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). The journal Public Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press for the Society for Transnational Cultural Studies, regularly features articles on these and related themes.
Pheng Cheah makes a strong case for the need to rethink cosmopolitanism in postcolonial studies in ‘Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), though his own suggestions for doing so point in a direction somewhat different from the one indicated here. Janna Thompson argues convincingly for the need to rethink cosmopolitanism in political theory in Justice and the World Order (London: Routledge, 1992), though again the line taken there is not the one followed here.
See John Rawls, ‘The Law of Peoples’ in S. Shute and S. Hurley (eds) On Human Rights. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993) pp. 41–82; Jürgen Habermas, Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996) English edition by C. Cronin and P. DeGreiff, forthcoming from The MIT Press.
The basic differences are already evident in their approaches to domestic justice, as I try to show in ‘Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue’, Ethics 105 (1994) 44–63.
‘Our age is in an especial degree the age of criticism and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and lawgiving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion and cannot claim the same respect which reason accords only to that which has been able sustain the test of free and open examination.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961), Preface to the First Edition, Axi, n. a. In the introduction to Political Liberalism Rawls explicitly disavows the ‘enlightenment project’ of finding a comprehensive rational basis for liberalism (PL xviii). In ‘Two Concepts of Liberalism’, Ethics 105 (1995): 516–34, William Galston argues that Political Liberalism still leaves Rawls closer to the ‘Enlightenment Project’, predicated on autonomy, and further from the ‘Reformation Project’, predicated on diversity, than Rawls would like to be. In this respect Galston underscores the doubts about the claimed neutrality of political liberalism raised by Samuel Scheffler and Leif Wenar in the essays cited in Note 18.
Thomas W. Pogge, ‘An Egalitarian Law of Peoples’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 23 (1994) 195–224.
John Rawls, ‘Reply to Habermas’, The Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995) 132–80, at p. 153. He is responding to Jürgen Habermas, ‘Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism’, trans. C. Cronin, in the same issue, pp. 109–31.
As Samuel Scheffler (‘The Appeal of Political Liberalism’, Ethics 105 (1994) 4–22) and Leif Wenar (‘Political Liberalism: An Internal Critique’, Ethics 106 (1995) 32–62) have argued, Rawls’s neutralist strategy fails even in the domestic case, since his presentation of the political conception rests on ideas (e.g. the burdens of judgement, the conception of the person, the method of political constructivism itself) not all parties to the overlapping consensus could reasonably be expected to accept. The problem is exacerbated in the present context, where the political conception of the law of peoples is explicitly presented as an ‘extension’ of political liberalism. Here, Rawls’s ‘hope’ (LP 230n54) that well-ordered hierarchical societies could embrace it — that it could serve as the focus of an overlapping consensus in the international realm — has quite a different basis than did the corresponding hope for his conception of political liberalism in the domestic case. The hope that the latter would prove to be publicly acceptable was grounded in the very method of construction, which started from ‘shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture’ of a (our) liberal society (PL 100). The corresponding hope for a law of peoples meant to unify different political cultures has no such grounding. In this respect, Rawls’s ‘practical’ efforts to provide a ‘realistic’ conception of international justice do not close the ideal-real gap as much as he would evidently like. Accordingly, the comparative costs of returning to a more strictly universalist approach are not as high in this respect as they might at first seem.
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Practice’ in Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973) pp. 1–40, at p. 40.
See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996).
See Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Nancy Fraser makes the case for linking a politics of recognition with a politics of redistribution in ‘Multiculturalism and Gender Equity: The U.S. Difference Debates Revisited’, Constellations 3 (1996) 61–72.
J. Habermas, ‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: Two Hundred Years Later’ in J. Bohman and M. Lutz Bachmann (eds) Perpetual Peace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997).
This is the principle that guides David Held’s rethinking of cosmopolitan democracy in Democracy and the Global Order (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995).
See Thomas McCarthy, ‘Legitimacy and Diversity: Dialectical Reflections on Analytical Distinctions’, Cardozo Law Review 17 (1996) 1083–1125, and Habermas’s ‘Reply’, in the same issue, pp. 1477–1557, especially pp. 1487–1503. In my view, this type of proceduralism is not fundamentally incompatible with the important role that Habermas assigns to reasoned discourse, for it is only in and through public discourse that ethical differences can be articulated and interrogated — and can prove to be discursively irresolvable, that is, reasonable disagreements. The rationalizing effects on the quality of public discourse that result from institutionalizing procedures intended to produce informed and reasoned agreements are by no means forfeited with the acknowledgement that consensus is not always attainable, even under sufficiently ideal conditions and in the long run.
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McCarthy, T. (1999). Two Conceptions of Cosmopolitan Justice. In: MacKenzie, I., O’Neill, S. (eds) Reconstituting Social Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27445-1_12
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