Social Bonds as Freedom: Revisiting the Dichotomy of the Universal and the Particular 9781782386940

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables
INTRODUCTION Of Bonds and Boundaries
PART I Social Bonds in Transformation
CHAPTER 1 Incompleteness and the Possibility of Making: Towards Denationalized Citizenship?
CHAPTER 2 Justice and Culture: New Contradictions in the Era of Techno-Nihilist Capitalism
CHAPTER 3 Making Commonality in the Plural on the Basis of Binding Engagements
CHAPTER 4 On the Poverty of Our Freedom: Relevance and Limits of the Hegelian Ethical System
PART II Beyond Imperial Universalism
CHAPTER 5 Western Humanitarianism and the Representation of Distant Suffering: A Genealogy of Moral Grammars and Visual Regimes
CHAPTER 6 Parochial Altruism and Christian Universalism: On the Deep Difficulties to Create Solidarity without Outside Enemies
CHAPTER 7 Partial Commitments and Universal Obligations
CHAPTER 8 A Reluctant Cosmopolitan
PART III Towards a Reconceptualization of Liberalism
CHAPTER 9 Liberal Autonomy and Minority Accommodation: A New Approach
CHAPTER 10 Cultural Boundaries and the Reasonable Accommodation of Minorities: Is Secularism Enough?
CHAPTER 11 Arrow, Rawls and Sen: The Transformation of Political Economics and the Idea of Liberalism
Conclusion: Social Bonds as Freedom
Index

Citation preview

Social Bonds as Freedom

Social Bonds as Freedom Revisiting the Dichotomy of the Universal and the Particular

Edited by

Paul Dumouchel and

Reiko Gotoh

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2015 Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Social bonds as freedom : revisiting the dichotomy of the universal and the particular / edited by Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-693-3 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-694-0 (ebook) 1. Universals (Philosophy) 2. Citizenship—Philosophy. 3. Liberalism— Philosophy. I. Dumouchel, Paul, 1951– editor of compilation. II. Goto, Reiko, editor of compilation. B105.U5S64 2015 323.1—dc23 2014039964

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-78238-693-3 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-694-0 ebook

Contents

List of Tables Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries Paul Dumouchel & Reiko Gotoh

vii 1

Part I. Social Bonds in Transformation Chapter 1. Incompleteness and the Possibility of Making: Towards Denationalized Citizenship? Saskia Sassen

27

Chapter 2. Justice and Culture: New Contradictions in the Era of Techno-Nihilist Capitalism Mauro Magatti

57

Chapter 3. Making Commonality in the Plural on the Basis of Binding Engagements Laurent Thévenot

82

Chapter 4. On the Poverty of Our Freedom: Relevance and Limits of the Hegelian Ethical System Axel Honneth

109

Part II. Beyond Imperial Universalism Chapter 5. Western Humanitarianism and the Representation of Distant Suffering: A Genealogy of Moral Grammars and Visual Regimes Fuyuki Kurasawa

127

vi • Contents

Chapter 6. Parochial Altruism and Christian Universalism: On the Deep Difficulties to Create Solidarity without Outside Enemies Wolfgang Palaver

153

Chapter 7. Partial Commitments and Universal Obligations Paul Dumouchel

174

Chapter 8. A Reluctant Cosmopolitan Anne Phillips

192

Part III. Towards a Reconceptualization of Liberalism Chapter 9. Liberal Autonomy and Minority Accommodation: A New Approach Geoffrey Brahm Levey

215

Chapter 10. Cultural Boundaries and the Reasonable Accommodation of Minorities: Is Secularism Enough? Gurpreet Mahajan

239

Chapter 11. Arrow, Rawls, and Sen: The Transformation of Political Economics and the Idea of Liberalism Reiko Gotoh

259

Conclusion. Social Bonds as Freedom Paul Dumouchel & Reiko Gotoh

285

Index

291

Tables

Table 5.1. The Iconographic Conventions of Humanitarian Sentimentalism

139

Table 9.1. Relation of Some Minority Cultural Practices to Autonomy: Applicability

223

Table 9.2. Relation of Some Minority Cultural Practices to Autonomy: Priority

225

Table 9.3. Relation of Some Minority and Mainstream Cases to Autonomy: Comparability

230

INTRODUCTION

Of Bonds and Boundaries Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

Why should the boundaries of states be viewed as presuppositions of justice rather than as institutions whose justice is to be assessed? —Onora O’Neill Bounds of Justice

After the devastating earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on 11 March 2011, new forms of social bonds began to appear. Social bonds are usually conceived as resting on special relationships between agents, on moral attachments, or on received boundaries that delimit the extent of the nation or group. But the social bonds that, especially among young people, are now being mustered in response to catastrophe take on a slightly different form. They seem freer and less partial, for they assume that anyone who has suffered from disaster should be aided by anyone who can help, independently of all borders erected by differences of class, race, culture, or gender. Furthermore, this help is viewed as a form of political action that promotes the central ideas (and ideals) of a constitution based on the right to life, freedom, and well-being. This experience bears witness, perhaps, to the arrival of a new stage in social relations and, consequently, in the sciences that reflect upon them. In the social sciences and the humanities, social changes are sometimes the occasion of theoretical breakthroughs. One reason this is so is that the basic frameworks of many disciplines—for example, ethics or political philosophy—often contain presuppositions about the world that are taken for granted without further ado and that, after a while, tend to be viewed as logical truths. When the world changes, these assumptions may turn out to be false, which may bring about the realization that some basic postulates are in need of revision. For example, the relationship between special provisions for particular groups and universal rules of justice is generally conceived in terms of a dichotomy between the universal and the particular, where universal rules are thought to exclude special treatment for some and particular claims are

2 • Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

viewed as necessarily contradicting the ideals of universality, equality, and neutrality. This dichotomy forces agents to choose one against the other, to elect the particular or to embrace the universal.1 This way of framing questions of multiculturalism, or the demands of various groups and minorities—ethnic, religious, women, gays and lesbians, etc.—is, we shall argue, grounded in specific empirical conditions; it does not correspond to a necessary logical opposition. For a long time, these conditions have generally been satisfied, at least within the Western world, but recently the institutions that ensured their satisfaction have begun to change, and the dichotomy between the universal and the particular does not, in consequence, seem as evident an answer to and explanation of the difficulty. The socio-historical conditions that guaranteed the temporary adequacy of these transitory “truths” are not independent of the beliefs of agents, but they nonetheless cannot be reduced to them. Simply stated, the dichotomy of the universal and the particular only makes sense within the context of a larger entity, where the bonds that hold together members of the group also constitute a boundary that separates that group from other groups. This conjunction of bonds and boundary may be the case of the smaller group only, of the larger encompassing entity, or of both. The language of the universal and the particular as it is used in ethics and political philosophy presupposes the existence of smaller groups and of a larger entity to which these groups belong in some sense. The dichotomy of the universal and the particular depends on the way in which the borders of the sub-groups and the boundaries of the overall population are construed and constructed and, in particular, on the relation of these borders with the bonds that attach together the members of these different entities. To say that it depends on the way these bonds and boundaries are “construed and constructed” is to say that it depends both on how agents conceive these bonds and boundaries and on the way in which they are instituted and made real in social relations.

The Universal and the Particular Various social movements and the theoretical trends of multiculturalism, feminism, and other forms of the politics of difference, as well as communitarians and liberal nationalists, can be considered as both symptoms and agents of the transformation of these empirical conditions. Many among those who hold such positions have taken sides

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 3

in the dispute between particularism and universalism, embracing one and rejecting the other. This, however, has not been the case of everyone. Other authors have tried to avoid the dichotomy and, in general, they have presented their reluctance to choose one against the other as motivated by a commitment to liberalism or, at least, if not to liberalism as such, to liberal democracy. Kymlicka (1995) for example, argues that the focus of liberalism on individual rights and its dismissal of minority rights are recent historical accidents. According to him, the exclusive attention to individual rights constitutes a trend that only became dominant after the Second World War, rather than a necessary aspect of liberalism. He argues that there is no contradiction between the universal ideal of liberalism and attention to particularist claims. Similarly, Nussbaum (2009) argues that liberalism has the necessary conceptual resources to respond to the challenge of feminism, and that doing so can only lead to a better version of liberalism and to a more open form of universalism. Tully (2008: 254–55), in Public Philosophy in a New Key, recently argued that the defense of basic civic and personal liberties entails, rather than contradicts, the protection of the diverse cultures present in a democratic polity. Already in “The Politics of Recognition,” Taylor (1994) had argued that the same desire for recognition underlies the demand for universal individual political and social rights and the demand for cultural rights, implying that group and cultural rights constitute an extension of individual and civic rights. This book should be seen as a further advance in the same direction, arguing in favor of the compatibility of particular demands with the ideals of universality, equality, and neutrality. Yet, if many authors affirmed that special provisions are, or can be, compatible with universal rules, all, to our knowledge, have taken for granted the dichotomy of the universal and the particular. They never directly questioned its relevance to the issue at hand and simply tried to escape its hold. For example in Multiculturalism and the Welfare State, editors Banting and Kymlicka (2006) propose a comparative analysis of the effect of multicultural policies on welfare in a number of countries and a reflection on their compatibility. In their introduction, they identify two major difficulties concerning the relationship between multicultural and welfare policies. One is whether in practice there is a trade-off between commitment to multicultural policies and to the welfare state. The other is whether the encouragement that is given to ethnic and racial diversity by multicultural policies reduces the feeling of national solidarity that is necessary to sustain redistributive policies. Their prudent

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conclusion is a guarded negative answer to both questions. In the cases they studied, the development of multicultural policies didn’t have a negative effect either on welfare policies or on national unity, which are both understood as structured by the ideals of universality, anonymity, and equality. This is certainly an important result in view of the commonly heard criticism that multiculturalism takes away resources from welfare policies (Hewitt 2005). However, their very way of framing the problem from the outset as a kind of either/or issue suggests the validity of the dichotomy between the universal and the particular. It suggests that encouragement to ethnic and racial diversity should weaken national solidarity, just as commitment to multicultural policies, i.e., to particular groups, should draw resources away from universal welfare policies. This presupposition is perhaps what explains their prudence; for all that Banting and Kymlicka have, in fact, shown is that, in a limited number of cases over a short period of time, the commitment of some states to multicultural policies did not reduce their commitment to universal welfare policies. This restricted empirical result cannot show that such a trade-off may not happen in different circumstances or even that it does not constitute the rule of what should happen. It is true that Banting and Kymlicka (2006: 10) also claim that multiculturalism “is inextricably linked to widely accepted norms of freedom, equality, human rights, and democracy,” suggesting that the compatibility between the two types of policies is to be expected. However, such a claim merely asserts that, appearances notwithstanding, multiculturalism is really on the “good side” of the dichotomy: that of the universal. Yet, since many people believe this not to be the case and argue, like Barry (2001), that multiculturalism is really on the side of the particular, they will consider this empirical result as an anomaly, an accident, due perhaps to the fact that budget pressure was not too high or to the fact that multicultural policies have not been around long enough to take their toll on national unity. This book takes steps in the direction of deconstructing the dichotomy of the universal and the particular, showing that what gives rise to this way of looking at the problem is not the logical opposition between the universal and the particular, but particular empirical conditions. Construing the relation between the claims of various groups and cultures and the universal requirements of justice in terms of the dichotomy between the universal and the particular is not the expression of an inescapable and eternal logical distinction but reflects the way in which various groups are partitioned within a larger population. It de-

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 5

pends, more precisely, on the relationship between the bonds that hold together the members of a group and the way in which the boundaries between groups are construed and constructed. The displacement of this fundamental issue, from a sterile opposition between the universal and the particular to an empirical question concerning the relation of bonds and boundaries, emerges from relating to each other the different contributions that make up this volume, rather than being a thesis that is explicitly defended in most of its chapters. This result clearly emerges in the conclusion of the book, “Social Bonds as Freedom,” which brings together the findings of the empirical enquiries on social bonds and boundaries, of the reflections on the practices of the universal and on the boundaries of the universal in various conceptions of justice, and of incursions into a revised liberalism that promotes new relations between the universal requirements of justice and the claims of particular groups. This book is thus divided into three parts. The first, “Social Bonds in Transformation,” inquires into the transformation of the relationship between the bonds that hold together members of a group and the boundaries that determine the limits of that community, as well as the nature of those bonds. The second part, “Beyond Imperial Universalism,” looks into the ways that, both practically and theoretically, universalism tends to be bounded—that is to say, the way it tends to be limited to certain groups. Historically, the universal never contained everyone. In spite of its claims to the contrary, universal justice always ends up excluding some individuals from the benefits and equality it promises to all. Part three, “Towards a Reconceptualization of Liberalism,” re-examines some of the basic concepts of liberalism and evaluates their ability to bypass the dichotomy of the universal and the particular—their ability to address in a different way the conditions that foster the illusion of a logical deadlock.

Social Bonds in Transformation Saskia Sassen, in chapter 1, focuses on citizenship, a national institution that delimits the inside from the outside of a modern state. Citizenship distinguishes those to whom we owe allegiance from non-citizens, residents whose rights are more limited, and from aliens, who always remain potential enemies. Citizenship, argues Sassen, should not be seen as a monolithic institution; rather, it should be conceived as a bundle of rights and privileges that can be assembled in a variety of ways. It con-

6 • Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

stitutes an incompletely formalized social contract between the state and its members, which, precisely because it is incompletely formalized, can accommodate changes and revisions. According to her, historically it is outsiders and others excluded from citizenship who have been essential to the incompleteness of the institutions. They were and remain the engines of its transformations. It is therefore important, argues Sassen, to distinguish the formal exclusions that are made by the institution from the incompleteness of the formalized institution. For example, those who actively participate in the life of the community where they are settled, such as longtime illegal immigrants, are recognized, but they remain unauthorized because they are formally excluded from citizenship. There are also others, who, though they are fully authorized, inasmuch as they are formal citizens, are nevertheless not really recognized—for example, the members of minority groups whose grievances are not considered legitimate. It is through the claims and the practices of both types of marginal or partial citizens that citizenship evolves. For example, when an undocumented alien is granted a mortgage to buy a house, she gains in practice a right from which she is formally excluded. These reassemblages of the bundle of rights characteristic of citizenship result, Sassen argues, from responses to global pressures which are expressed in the practices of individuals, practices that are located at the sub-national level of everyday social interactions between individuals. Therefore, claims Sassen, citizenship should not be construed as a purely national institution, rather it constitutes an important meeting point of the national and the global, a meeting that takes place, however, at the local level. In consequence, even if at an abstract formal level it may seem that the essential characteristics of citizenship have changed very little during the last century, the institution is in fact undergoing significant mutations through the practices of different types of marginal agents. In these mutations of citizenship, we can recognize the changing relationships between the inside and the outside of the state, between the universal and the particular, and we can witness the transformations of the bonds that unite us and simultaneously separate us from others. Mauro Magatti, in chapter 2, adopts a more pessimistic view of the changes brought about by globalization. According to him, the present period is characterized by the continuous expansion of the macro technical system, of functional institutional spheres, and of a deterritorialized aesthetic sphere. The macro technical system refers to the growing worldwide technological integration resulting from efforts to create compatibilities between technologies in the hope of expanding

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 7

the market for an ever greater number of different products. Functional institutional spheres are networks integrating the different aspects of institutions, such as health care or transportation, whose explicit function in consequence of this integration progressively becomes the institution’s unique rationale. Of course, medicine must cure and transportation systems should allow people to travel, but, traditionally, these services simultaneously fulfilled many other social functions. For example, they provided occasions of socialization for older persons or functioned as symbols of national unity. The diminishing importance of these other roles, argues Magatti, comes from the fact that, by being organized around common codes and rules, these services become independent of (and indifferent to) cultural and local particularities. This reorganization permits a greater integration of services between countries and the exchange of personnel between them, but it also makes these institutions more independent from the authority of different states and from national priorities. The development of functional integration progressively leads to a form of transnational governance that is exclusively responsible to the bureaucratically defined function of the service. These social and technological transformations culminate in the establishment of a deterritorialized aesthetic sphere, which goes together with the increasing mobility of persons, products, and cultural symbols. At the same time, the growing mobility of populations leads to a situation where, in many parts of the world, it becomes more and more difficult to identify stable cultures shared by specific groups attached to particular territories. The deterritorialized aesthetic sphere is a response to these changes. It is characterized by a plurality of partial orders and by the constant change and replacement of values and symbols. In consequence, hierarchically organized systems of obligations and the loyalties that were characteristic of national cultures are progressively being replaced by a “universal” culture of “instant happenings.” It gives pride of place to the momentary experience of what is presently going on and abstains from narratives that make sense of the present by integrating it into a continuous history. These social and cultural transformations induced by techno-nihilistic capitalism,2 argues Magatti, are slowly destroying the conditions that made citizenship and democratic participation possible. They subvert the territorially bounded universality characteristic of the nation-state and make acceptable its disappearance. These changes, according to Magatti, lead to the simultaneous diminution of the bonds that unite the members of the state and of the boundaries that separate it from other states.

8 • Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

Both authors focus on the transformations of moral bonds and boundaries and on the ways in which the practices of agents upset the formal characteristics of institutions. Saskia Sassen shows how, through such practices, the borders of citizenship, traditionally viewed as exclusive, are being redrawn and how, while remaining formally identical, citizenship is progressively becoming denationalized. Mauro Magatti, though he takes a more negative view of the process, fundamentally agrees. He argues that the universality that is characteristic of the laws and services of the nation-state is progressively being emptied of its content and replaced by functional systems that are indifferent to the narratives that previously authorized the access of different categories of agents to different rights or services. Chapter 3, by Laurent Thévenot, is built on analytical categories with which most readers are probably unfamiliar, those of regimes of engagement and of grammars of commonality in the plural. Novel and strange as these categories may seem, they seek to capture central yet ordinary aspects of human life. Regimes of engagements are ways of being in the world. For example, “the regime of engagement in familiarity” refers to the relation of intimate attachment that a person has to what is familiar to him or her. Familiarity provides ease of action, comfort, and a form of security. However, because it is uniquely particular, it is also exposed to forms of harms to which other types of relation to the world are less sensitive. The loss of what is familiar—for example, of the house in which one was born and raised—cannot be compensated; the house can be replaced, but only by another house that necessarily lacks that which made unique the one that has been lost. Thus, regimes of engagements do not only seek to capture the relation of agents to the world, but also the various ways in which persons and their environments reciprocally transform each other. Parts of the world become familiar to us as a result of our actions, and the familiar consequently determines the way we interact with it and with other agents. Thévenot recognizes three such regimes of engagement: engagement in familiarity, engagement in a plan, and engagement in qualified justification for the common good. Corresponding to these different ways of being with each other and in the world are three grammars of commonality in the plural: the grammar of personal affinities to commonplaces, the liberal grammar of individual preferences, and, finally, the grammar of plural orders of worth. Grammars are, in a broad sense, forms of justifications, ways of making sense—for ourselves and to others—of issues relative to the different regimes of engagement. They bear witness to the fact that we

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 9

always act in common; even the regime of engagement in familiarity is inevitably a way of being with others, both with those who are allowed into our intimacy and those who are not. Thévenot inquires into the limits of these different grammars, showing how each one is open to different forms of abuse and can lead to exclusions. One important aspect of these analytical categories is that they are, so to speak, orthogonal to cultural or national distinctions. Whether you are a French republican, a Muslim living in the Middle East, or a Buddhist monk in Japan, you have a domain of familiarity in which some others can be invited and from which other others are excluded; you share plans and projects with others or are exposed to the consequences of theirs; and you are sensitive to and a promoter of various definitions of the common good. These categories focus on ways of being and of acting together, rather than on values that are either shared or not shared, and rather than on rules that are either conceived as culturally relative or as universal. In consequence, regimes of engagement in a multicultural society often reveal forms of commonality that bypass cultural or group differences. Thévenot illustrates this with examples of resistance to the expulsion of undocumented aliens in France that were motivated not by traditional political commitment, but by affinities to a common place. The local school, shared by children of French citizens and of illegal immigrants, became the rallying point of actions to protect a world with which all were familiar. Regimes of engagement and grammars of commonality suggest that in multicultural societies, transgressions of cultural barriers are frequent, and they allow us to understand how agents from different cultural backgrounds can successfully coordinate common shared actions. They also reveal the extent to which the values present in commonality can be different from and independent of our shared or divergent public values. Rather than trying to locate the bonds that come to be established between agents in a space that is bipartitioned between particularity and universality, or between culture and universal equal treatment, Thévenot analyzes the processes through which bonds can arise in the absence of shared values. The last chapter of part one is a reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, by Axel Honneth, which criticizes the poverty not only of our conception of freedom, but also of the forms of freedom that are practiced and made real in our social world. Hegel, according to Honneth, was a sociologist before the term was ever coined. Not only did he analyze and describe the social world, but he also recognized that fundamental aspects of ethical life lie in social institutions and in the rela-

10 • Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

tions in which individuals engage. Ethics, according to him, is not an individual but a social science. Hegel considered that there were three different forms that human freedom can take. The third and superior form is realized through what he considered were the basic institutions of society: the family, market economy, and constitutional monarchy. Independently of Hegel’s specific characterization of the fundamental institution of “ethical life,” what is important, according to Honneth, is the idea that true freedom only exists in relations between persons where each one can recognize himself or herself in the free activity or desire of the other. According to Honneth, the two lesser forms of freedom identified by Hegel correspond, more or less, to what Isaiah Berlin called “negative freedom”—an unimpeded sphere of individual activity—and to Kantian moral autonomy, the ability to determine oneself in relation to what one views as good, right, or moral. If these are deemed by Hegel to be inferior forms of freedom, it is, in the first case, because there is no guarantee that the desires that motivate the agent in his or her individual sphere of activity are themselves free, and, in the second case, because “freedom” here, lacks the moment of “objectivity,” where the agent recognizes in the other the expression of his or her own reflexive self-relation. In both cases, freedom ultimately presents itself as freedom of choice within a list of well-motivated options. However, according to Hegel, it lacks a fundamental dimension of “ethical life,” which is the recognition of oneself and of one’s own freedom in the freedom of the other. Nonetheless, it is significant, according to Honneth, that Hegel neither dismissed nor rejected these lesser forms of freedom. To the contrary, he judged that they were essential to modern society and to the realization of ethical life. By maintaining these “subjective” forms of freedom in his ethical system, he opened the door, probably against his will, argues Honneth, to the historical transformation of an edifice that he tended to view as definitively completed. By maintaining these two forms of freedom, Hegel implanted in ethical life a dynamic mechanism through which protests in the name of what one believes is good and the conflictual changes that result from dissent can become part of the realization of freedom. Thus, the contemporary relevance of Hegel, according to Honneth, is to help us to understand how impoverished our freedom is when it remains confined to the claims of individual rights and of moral autonomy. These forms of freedom are indispensable and fundamental, but they remain limited. Real freedom can only be achieved through institutions and relations in which each one can recognize himself or

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 11

herself in the other. Hegel thought that there is a history of freedom, of equality, and of the universal. He thought that, historically, it is only through institutions and social relations that these ideas are made real and concrete. It is also true that he thought that the social embodiment and realization of freedom could only appear at a certain moment in time, before which neither freedom nor equality could really exist. Hegel further thought that this advent was final and definitive. Yet, argues Honneth, Hegel embedded in his analysis a dynamic mechanism that suggests, contrary to what he thought, that we have not yet reached the “end of history” and that ethical life is permanently at stake in the transformation of social institutions. In his way, Honneth provides a philosophical reading of the transformations of social bounds and boundaries that Sassen, Magatti, and Thévenot have been documenting and analyzing. Honneth focuses more on the way in which social bonds are realized through relations between agents and less on the formal dimensions of institutions. He insists on the ethical dimension present in such bonds and on the requirements of a fulfilling ethical life. In this way, he brings to the fore the ethical dimension of social bonds and boundaries that remains implicit in the three other contributions.

Beyond Imperial Universalism The universal, of course, is an idea that can be conceived in a variety of ways, but, in the world in which we live, the universal is also practiced. Non-government organizations, international agencies, governments, international treaties and tribunals, and many other institutions practice the universal, and these various practices confer upon it different shapes. As argued by Honneth, the universal is made real: it is given form and substance by institutions. It is through them and the actions of agents that the universal becomes concrete and effective. In this context, the question of the relationship between how it is conceived and how it is effectively realized becomes centrally important. However, this question tends to be viewed as a simple top-down issue, where failures in thinking explain the limits of actual practices. The four chapters in this section, in contrast, give a central place to the practices of the universal, which they recognize as significant in their own right, rather than as mere symptoms and expression of how the idea is conceived. Fuyuki Kurasawa, in chapter 5, “Western Humanitarianism and the Representation of Distant Suffering,” argues that Western humanitari-

12 • Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

anism, even if it is underwritten by two fundamental universalist principles—impartiality and unbounded charity—nonetheless unwittingly recreates hierarchical distinctions between the people of the world. Impartiality, the idea that care must be extended to all victims of crises regardless of their status or location, and charity, the idea of unconditional benevolence for those in need, both entail a rejection of differences in favor of universal egalitarianism. However, humanitarian campaigns for victims of crises that exploit our emotions to make us sensitive to the pleas of suffering others do so in a way that does not encourage the recognition of their moral equality. In particular, an analysis of the visual representations of suffering others shows them to be pictured as helpless, passive victims, as innocent, vulnerable human beings who are unaware of the structural forces that are tearing their life apart and who are radically unable to help themselves. Central to Kurasawa’s argument is the claim that the cultivation of good conscience and of a feeling of moral superiority is fundamental to the donor’s willingness to give. Such representations of the victims of crises, argues Kurasawa, are particularly troubling in the case of humanly constructed, conflict-based crises, which are the focus of his chapter. Instead of viewing the victims of these crises as equals whose rights have been violated—as actors who are striving to survive in difficult circumstances—we perceive them as suffering others who awaken our pity and charity. Such “good sentiments,” argues Kurasawa, do not promote critical understanding of their plight, nor reflection on the role we may have played in what is happening to them. To the contrary, they encourage a feeling of moral superiority in relation to strange others “who cannot even help themselves.” This tension between the universal equality of all who should be helped regardless of any difference that separates them from us, and the moral superiority of donors, which Kurasawa denounces, is not, he claims, something new. It was already present at the very inception of Western humanitarianism, which was always conceived as fulfilling a duty of assistance towards the “distant needy” rather than as satisfying the requirements of justice among equals engaged in a common enterprise. Western humanitarianism in its present form is essentially ambiguous. It rests on the recognition of universal equality and simultaneously reinforces current prejudices and divisions that negate this equality. Kurasawa, in conclusion, calls for a new form of humanitarianism, one that “mobilizes a different set of moral sentiments, namely, outrage and revolt at the perpetuation of structural injustices and the reproduction of massive socio-economic inequalities.”

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 13

Wolfgang Palaver, in chapter 6, “Parochial Altruism and Christian Universalism,” addresses in a different language some of the issues raised in the previous chapters. Parochial altruism is the conjunction of altruism inside the group and enmity towards outsiders. It corresponds to the basic idea that solidarity is always simultaneously with some and against others. Parochial altruism is an expression of the idea that bonds always imply boundaries. Building on results of Bowles (2006, 2008) and Girard (1977), Palaver argues that since the beginning of humanity, parochial altruism has characterized cooperation among humans. The greatest difficulty societies have always faced has been to institute forms of solidarity that did not require conflicts with outside enemies. Following Bergson’s distinction between closed and open religions and moralities, Palaver argues that open religions offer a way out of the impasse created by parochial altruism. The parable of the Good Samaritan in particular illustrates how charity can allow us to overcome the divisions that imprison us into antagonist groups, for the parable is not only about benevolence and kindness to those who are in need, but about care for a person who is a member of an outside group, an enemy. The Good Samaritan, who is the enemy of those to whom this parable is being told, breaks free from the parochial altruism of his group to help one of his enemies (a member of the listeners’ group), who has been the victim of a violent aggression. By giving the Good Samaritan as an example to imitate, the parable seeks in turn to disarm the parochial altruism of its listeners. Numerous religious traditions, argues Palaver, introduce us to a form of solidarity that neither implies nor requires the presence of outside enemies. However, taking advantage of that opening, he argues, is only possible if we recognize our relation to a transcendent God. Institutional religions nonetheless rarely succeed to live up to this lofty ideal. A particularly clear example of this failure is provided by the term “parochialism” itself, which is used by Bowles to qualify altruism. It derives from the Latin word for parish, the basic church community, and refers to an attitude of exclusion that is certainly not foreign to the history of Christianity. In fact, insists Palaver, historical Christianity is a mixed religion in which the closed elements are only slowly being transformed and, through this long process, is gradually being turned into a really universal religion. Historically, the Constantinian shift that took place when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire gave rise to “imperial universalism,” which is an important example of the entanglement of closed and open patterns of morality. This form of universalism is still with us, argues Palaver, and profoundly informs most current moral theories. It may be defined as imperial uni-

14 • Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

versalism, because it is open to all and therefore implies a form of universal equality, and as imperial universalism, because it recognizes only one form of the good life or of the just society, which it tries to extend to and impose on all. Imperial universalism typically fails to recognize and to accommodate differences and only views them as obstacles to the realization of true universalism.3 These two chapters deal with some of the ways in which our universal ideals can fail. They also suggest that the failures in this case are related. In spite of their different understanding and evaluation of charity, Palaver and Kurasawa would probably agree that the ambiguity of Western humanitarianism towards suffering others, who are seen both as equals and as in some way morally deficient, constitutes a form of imperial universalism. It bears witness to a moral judgment that measures others on a unique and unified scale that it considers universal. Both authors also focus directly on practices of the universal, those of humanitarianism and of religion. The next two chapters center on different ways in which political practices and institutions can profoundly distort universalism. In chapter 7, Paul Dumouchel inquires into the justification of partial commitment in liberal moral and political theory. How can a theory that claims as its starting point that individuals are the basic units of moral concern, sharing an equal moral value, simultaneously argue that compatriots should be granted a higher moral importance relative to more distant others? This contradiction is especially striking in a world like ours, where very often the greater distance that separates these others from compatriots has no other basis than the fact that they are not citizens. In this case, this distance does not correspond to any physical or geographical distance, or even to a lack of social proximity—these others may be our next-door neighbors—or even many times to any significant cultural difference. Dumouchel first rejects the common claim that the moral priority that we accord to compatriots is an expression of special or associative duties—that is to say, of obligations that we have towards some others only with whom we entertain special relations. He argues that the compatriot principle and other similar principles that formally grant a moral privilege to co-nationals are universal claims that equally extend to all citizens or to all members of the nation. Loyalty to compatriots is not a special duty. It is an equal universal symmetrical obligation extending to all individual members of the class to which it applies: the nation. The tension between such claims and the universal moral egalitarianism of liberalism is therefore falsely represented when construed as an expression of the dichotomy of the universal and the particular.

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 15

The compatriot principle is a universal obligation of lesser scope than the unbounded universal moral egalitarianism of liberalism, rather than a different type of duty. The question that this bounding of the universal raises is why: through what principle is the reduction of the scope of the obligation justified? Richard Miller offers an interesting answer to this question in a recent article. He argues that at least one form of the priority-ofcompatriot principle is grounded on the principle of universal equal respect; that form is the patriotic bias in tax-funded aid, which is to say the common belief that tax-funded aid should go first to underprivileged co-nationals rather than to distant others, even if the latter may be much more needy. This common belief, says Miller, is justified by the universal equal respect that we owe to all others and in particular to conationals with whom we participate in a system of reciprocally imposed coercive rules and obligations. Miller’s argument, claims Dumouchel, is in truth a variant of classical social contract arguments, like those of Hobbes, Locke, or Rawls. However, unlike these authors, Miller assumes from the outset the legitimacy of the state and of the inequalities that persist within it. In consequence, he actually presupposes what he wants to demonstrate: the existence of moral relations that ground the obligations that co-nationals owe to each other and that separate them from others. This circularity is not so much damaging to Miller’s argument as it is revealing. It makes clear that, contrary to what Miller argues, the real focus of the compatriot principle is not social and welfare rights, but the moral status of persons. The coercive power of the state that universally guarantees the basic rights and freedom of all those who take part in the pact of association simultaneously dissociates them from others— foreigners and non-nationals. Therefore, argues Dumouchel, the moral priority we grant to co-nationals is neither a mistake nor an illusion, but a consequence of the way in which we have institutionalized basic rights and freedoms through the coercive power of a state that holds the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. The contradiction between partial commitment to the state and universal obligations therefore proceeds from some of the basic presuppositions of liberal political theory. Commitment to a more open form of moral universalism, one that is neither splintered nor abridged by the divisions between nations, therefore requires us to readdress those fundamental presuppositions. In chapter 8, “A Reluctant Cosmopolitan,” Anne Phillips analyses the reasons why she is disinclined to accept being called a cosmopolitan, even if she accepts the basic tenets of this conception of justice. Her starting point is the manifest tension between multiculturalism, which

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stresses the importance of particular loyalties and identities in shaping our humanity, and cosmopolitanism, which, in contrast, insists on the universality, generality, and equality of moral claims. In the last few years, serious efforts have been made at bridging the gap between these two positions. However, there remains the question of whether this narrowing of the difference is the result of an original misrepresentation of the two positions or if it corresponds to a real rapprochement that could constitute, as she says, “a model for rethinking the relationship between justice and culture.” Phillips considers three sets of philosophical objections to cosmopolitanism: first, that cosmopolitanism commits us to a form of abstract universalism that ignores specificity and difference; second, that it gives insufficient weight to special bonds and attachments; and third, that it fails to perceive that inclusions simultaneously lead to exclusions. All three types of objections, she argues, can be successfully rebutted. Cosmopolitanism does not have to be indifferent to particularity, insensitive to special attachments, and narrow and exclusive. Its universalism can be grounded in the recognition of our shared vulnerability to pain and suffering. There is no reason to judge that cosmopolitanism necessarily rejects the bonds of attachments or that it understates their value. Furthermore, arguments that denounce universal obligations as being too distant to be motivating are not convincing. It is often claimed that obligation towards distant needy others fails to move agents to action. However, as Phillips says, “[we] are perhaps too willing to see in the widespread reluctance to share resources with people in distant lands a refutation of cosmopolitan fantasies. We should perhaps look more closely at the widespread reluctance to share resources with anyone before reaching that conclusion.” Finally, if it is true that universalism has never meant everyone and therefore has always implied exclusions, it is nevertheless a well-known fact that, historically, many of those who were originally excluded were later included. It would be an error to see this as a kind of progressive march toward the true universal. What was involved in those transformations was not the simple extension of a category, but the challenge of thinking differently about what being human means. This remains true today: being attentive to exclusion implies a renewed understanding of cosmopolitanism. The real question, therefore, is not that of choosing between “isms,” but of choosing the appropriate version of cosmopolitanism. In spite of the fact that philosophical objections to cosmopolitanism, according to her, are not convincing, Anne Phillips still hesitates to define herself as cosmopolitan. Why? Her reluctance is, she explains,

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 17

to some extent political. When Europe “is rushing headlong into bans on the public wearing of the hijab, niqab, and burqa, one should be prudent about endorsing a position that is too often conceived as the opposite of multiculturalism.” Beyond this contingent political situation, and more importantly, there is, she says, the ghost of the hierarchical relation between the traditional and the modern. In consequence, she remains a skeptical multiculturalist and a reluctant cosmopolitan. In the terms used in earlier chapters of this section, what feeds her reluctance at being labeled a cosmopolitan is the specter of imperial universalism. This danger is not simply a theoretical issue, but mostly manifests itself in the way universalism is embodied and realized through policies and institutions. Because imperial universalism represents as “universal” the bonds that define it, what it excludes can only subsist as an expression of particularism—of local customs and traditions that fail to reach out to the universal.

Towards a Reconceptualization of Liberalism Can liberalism move beyond the dichotomy of the universal and the particular? Can it escape parochial altruism and imperial universalism, or are they so deeply ingrained in its conceptual structure that it cannot open itself to a new understanding and to new practices of the universal? Individual autonomy is more and more often considered the foundation of liberal political morality. During the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of autonomy also gained a central place as a public value in Western liberal democracies. According to Geoffrey Brahm Levey, the critics of autonomy are right in their claim that this concept is often used as a blunt argument stopper to reject the claims of minorities. It is true that it frequently functions as a prop for imperial universalism. Nonetheless, these critics, he argues, wrongly conclude that autonomy should be abandoned or that it is too narrow and culturally limited an ideal to ground public life in a multicultural society. To the contrary, says Levey, autonomy “speaks to the interests of cultural minorities negotiating life today in liberal societies.” Rather than the abstract idea of autonomy, the starting point of chapter 9, “Liberal Autonomy and Minority Accommodation,” is the way in which autonomy functions in public discourses in multicultural liberal societies. Instead of searching for a purely theoretical solution to the question of the relation of individual autonomy to the values from other cultures, Levey asks how autonomy considered as a public value

18 • Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

informs the policies of liberal societies. How does it influence the responses that can be given to the particular claims of minority cultural groups? In order to answer these questions, he proposes a five-dimensional taxonomy of the practice of autonomy. An autonomous action must be voluntary (volition); it must correspond to the well-considered preferences of the agent (authenticity); it must be arrived at without undue pressure or outside influence (procedural independence); it should respect the autonomy of others (reciprocity); and should not be self-contradictory, in the sense that an agent’s exercise of autonomy should not deprive him or her of the ability for autonomous choice in the future (inalienability). Understood in this way, argues Levey, autonomy is a much more complex, open, accommodating, and truly democratic value than is often assumed by both its advocates and by its critics. Using various examples, those of the hijab, the kirpan, of the refusal to wear a motorcycle or construction helmet on the part of turban-wearing Sikhs, of male circumcision, and of female genital mutilation, Levey shows how these five criteria afford minority cultures handles to reasoned and thoughtful public discussions across cultures. Of course the weight that should be accorded to the different dimensions of autonomy is not fixed a priori. It is the temporary result of ongoing political negotiations, just as is the importance of autonomy relative to other social values such as public health or safety. In consequence, practices that are similarly placed in regard to the five criteria listed above will sometimes be treated quite differently. This, however, is how it should be, not only because of varying social circumstances, but also because cultures themselves change and, to a large extent, change as the result of these ongoing negotiations and discussions. It is not only the content or structure of the concept or value of autonomy as such that determines its capacity to accommodate and to coexist with other values, but also the practice of autonomy as a reference in public debates, and, in its practice, autonomy often turns out to be a lot less foreign or distant from the values of other cultures than it is generally thought to be. Accommodating cultural diversity in a multicultural society can also mean departing from the principle of formal equality in order to defend specific groups, either national minorities or other groups that, in the past, experienced colonialism or other forms of injustice. According to Gurpreet Mahajan in chapter 10, “Cultural Boundaries and the Reasonable Accommodation of Minorities,” such approaches suffer from two major difficulties. First, because they ignore the processes through which cultures are constantly being renegotiated and differences ho-

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 19

mogenized, they tend to objectify cultural communities. Second, they depend on specific, exceptional situations. In consequence, they fail to address the range of practices that are seeking accommodation in today’s liberal democracies. In particular, they have little to say to the growing number and importance of claims made by religious communities. Secularism has recently been revisited in a way that does not in any manner imply renouncing equality or universality in an effort to address these demands within the framework of equal treatment, rather than of special provisions. Chapter 10 seeks to evaluate the success of what has recently been defined as “open” (Bouchard and Taylor 2008) or “moderate” (Modood 2009) secularism. Unlike its more rigid version, this manner of secularism does not erect a wall between religion and politics. It begins by recognizing the importance of religion in social and individual life and wants to make room for religions in the public domain in a way that is fair and equal for all. Contrary to what is central in accommodation policies for national minorities, open secularism does not aim at providing protection for a distinct way of life, but at meeting the requirements of moral equality and of freedom of conscience. If open secularism is open to allowing the expression and presence of religious symbols in the public sphere, it nonetheless “holds on to the belief that some religious symbols/practices may restrict or hinder the performance of one’s professional and institutional responsibilities.” It therefore shares with strict forms of secularism the belief that donning religious symbols can compromise the neutrality and impartiality of public officials, but mostly it partakes in the illusion that impartiality can be realized simply by removing all symbols of particular identities. Open secularism that encourages us to listen and to attend to the claims of religious communities can facilitate a modus vivendi between them. However, argues Mahajan, it cannot create between them an “overlapping consensus” because it assumes that being situated limits an agent’s capacity for dialogue concerning the beliefs and practices that define the self. Like more rigid forms of secularism, open secularism also fails to understand that being a member of a community is to be simultaneously constituted by sameness and difference. That is to say, membership in a community does not correspond to adopting one simple, once-and-forever-determined identity; to the contrary, it is something that is open to change and to constant renegotiation. The presence of nonhostile others can transform this intracommunal dialogue into a space for reconsidering one’s cultural codes and norms, and liberal democracy ensures that others will be nonhostile.

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However, secularism as a policy, whether open or rigid, argues that, in the public domain, these others should not be met as others, but as the same. In consequence, because it hinders the dialogue through which they are transformed, it ultimately and paradoxically confines agents to the identity that it wants them to abandon. In other words, both open and moderate secularism fail to satisfy the requirements of moral equality and of freedom of conscience because they subscribe to the belief that the bonds that hold members of a religious community together necessarily constitute a boundary that separates them from and opposes them to others. In consequence they require agents to hide the symbols that signify these bonds in the hope that privatizing the symbols will make the bonds disappear. Reiko Gotoh, in the final chapter, “Arrow, Rawls, and Sen,” proposes elements of a reconceptualization of liberalism. She analyses the continuity and discontinuities in the methodology of political economy and in the idea of liberalism in the contributions of Arrow, Rawls, and Sen. Her starting point is Kenneth Arrow’s social choice theory, which can be seen as providing a particular formalization of some of the basic concepts of liberalism. A social choice rule, according to social choice theory, is a procedure that associates the (universal) set of individual values or preferences with a set of social choices. Any such rule, on which are imposed a number of conditions, can be viewed as a particular “constitution of liberty” in the sense that the rule defines the manner in which individual choices—the expressions of individual freedom—are translated in social options. Furthermore, in such models, individuals appear both as the evaluators and as the recipients of social policies. Building on Amartya Sen’s criticism of Arrow, Gotoh argues that one of the weaknesses of Arrow’s original approach lies in the fact that liberalism is conceptualized in excessive proximity to market mechanisms, which fails to take into account considerations of justice in the translation of individual choices into social values. Rawls can be a useful guide to remedy this difficulty, but only if he is interpreted with care, for at first sight it may seem that, like Arrow, he also puts excessive emphasis on the need for a complete ordering of choices and on the determinacy of adjustment between different criteria. However, according to Gotoh, a more attentive reading reveals Rawls’s position to be much closer to Sen’s and sensitive to the indeterminacy of justice—that is to say, to the impossibility of giving a complete and definitive answer to every question of justice. This indeterminacy, argues Sen, neither makes justice impossible or meaningless, but it suggests that instead of aiming for an

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 21

exhaustive theory of perfect justice, we should take as our objective the reduction of patent injustices. In response to the feminist and multicultural criticism of the abstract universalism of liberalism, Gotoh proposes a social rule, or “constitution of liberty,” that addresses issues of justice using the category of basic capability in a way that is sensitive to differences in social positions and that can take into account incommensurable diversity in the content of basic capability among different groups—that is to say, a social rule that can respond to the fact that it may be impossible to determine who is the least advantaged in a society taken as a whole, by reason of the important differences that may exist between agents and groups. In consequence, this social rule, which is by definition universal, can simultaneously be sensitive to local differences between groups. Furthermore, it is consistent with the idea of public reciprocity, as well as with the individual autonomy of agents conceived as having multilayered preferences. One of the main contributions of Sen, which this approach develops, is the introduction in social choice theory of the idea of “positionality”—that is to say, the fact that the opinions, preferences, or interests of agents are expressed from a specific social or cultural point of view, which may be characterized through a bundle of parameters. The positionality of individual values can, in consequence, be taken into account without transgressing the requirements of freedom, impartiality, and universality that are central to liberalism. Therefore, claims Gotoh, beyond the analysis and reinterpretation of Arrow, Rawls, and Sen, what this chapter ultimately illustrates is the possibility of a reconceptualization of the “constitution of liberty” that can reflect the positionality of individuals both as evaluators and as recipients of social states, and, in consequence, the possibility of overcoming the dichotomy between universal rules of justice and the particular positions of groups and individuals. The conclusion, “Social Bonds as Freedom,” brings together the various threads contained in the three sections of this volume. We argue that the difficulties facing cosmopolitan justice or liberal multicultural societies are not adequately captured when they are imprisoned in a simple logical contraction. The dichotomy of the universal and the particular provides an in-principle explanation that has little to do with the complex and changing reality of the present world. Rather, it is the institutional and political relations between the social bonds that hold groups together, and the boundaries that separate them from each

22 • Paul Dumouchel and Reiko Gotoh

other, as well as the way in which these are conceived, that allow or exclude the accommodation of the claims of diverse groups into a universal framework of equal justice for all.

Paul Dumouchel is professor of philosophy at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He is coauthor, with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, of L’Enfer des choses, René Girard et la logique de l’économie (Paris: Seuil, 1979) and author of Emotions essai sur le corps et le social (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en rond, 1999). With Reiko Gotoh, he coedited Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His latest books are Le sacrifice inutile essai sur la violence politique (Paris: Flammarion, 2011) and The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays (Michigan State University Press, 2014). Reiko Gotoh is professor at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo (Japan). Her areas of interest are economics and philosophy, justice, the capability approach, social choice, and welfare. With Paul Dumouchel, she coedited Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen (Cambridge University Press, 2009); with Amartya Sen, she coauthored Wellbeing and Justice [in Japanese] (University of Tokyo Press, 2008). She is the author of Economical Philosophy of Justice: Rawls and Sen [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shinposha, 2002), and, with K. Suzumura, coauthor of Amartya Sen: Economics & Ethics [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Jikkyo Shuppan, 2001).

Notes 1. For a critical overview of the importance of the debate between particularism and universalism in ethics, see O’Neill 1996, 2000. 2. “Techno,” because these transformations are made possible by and rest on continuous technological developments; “nihilistic,” because it replaces meaning by the exaltation of immediate experience and the narratives that gave sense to our common life by exclusive attention to efficiency; finally “capitalism,” because it is driven by the search for profit and economic growth. 3. Imperial universalism is implicit in what may be described as the paradox of liberalism—that is, when liberalism is conceived as the only moral form of social organization because it is open to the plurality of definitions of the good life.

Introduction. Of Bonds and Boundaries • 23

References Barry, B. 2001. Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Banting, K. and W. Kymlicka (eds.). 2006. Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Bouchard, G. and C. Taylor. 2008. Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, Government of Quebec. Bowles, S. 2006. “Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling and the Evolution of Human Altruism.” Science 314(5805): 1569–72. ———. 2008. “Being Human: Conflict: Altruism’s Midwife.” Nature 456: 326–27. Girard, R. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by P. Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hewitt, R. 2005. White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, W. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Modood, T. 2009. “Moderate Secularism and Multiculturalism.” Politics. 29 (1): 71–76. Nussbaum, M. 2009. “The Challenge of Gender Justice.” In R. Gotoh and P. Dumouchel (eds.), Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, O. 1996. Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. Bounds of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tully, J. 2008. Public Philosophy in a New Key: Volume 1, Democracy and Civic Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Social Bonds in Transformation

CHAPTER 1

Incompleteness and the Possibility of Making Towards Denationalized Citizenship? Saskia Sassen

Beneath the reinvigorated imperial logics that organize the political economy of the US today, emergent social dynamics are enabling disadvantaged and minoritized groups to make new forms of the political (Young 2002; Fraser 2007; Yuval-Davis 1999; Bada, Fox, and Selee 2006; Nussbaum 2008; Bartlett 2007; Smith 2003). New types of political actors are taking shape, changing the relationship between the state and the individual (Bosniak 2006; Shachar 2009; Westbrook 2007). The particular aspect in this larger configuration that I pursue here concerns the fact that this is a period when, once again, citizenship reveals itself to be an open condition, notwithstanding its high level of formalization. Elsewhere (Sassen 2008: chapter 6, 1996: chapter 3),1 I have developed the argument that citizenship is an incompletely theorized contract between the state and the citizen. This incompleteness makes it possible for a highly formalized institution to accommodate change—more precisely, to accommodate the possibility of responding to change without sacrificing its formal status. Secondly, my argument is that the longevity of the institution suggests that it is meant to be incomplete—that is to say, capable of responding to the historically conditioned meaning of citizenship. Incompleteness brings to the fore the work of making, whether it is making in response to changed conditions, new subjectivities, or new instrumentalities. Finally, it is the outsider and the excluded who have been key makers of this incompleteness by subjecting the institution to new types of claims across time and space—from rights to citizenship by non-property owners to fullness of marriage rights by gays and lesbians. There are elements in these dynamics of transforma-

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tion that only become formalized long after the original claim-making and hence in their time are easily thought of as pre-political. But I argue that these elements are better defined as informal or not-yet-formalized types of politics. I locate my inquiry at this point of incompleteness so as to open up the analysis to the role played by the making of the political, especially by the excluded. A critical distinction in my analysis is that between the incompleteness of a formalized institution and the formal exclusions it contains. The latter pertains to what is a visible excluding (such as foreign-born who are not naturalized, or nonwhites and non-property owners in earlier times in the US). The incompleteness that concerns me here is of a specific sort. It does not pertain to what is left out knowingly, and perhaps necessarily, in the process of formalizing, and which can become highly visible through this excluding. Rather the kind of incompleteness that concerns me is integral to the condition of being formalized.2 It is rendered invisible by the fact itself of full formalization. It is not captured by Weber’s concept of the iron cage. I am interested in the frictions between the formalized and the incomplete. Incompleteness enables a formal institution to incorporate change, including change that is potentially lethal to that institution. Formal institutions generally cannot avoid the unsettlements of daily life and, more generally, the conflicts that mark an epoch, a period. Some formalized institutions are sufficiently abstract to escape with only minor chinks in their armor. But this is not the case with institutions that encase critical and contested components of daily life or of an epoch, such as citizenship. These institutions can be brought down, no matter how powerful their formalization and their supporters. The divinity of the sovereign in medieval times and slavery in modern times are two grand cases of the fall of formalized institutions. The conceptualizing of these various issues is organized here by the proposition that insofar as citizenship is at least partly and variably shaped by the conditions within which it is embedded, conditions that have changed in specific and general ways, today we may well be seeing yet another set of changes in the institution itself as we enter a new global phase. These changes may not yet be formalized, and some may never become fully formalized. Today, one of the critical dynamics of change is globalization in its multiple incarnations, from organizational to subjective. In my work, I have long insisted that it is a mistake to see the global and the national as mutually exclusive and in some sort of zero-sum relationship—what one gains, the other loses (e.g., Sassen 2008, 1996).

Incompleteness and the Possibility of Making • 29

I find and theorize that the national, including the national state, is one of the strategic institutional locations for the global. That is to say, some of the larger contextual changes that may carry specific consequences for citizenship in our current era include changes in the national. Thus citizenship, even if situated in institutional settings that are “national,” is a possibly changed institution if the meaning of the national itself has changed. The changes brought about by globalizing dynamics in the territorial and institutional organization of state authority are also transforming citizenship. I interpret these types of changes as a partial and often incipient denationalizing of citizenship to distinguish it from post-national and transnational trends, which are also taking place. With the term “denationalization,” I seek to capture something that remains connected to the “national” as constructed historically and is indeed profoundly imbricated with it, but is so on historically new terms of engagement. “Incipient” and “partial” are two qualifiers I find useful in my discussion of denationalization. From the perspective of nation-based citizenship theory, some of these transformations might be interpreted as a decline or devaluation of citizenship, but I argue that this is, rather, a feature of that complex incompleteness that marks the institution and allows it to accommodate transformations without sacrificing its formal status. Some of the transformations that are linked to particular features of globalization—notably the denationalizing of the national—are easily obscured by the fact that the institution remains embedded in the language, the code, the representations of the national. Here I examine formal and informal changes in the rights of citizens, in citizens’ practices, and in the subjective dimensions of the institution. By including nonformalized “rights,” practices, and subjectivities, the analysis can grasp instabilities and possibilities for further change in the institution.

An Incomplete Subject The rights articulated through the subject of the citizen are of a particular type and cannot be easily generalized to other types of subjects. Yet the complexity and multiple tensions built into the formal institution of citizenship make it a powerful heuristic for examining the question of rights generally and the specific case of rights issued by national states. The type of contextualizing I advance here brings to the fore the particularity of what is often universalized: the national citizen as a rights-bearing subject.

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Elsewhere (Sassen 2008: chapters 2 and 3), I have examined the active making of diverse kinds of rights-bearing subjects. For instance, the making of a citizen-subject in medieval times issued out of the active making of urban law by urban burghers. England and the United States in the 1800s saw the shaping of a fully enabled property-owning citizen (epitomized by the industrial bourgeoisie) and a disadvantaged citizen (the normally male factory worker), an inequality formalized in the law. The 1900s saw the partial remaking of this disadvantaged citizen through civil and workplace struggles: disadvantaged subjects fought for and gained several formal rights. These are just a few instances in recent Western history. Struggles for making a rights-bearing subject have happened across the centuries and around the world, with vast variations of form and content. The modern twenty-first-century citizen arising out of the nation-state is also being remade in bits and pieces, even though formally this category may appear permanent. My focus here is on how this highly formalized institution confronts today’s changes in the larger social context, in the law, in political subjectivities, and in discursive practices. A key element bringing these various histories together, as well as securing the durability of the institution of citizenship, has been the larger historical project usually described as the development of the modern state: the project to render national major institutions that might well have followed a different trajectory, and to some extent did for most of recorded history. Political membership as a national category is today an inherited condition, one that is experienced as a given rather than as a process of making a rights-bearing subject. And while its making in Europe arose out of the conditions of the cities, from the Greek city-states to the cities of the Late Middle Ages, today it is generally understood to be inextricably articulated with the national state (Himmelfarb 2001; see Abu-Lughod 1989 for another geography of this history of political membership). Yet today’s significant, even if not absolute, transformations in the condition of the national generally, and the national state in particular, help make visible the historicity of the formal institution of citizenship and thus show its national spatial character as but one of several possible framings. Both the nation state and citizenship have been constructed in elaborate and formal ways. And each has evolved historically as a tightly packaged bundle of what were often rather diverse elements. Some of the main dynamics at work today are destabilizing these national bundlings and bringing to the fore both the fact itself of that bundling and its particularity. The work of making and formalizing a unitary packaging for diverse elements comes under pressure in both

Incompleteness and the Possibility of Making • 31

formalized (for example, the granting of dual nationality and recognition of the international human rights regime) and nonformalized ways (for example, granting undocumented immigrants in the United States the right to obtain mortgages so they can buy homes). Among the destabilizing dynamics at work are globalization and digitization, both as material processes and as signaling subjective possibilities or imaginaries. In multiple ways, they perform changes in the formal and informal relationships between the national state and the citizen. There are also a range of emergent political practices, often involving hitherto silent or silenced population groups and organizations. Through their destabilizing effects, these dynamics and actors are producing operational and rhetorical openings for the emergence of new types of political subjects and new spatialities for politics. More broadly, the destabilizing of national state-centered hierarchies of legitimate power and allegiance has enabled a multiplication of nonformalized or only partly formalized political dynamics and actors. Today’s condition of unsettlement helps make legible the diversity of sources and institutional locations for rights, as well as the changeability and variability of the rights-bearing subject that is the citizen, notwithstanding the formal character of the institution. We can detect a partial redeployment of specific components of citizenship across a wide range of institutional locations and normative orders, going well beyond the national bond. These are components that have been held together rather tightly for the last hundred years. We also can detect a growing range of sites where formal or experiential features of citizenship generate instability in the institution, and hence the possibility of changes. Analytically, I distinguish between citizenship markers arising from the formal apparatus of the nation-state, including citizenship as a formal institution, on the one hand, and, on the other, citizenship markers arising outside that formal apparatus (that can, at the limit, signal types of informal citizenship). Among the first, I include the changing relationship between citizenship and nationality, the increasingly formalized interaction between citizenship rights and human rights, the implications for formal citizenship of the privatizing of executive power along with the erosion of citizens’ privacy rights, and the elaboration of a series of portable citizenship rights for high-level professionals engaged in novel types of formal cross-border economic transactions (Sassen 2008: chapters 4, 5, and 6). Among the second, I include a range of incipient and typically not formalized developments in the institution that can be organized into three types of empirical cases. One category is the processes that alter a

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status and involve both informal and formal institutional environments. Two examples illustrate the range of possible instances. One is the fact that international human rights enter the national court system through an often rather informal process, which, with time, can become stabilized and eventually made part of national law. The other is the fact that undocumented immigrants who demonstrate long-term residence and good conduct can make a claim for regularization on the basis, ultimately, of their long-term violation of the law because this temporal dimension points to, in my reading, the active making by the immigrant of the material conditions supporting that claim (e.g., sustaining the duties of neighborliness, parenthood, employee, etc. over many years). These types of dynamics are good examples of one of the theses that have organized much of my research in previous work: excluded actors and not fully formalized norms are factors that can make history, even though they become recognized only when formalized. A second type of empirical case is the variety of components usually bundled with the set of formal citizenship rights even though their legal status is of a different sort. A possible way of categorizing these components is in terms of practices, identities, and locations for the enactment of citizenship (see Bosniak 2000a). This differentiation allows me to focus on subjects who are by definition categorized as not political in the formal sense of the term, such as the subject that is the “housewife” or the “mother,” but who may have considerable political agency and be an emergent political actor. And the third type of empirical example is that of subjects not quite fully authorized by the law, such as undocumented immigrants, but who can nonetheless function as bearers of partial rights (for example, the right to wages for work done) and, more generally, as part of a larger informal political landscape. One of the critical institutional developments that gives meaning to such informal political actors and practices is the thesis that the formal political apparatus today accommodates less and less of the political. While the US is perhaps emblematic of this shrinking presence of the political in the formal state apparatus, it is a condition that I argue is increasingly evident in a growing number of liberal democracies.

When the Global Triangulates Between the Nation-State and Citizenship Some of the major transformations occurring today under the impact of globalization may give citizenship yet another set of features as it

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continues to respond to the conditions within which it is embedded. The nationalizing of the institution that took place over the last few centuries may give way to a partial denationalizing. A fundamental dynamic in this regard is the growing articulation of globalization with national economies and the associated withdrawal of the state from various spheres of citizenship entitlements, with the possibility of a corresponding dilution of loyalty to the state. In turn, citizens’ loyalty may be less crucial to the state today than it was at a time of intense warfare and its need for loyal citizen-soldiers. Global firms and global markets mostly benefit from peace among the rich countries—with the exception of firms and markets involved in war industries. The “international” project represented by such firms and markets is radically different from what it was in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. This became evident in the debates leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, an event that renationalized politics. Except for highly specialized sectors, such as oil and war-linked supplies and services, global firms in the United States and elsewhere were basically opposed to the invasion. Also, the position of the citizen has been markedly weakened by states’ concern with national security, especially that of the United States; this introduces yet another variable that can blur the differences between being and not being a citizen. Where previously nationality could determine designation as a suspect resident citizen, as, for example, Germans and Japanese in the United States during World War II, today all citizens are, in principle, suspect in the United States given the government’s War on Terror. Many of the dynamics that built economies, polities, and societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved an articulation between the national scale and the growth of entitlements for citizens. This articulation was not only a political process; it contained a set of utility functions for workers, for property owners, and for the state. These utility functions have changed since the 1970s. During industrialization, class formation, class struggles, and the advantages of employers or workers tended to scale at the national level and became identified with state-produced legislation and regulations, entitlements, and obligations. The state came to be seen as a key to ensuring the well-being of significant portions of both the working class and the bourgeoisie. The development of welfare states in the twentieth century resulted in good part from the struggles by workers whose victories contributed to actually make capitalism more sustainable; advantaged sectors of the population, such as the growing middle class, also found their interests playing out at the national level and supported by national state plan-

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ning, such as investment in transportation and housing infrastructure. Legislatures (or parliaments) and judiciaries developed the needed laws and systems and became a crucial institutional domain for granting entitlements to the poor and the disadvantaged. Today, the growing weight given to notions of the “competitiveness” of states puts pressure on the particular utility functions of that older phase, and new rationales are developed for cutting down on those entitlements, which in turn weakens the reciprocal relationship between the citizen and the state. This weakening relationship takes on specific kinds of content for different sectors of the citizenry. The loss of entitlements among poor and low-waged workers are perhaps the most visible case (Munger 2002), but the impoverishment of the old traditional middle classes, evident in a growing number of countries around the world, is not far behind. Finally, the intergenerational effects of these trends signal more change. Thus the disproportionate unemployment among the young and the fact that many of them develop only weak ties to the labor market, once thought of as a crucial mechanism for the socialization of young adults, will further weaken the loyalty and sense of reciprocity between these future adults and the state (Roulleau-Berger 2002). As these trends have come together at the turn of the twenty-first century, they are destabilizing the meaning of citizenship as it was forged in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. The growing emphasis on notions of the “competitive state” and the associated emphasis on markets have brought into question the foundations of the welfare state broadly understood—that is, the idea that the state bears responsibilities for the basic wellbeing of its citizens and that the state’s utility function is to be distinguished from that of private firms (Aman 1998, 2004; Schwarcz 2002; Hall and Biersteker 2002). For Marshall ([1950] 1977) and many others, the welfare state is an important ingredient of social citizenship; the reliance on markets to solve political and social problems is seen, at its most extreme, as a savage attack on the principles of citizenship (Saunders 1993). For Saunders, citizenship inscribed in the institutions of the welfare state is a buffer against the vagaries of the market and the inequalities of the class system. The nature of citizenship has also been challenged by the erosion of privacy rights justified by the declaration of national emergencies, as well as by a proliferation of old issues that have gained new attention. Among the latter is the question of state membership of aboriginal communities, stateless people, and refugees.3 All of these have important implications for human rights in relation to citizenship (Benhabib 2004; Brysk and Shafir 2004). These social

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changes in the role of the nation-state, the impact of globalization on states, and the relationship between dominant and subordinate groups also have major implications for questions of identity. Ong (1999: chapters 1 and 4) finds that in cross-border processes, individuals actually accumulate partial rights, a form she calls “flexible citizenship.”4 Global forces that challenge and transform the authority of nation-states may give human rights an expanded role in the normative regulation of politics as politics become more global (Jacobson 1996; 2006; Soysal 1994; 2000). If citizenship is theorized as necessarily national (Himmelfarb 2001), then these new developments are not fully captured in the language of citizenship.5 An alternative interpretation would be to suspend the national, as in post-national conceptions, and to posit that the issue of where citizenship is enacted should, as Bosniak argues (2000a), be determined in light of developing social practice.6 Over the last two decades there have been several efforts to organize the various understandings of citizenship: citizenship as legal status, as possession of rights, as political activity, and as a form of collective identity and sentiment (Kymlicka and Norman 1994; Carens 2000; Benhabib 2002; Vogel and Moran 1991; Conover 1995; Bosniak 2000b). Further, some scholars (Young 2002; Turner 1993; Taylor 2007) have posited that cultural citizenship is a necessary part of any adequate conception of citizenship, while others have insisted on the importance of economic citizenship (Kirsch 2006; Fernández-Kelly and Shefner 2005; Sassen 1996: chapter 2). Still others emphasize the psychological dimension and the ties of identification and solidarity we maintain with other groups in the world (Conover 1995; Carens 2000; Pogge 2007). Many of these distinctions deconstruct the category of citizenship and are helpful for formulating novel conceptions. And they do not necessarily cease to be nation-state based. The development of notions of post-national citizenship requires questioning the assumption that people’s sense of citizenship in liberal democratic states is fundamentally characterized by nation-based frames. In explaining post-national citizenship, these questions of identity need to be taken into account along with formal developments such as EU citizenship and the growth of the international human rights regime (Baubock 2006). Insofar as legal and formal developments have not gone very far, a focus on experiences of identity emerges as crucial to post-national citizenship. A focus on changes inside the national state and the possibility of new types of formalizations of citizenship status and rights—formalizations that might contribute to a partial denationalizing of certain features of citizenship—should be part of a more general examination of

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change in the institution of citizenship. Distinguishing post-national and denationalized dynamics in the construction of new components of citizenship allows us to take account of changes that might still use the national frame yet are in fact altering the meaning of that frame. The scholarship that critiques the assumption that identity is basically tied to a national polity represents a broad range of positions, many having little to do with post-national or denationalized conceptions. For some, the focus is on the fact that people often maintain stronger allegiances to and identification with particular cultural and social groups within the nation than with the nation at large (Young 1990; Taylor 2007). Others have argued that the notion of a national identity is based on the suppression of social and cultural differences (Friedman 1973; Young 2002). These and others have called for recognition of differentiated citizenship and modes of incorporation predicated not only on individuals but also on group rights, often understood as culturally distinct groups (Young 1990; Kymlicka and Norman 1994; Taylor 2007; Conover 1995). As De los Ángeles Torres (1998) has observed, the “cultural pluralist” (Kymlicka and Norman 1994) or multiculturalist positions (SpinnerHalev 1994) posit alternatives to a national sense of identity but continue to use the nation-state as the normative frame and to understand the social groups involved as parts of national civil society. This also holds for proposals to democratize the public sphere through multicultural representation (Young 1990; Kymlicka 1995) since the public sphere is thought of as national. Critical challenges to statist premises can also be found in concepts of local citizenship, typically conceived of as centered in cities (e.g., Magnusson 1990, 2000; Isin 2000), or by reclaiming for citizenship domains of social life often excluded from conventional conceptions of politics (Bosniak 2000a). Examples of the latter are the recognition of citizenship practices in the workplace (Pateman 1989; Lawrence 2004), in the economy at large (Dahl 1989; Sennett 2003), in the family (Jones 1998; Hindman 2007), and in new social movements (Tarrow 1994; Magnusson 2000; Bartlett 2007). These are more sociological versions of citizenship, not confined by formal political criteria for specifying citizenship. While some of these critical literatures do not go beyond the nation-state and thereby do not fit in post-national conceptions of citizenship, they may fit in a conception of citizenship as becoming denationalized. Partly influenced by these critical literatures and partly originating in other fields, a rapidly growing scholarship has begun to elaborate notions of transnational civil society and citizenship. It focuses on new transnational forms of political organization emerging in a context of

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rapid globalization and proliferation of cross-border activities of all sorts of “actors,” notably immigrants, NGOs, first-nation people, human rights, the environment, arms control, women’s rights, labor rights, and rights of national minorities (Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Bonilla et al. 1998; Brysk and Shafir 2004). For Falk (1993) these are citizen practices that go beyond the nation. Transnational activism emerges as a form of global citizenship, which Magnusson (1996: 103) describes as “popular politics in its global dimension.” Wapner (1996: 312–33) sees these emergent forms of civil society as “a slice of associational life which exists above the individual and below the state, but also across national boundaries.” Questions of identity and solidarity include the rise of transnationalism (de los Ángeles Torres 1998; Cohen 1995; Franck 1992; Levitt 2001) and translocal loyalties (Appadurai 1996: 165; Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1993). Third is the emergence of transnational social and of political communities constituted through trans-border migration. These begin to function as bases for new forms of citizenship identity to the extent that members maintain identification and solidarities with one another across state territorial divides (Levitt 2001; Portes 1995; Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1993; Smith 2005; Soysal 1997). These are, then, citizenship identities that arise out of networks, activities, and ideologies that span the home and the host society. Fourth is a sort of global sense of solidarity and identification, partly out of humanitarian convictions (Slawner and Denham 1998; Pogge 2007). Today there are often practical considerations at work, as in global ecological interdependence, economic globalization, global media, and commercial culture, all of which create structural interdependencies and a sense of global responsibility (Falk 1993; Held and McGrew 2007; Hoerder 2000). In brief, through different vocabularies and questions, these diverse literatures make legible the variability of citizenship. In so doing, they also signal what we might think of as the incompleteness of citizenship, one inherent to the institution given its historicity and embeddedness.7 In this incompleteness also lies the possibility of its transformation across time and place.

Citizenship Disassembled: A Lens into the Question of Rights These empirical conditions and conceptual elaborations of the late twentieth century together produce a fundamental question: what is the analytic terrain within which we need to place the question of rights

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as articulated in the institution of citizenship (Sassen 1996: chapter 2, 2008: chapter 6)? The history of interactions between disadvantage and expanded inclusions signals the possibility that the new conditions of inequality and difference evident today and the new types of claim-making they generate may bring about further transformations in the institution of citizenship. For instance, although it has an old history,8 the question of diversity assumes new meanings and contains new elements. Notable here are the globalization of economic and cultural relationships and the repositioning of “culture,” including cultures embedded in religions that encompass basic norms for the conduct of daily life.9 It is clear that republican conceptions of citizenship are but one of several options, even though they can accommodate diversity via the distinction of public and private spheres.10 There are three aspects that begin to capture the complexity of contemporary citizenship and, more broadly, the formation of a rightsbearing subject. One of these can be captured through the proposition that citizenship is partly produced by the practices of the excluded; this opens up the terrain for rights in a context where the grip of the nation-state on questions of identity and membership is weakened by major social, economic, political, and subjective trends. Second, by expanding the formal inclusions of citizenship, the national state itself contributed to create some of the conditions that eventually facilitated key aspects of post- or transnational citizenship, particularly in a context of globalization. Third, insofar as the state itself has undergone significant transformation, notably the changes bundled under the notion of the competitive state and the quasi-privatized executive, there is a reduced likelihood that state institutions will do the type of legislative and judiciary work that in the past led to expanded formal inclusions. These three dynamics point to the absence of a linear evolution in the institution of citizenship. The progressively expanding inclusions that took off in the United States in the 1960s, notably the struggles for civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and feminist struggles, produced conditions for new trajectories in the development of citizenship. Those inclusions enabled a variety of actors to make claims. The formalizing of increasing inclusions has contributed to the centrality of equality to citizenship, giving it an aspirational quality that brings yet another dimension to the question of rights. In a socioeconomic context where the traditional protected middle classes are becoming impoverished, equality becomes a substantive norm that takes the project of citizenship beyond formal equality of rights. Also, the traditional middle classes that have enjoyed formal equality of rights move

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towards new types of substantive claims. With the growing importance of national law for the giving of presence and voice to hitherto silenced minorities, the tension between the legal status and the normative project of citizenship has also grown: the legal status is no longer enough not only for those who are minoritized socially, but also for the newly vulnerable traditional middle classes. For many, citizenship is now a normative project whereby social membership becomes increasingly comprehensive and open-ended. Globalization and human rights contribute to this tension and thereby further the elements of a new discourse on rights. Though in very different ways, both globalization and the human rights regime have contributed to destabilizing the existing political hierarchies of legitimate power and allegiance over the last decade as economic insecurity fed new and old racisms and nationalisms. The pressures of globalization on national states have also redirected claim-making. This is already evident, among other cases, in the decision by first-nations people to address the UN and claim direct representation in international fora, rather than going through the national state. It is also evident in the increasingly institutionalized framework of the international human rights regime that now offers some actors the possibility to bypass unilateral state sovereignty (Jacobson and Ruffer 2006). We see today a growing emphasis on claims and aspirations that go beyond a national definition of rights and obligations, facilitating in the process new discourses and subjectivities. Though often presented as a single concept and experienced as a unitary institution, citizenship actually describes a number of discrete but connected components in the relation between the individual and the polity. Current developments are bringing to light and accentuating the distinctiveness of these various components, from formal rights to practices and subjective dimensions, and the tension between citizenship as a formal legal status and as a normative project or an aspiration (Bosniak 2006; Shachar 2009). The formal equality that attaches to all citizens rarely embodies the need for substantive equality in social terms. Finally, the growing prominence of an international human rights regime has produced synergies between citizenship rights and human rights, even as it has underscored the differences between these two types of rights. Insofar as citizenship is a status that articulates legal rights and responsibilities, the mechanisms through which this articulation is shaped and implemented can be analytically distinguished from the status itself. In the medieval cities of Europe, urban residents themselves set up

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the structures through which to establish and thicken the rights and obligations of the citizen, a special status to be distinguished from the overall population of urban residents. They did so through the codification of a specific type of law—urban law—that constructed them as rights-bearing subjects. Today it is largely the national state that articulates the subject of the citizen. Some of these issues can be illustrated through the evolution of equal citizenship. Equal citizenship is central to the modern institution of citizenship; the expansion of specific types of equality among citizens has shaped a good part of its evolution in the twentieth century. Yet insofar as equality is based on membership, as a criterion, citizenship status forms the basis of exclusive politics and identities. This exclusiveness can be seen as essential because it provides the sense of solidarity necessary for the development of modern citizenship in the nation-state (Walzer 1995; Bosniak 1996). In a country such as the United States, the principle of equal citizenship remains unfulfilled, even after the successful struggles and legal advances of the second half of the twentieth century. Groups defined by race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and other identities still face various exclusions from full participation in public life. This is especially so at the level of practices even in the face of changes in the formal legal status and notwithstanding formal equality as citizens. Feminist and race-critical scholarship has highlighted the failure of gender- and race-neutral conceptions of citizenship, such as legal status, to account for the differences of individuals within communities (Benhabib et al. 1995; Crenshaw et al. 1996; Delgado and Stefancic 1999; Benhabib 2002). In addition, because full participation as a citizen is conditioned by a (variable) minimum of material resources and social rights (Marshall [1950] 1977; Handler 1995), poverty can severely reduce participation.11 In brief, legal citizenship does not always bring full and equal membership rights because these rights are often conditioned by the position of different groups within a nation-state. With the major transformations afoot both inside (Sassen 2008: chapter 4) and beyond (Sassen 2008: chapter 5) the state, as well as the ascendance of human rights as a significant vector of contemporary law (Koh 1998; Jacobson and Ruffer 2003; Bosniak 2006), this articulation may well begin to change once again and so might the actual content and shape of citizens’ rights and obligations. One window into these issues is a comparison of particular features that are meant to distinguish the citizen and the alien, the two foundational institutions for membership in the modern state. The particular features I am after here are those that mark an unstable difference. These are in many ways mi-

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nor features, and they are situational in that they only emerge in certain spaces and at particular times. The next section examines some of these particularities (for a full treatment see Sassen 2008: chapters 6, 8, and 9).

Beneath New Nationalisms: A Blurring of Membership Politics Unlike the citizen, the immigrant or, more generally, the alien, is constructed in law as a very partial, thin subject. Yet the immigrant and immigration have been made into thick realities, and as words they are charged with content. In this tension between a thin formal subject— the alien—and a rich reality lies the heuristic capacity of immigration to illuminate tensions at the heart of the historically constructed nationstate (Sassen 1996: chapter 3). These tensions are not new, historically speaking (Sassen 1999), but as with citizenship, current conditions are producing their own distinct possibilities. Further, the changes in the institution of citizenship itself, particularly its debordering of formal definitions and national locations, have implications for the definition of the immigrant. Confronted with post-national and denationalized forms of citizenship, what is it we are trying to discern in the complex processes we group under the term immigration?12 On the other hand, the renationalizing of citizenship narrows the definition of the citizen and thereby that of the immigrant. As a subject, then, the immigrant filters a much larger array of political dynamics than its status in law might suggest. Working with the distinctions and transformations discussed thus far, I want to explore the possibility of two somewhat stylized subjects that destabilize formal meanings and thereby illuminate the internal tensions of the institution of citizenship, specifically the citizen as a rights-bearing subject. On the one hand, we can identify a type of informal citizen who is unauthorized yet recognized, as might be the case with undocumented immigrants who are long-term residents in a community and participate in it as citizens do. On the other hand, we can identify a formal citizen who is fully authorized yet not fully recognized, as might be the case with minoritized citizens and with subjects engaging in political work even though they do so not as citizens per se, but as some other kind of subject, for example, as mothers. Perhaps one of the more extreme instances of a condition akin to informal citizenship is what has been called the informal social contract that binds undocumented immigrants to their communities of residence (Schuck and Smith 1985). Thus, unauthorized immigrants who

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demonstrate civic involvement, social deservedness, and national loyalty can argue that they merit legal residency. At perhaps the other extreme of the undocumented immigrant whose practices allow her to become accepted as a member of the political community are those who are full citizens yet are not fully recognized as such. Minoritized citizens who are discriminated against in any domain are one key instance. This is a familiar and well-documented condition. However, a very different case is the citizen who functions as a political actor even though she is not recognized as such. This is a condition I see emerging all over the world and read as signaling the limitations of the formal political apparatus for a growing range of political projects. Women are often such actors. Women emerged as a specific type of political actor during the brutal dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s in several Latin American countries. It was precisely their condition as mothers and wives that gave them the clarity and courage to demand justice and bread, and, in a way, protected them from attacks by the armed soldiers and policemen they confronted. Mothers in the barrios of Santiago during Pinochet’s dictatorship, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, and the mothers regularly demonstrating in front of the major prisons in El Salvador during that country’s civil war all were driven to political action as mothers—that is, by their despair over the loss of children and husbands and by the struggle to provide food in their homes. These are dimensions of formal and informal citizenship and citizenship practices that do not fit the indicators and categories of mainstream academic frameworks for understanding citizenship and political life. The subject that is the housewife or the mother does not fit the categories and indicators used to capture participation in public life. Feminist scholarship in all the social sciences has had to deal with a set of similar or equivalent difficulties and tensions in its effort to constitute its subject or to reconfigure a subject that has been flattened. The theoretical and empirical distance has to be bridged between the recognized world of politics and the as-yet-unmapped experience of citizenship of the housewife.

Post-National or Denationalized Citizenship? The transformations discussed thus far in this chapter raise questions about the proposition that citizenship has a necessary connection to the national state insofar as they significantly alter the conditions for that

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articulation. Posing the question this way denaturalizes conventional political thought and parallels the argument about the historicity of both the institution of citizenship and that of sovereignty, especially as it is brought to the fore through the new conditions introduced by globalization. Some scholars (e.g., Bosniak 2000a) argue that there is no objective definition of citizenship to which we can refer authoritatively to resolve any uncertainties about the usage of the term. The discussion in the preceding sections showed the extent to which the institution of citizenship has multiple dimensions, many of which are under contestation. These developments have increasingly been theorized as signaling the emergence of post-national forms of citizenship (Soysal 1994, 2000; Jacobson 1996).13 The emphasis in this formulation is on the emergence of locations for citizenship outside the confines of the national state. The European Union passport is perhaps the most formalized of these. But the re-emergence of a concern with cosmopolitanism (Turner 2000; Nussbaum 1998) and the proliferation of transnationalisms (Smith and Guarnizo 1998) have been key sources for notions of post-national citizenship. Bosniak (2000a: 60) states that there is a reasonable case to be made that “the experiences and practices we conventionally associate with citizenship do in some respects exceed the boundaries of the territorial nation-state—though the pervasiveness and significance of this process varies depending on the dimension of citizenship at issue.” Whether it is the organization of formal status, the protection of rights, citizenship practices, or the experience of collective identities and solidarities, the nation-state is not the exclusive site for their enactment, but it remains by far the most important site. There is a second dynamic becoming evident that shares aspects with post-national citizenship but is usefully distinguished in that it concerns specific transformations within the national state that directly and indirectly alter specific aspects of the institution of citizenship. These transformations are not predicated necessarily on locations for the institution outside the national state, which are key to conceptions of post-national citizenship. These changes in the law of nationality described later in this section, although minor, capture some of these transformations inside the national state and further indicate an increased valuing of effective rather than purely formal nationality. It is also useful to distinguish this second dynamic of transformation inside the national state because most of the scholarship on these issues is about post-national citizenship (e.g., Soysal 1994; Bosniak 2000a) and has overlooked some of the trends I describe as a denationalizing of particular aspects of citizenship.

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I see the potential for capturing two—not necessarily mutually exclusive—possible trajectories for the institution of citizenship in the differences between these dynamics. These trajectories are embedded in some of the major conditions marking the contemporary era; that we can identify two possible trajectories contests easy determinisms about the impact of globalization (i.e., the inevitability of the post-national), and they signal the potential for change in the institution of citizenship even inside the national framing of the institution. Their difference is a question of scope and institutional embeddedness. The understanding in the scholarship is that post-national citizenship is located partly outside the confines of the national.14 In considering denationalization, the focus moves onto the transformation of the national, including the national in its condition as foundational for citizenship. Thus it could be argued that post-nationalism and denationalization represent two different trajectories.15 Both are viable, and neither excludes the other. One has to do with the transformation of the national, specifically under the impact of globalization, though not exclusively perhaps, and will tend to instantiate inside the national. The other has to do with new forms that we have not even considered, and might emerge out of the changed conditions in the world located outside the national. If important features of the territorial and institutional organization of the political power and authority of the state have changed, then we must consider that key features of the institution of citizenship— its formal rights, its practices, its subjective dimension—have also been transformed, even when it remains centered on the national state. This territorial and institutional transformation of state power and authority has allowed operational, conceptual, and rhetorical openings for nation-based subjects other than the national state to emerge as legitimate actors in international/global arenas that used to be confined to the state (e.g., Aman 1996). Further, among the sharpest changes in the condition of citizens are the new security measures (e.g., the Patriot Act in the US), which in this context can be seen as a stimulus for particular citizens to want to go transnational to make claims, notably to human rights courts such as the European Court on Human Rights or, if pertinent, the International Criminal Court. The national remains a referent in my work on citizenship. But clearly it is a referent of a specific sort: it is, after all, its change that becomes the key theoretical feature through which it enters my specification of changes in the institution of citizenship.16 Whether this devalues citizenship is not immediately evident at this point, partly because I read the institution of citizenship as having undergone many transformations in

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its history precisely because it is to variable extents embedded in the specifics of each of its eras.17 We can identify three elements that signal this particular way of using the national as a referent for capturing changes in the institution of citizenship. First, it was through national law that many of the expanded inclusions that enabled citizens were instituted (Karst 1997), inclusions that today are destabilizing older notions of citizenship.18 This pluralized meaning of citizenship, partly produced by the formal expansions of the legal status of citizenship, is helping explode the boundaries of that legal status even further, for example, the increasing number of states that now grant dual nationality, EU citizenship, and the strengthening of human rights. If we assume that “the enjoyment of rights remains as one aspect of what we understand citizenship to be, then we can argue that the national grip on citizenship has been substantially loosened” (Bosniak 2000a: 41), perhaps most especially by the emergence of the human rights regime (Soysal 1994; Jacobson and Ruffer 2003). This transformation in nation-based citizenship is not only due to the emergence of non-national sites for legitimate claim-making. The meaning of the territorial itself has changed (see Sassen 2008: chapter 5, 1996: chapter 1); in addition, digital space enables articulations between national territorial and global spaces that deborder national encasements for a variety of activities from economics to citizenship practices.19 All of these have been interpreted as loosening the “national grip” on citizens’ rights. A second critical element is the strengthening, including the constitutionalizing, of rights that allow citizens to make claims against their states and to invoke a measure of autonomy in the formal political arena that can be read as a lengthening distance between the formal apparatus of the state and the institution of citizenship. The political and theoretical implications of this dimension are complex and in the making: we cannot tell what the practices and rhetorics that might be invented and deployed will be. Certainly the erosion of citizens’ privacy rights is one factor that has sharpened the distance from the state for some citizens and has caused some citizens to sue governments. A third element is the granting by national states of multiple rights to foreign actors, largely and especially economic actors—foreign firms, foreign investors, international markets, and foreign business people (Sassen 2008: chapter 6, 1996: chapter 2). Admittedly, this is not a common way of framing the issue. It comes out of my perspective on the impact of globalization and denationalization on the national state, including the impact on the relationship between the state and its own

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citizens, and between the state and foreign actors. I see this as a significant, though not much recognized, development in the history of claim-making. For me, the question as to how citizens should handle these new concentrations of power and legitimacy that attach to global firms and markets is a key to the future of democracy. Detecting the extent to which the global is embedded and filtered through the national (for example, the concept of the global city) is one way of understanding whether therein lies a possibility for citizens, still largely confined to national institutions, to demand accountability of global economic actors through national institutional channels, rather than having to wait for a global state. Thus, while accentuating the national may appear as a handicap in terms of democratic participation in a global age, it is not an either/or proposition precisely because of this partial embedding of the global in the national. There is indeed a growing gap between globalization and the confinement of the national state to its territory. But it is inadequate simply to accept the prevailing wisdom in this realm that, wittingly or not, presents the national and the global as two mutually exclusive domains—for theorization and for politics. This is a highly problematic proposition even though I recognize that each domain has specificity. It is enormously important to develop forms of participatory politics that decenter and sometimes transcend national political life, and to learn how to practice democracy across borders. In this I fully support the political project of post-national citizenship. We also can engage in democratic practices that cross borders and engage the global from within the national and through national institutional channels. The international human rights regime may eventually become an acceptable and effective alternative to specific cases of judicial enforcement of citizens’ rights. In the United States, for instance, it would affect the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. In Europe some of this is already happening. Accession to the European Convention on Human Rights and various EU treaties has produced important substantive changes in the domestic law of member countries, enforced by domestic courts (e.g., Jacobson and Ruffer 2003). But in most of the world, human rights are enforced through national law or not at all. Critical here is Koh’s (1998) argument that human rights norms get incorporated into national law through an at times slow but effective means he calls “transnational legal process.” Two major changes at the turn of the millennium are the growing weight of the human rights regime on states under the rule of law and the growing use of human rights instruments in national courts both for interpreta-

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tion and adjudication. This is an instance of denationalization insofar as the mechanisms are internal to the national state—national courts and legislatures—while the instruments invoke an authority that transcends the national state and the interstate system. The long-term persuasive powers of human rights are a significant factor in this context. It is important to note here that the human rights regime, while international, deals with citizens inside a state. It thereby destabilizes older notions of exclusive state sovereignty articulated in international law, which posit that matters internal to a country are to be determined solely by the state. The human rights regime subjects states to scrutiny when it comes to treatment of individuals within its territory.

National Citizenship in the Global City? Many of the transformations in the broader context and in the institution itself become evident in today’s large cities. Perhaps the most evolved type of site for these types of transformations is the global city (Sassen 2001, 2006). The global city concentrates the most developed and pronounced instantiations of some of these changes and in so doing is reconfigured as a partly denationalized space that enables a partial reinvention of citizenship. These are spaces that can exit the institutionalized hierarchies of scale articulated through the nation-state. That reinvention, then, takes the institution away from questions of nationality narrowly defined and toward the enactment of a large array of particular interests, from protests against police brutality and globalization to sexual preference politics and house squatting by anarchists. I interpret this as a move toward citizenship practices that revolve around claiming rights to the city. These are not exclusively or necessarily urban practices. But it is especially in large cities that we can observe simultaneously some of the most extreme inequalities and conditions enabling these citizenship practices. In global cities, these practices also contain the possibility of directly engaging strategic forms of power, which I interpret as significant in a context where power is increasingly privatized, globalized, and elusive. Where Max Weber saw the medieval city as the strategic site for the enablement of the burghers as political actors and Lefebvre saw the large modern cities as the strategic site for the struggles of the industrial organized workforce to gain rights, I see in today’s global cities the strategic site for a whole new type of political actor and project.

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Current conditions in global cities are creating not only new structurations of power but also operational and rhetorical openings for new types of political actors that may have been submerged, invisible, or without voice. A key element here is that the localization of strategic components of globalization in these cities means that the disadvantaged can engage the new forms of globalized corporate power and, further, that the growing numbers and diversity of the disadvantaged in these cities under these conditions becomes heuristic in that they become present to each other. It is the fact of such presence, rather than power per se, that generates operational and rhetorical openings. Such an interpretation seeks to make a distinction between powerlessness and invisibility/impotence, and thereby underlines the complexity of powerlessness. Powerlessness is not simply the absence of power; it can be constituted in diverse ways, some indeed marked by impotence and invisibility, but others not. The fact that the disadvantaged in global cities can gain presence in their engagement with power but also visà-vis each other does not necessarily bring power but neither can it be flattened into some generic lack of power.

Conclusion Citizenship becomes a heuristic category through which to understand the question of rights and subject formation and to do so in ways that recover the conditionalities entailed in its territorial articulation and thereby the limits or vulnerabilities of this framing. At the most abstract or formal level, not much has changed over the last century in the essential features of citizenship, unlike, for example, the characteristics of leading economic sectors. The theoretical ground from which I addressed the issue is that of the historicity and the embeddedness of both citizenship and the national state. Once we accept that the institution of citizenship is embedded and hence marked by this embeddedness and that the national state is undergoing significant transformations in the contemporary era (due to a partly overlapping combination of globalization, deregulation, and privatization), we can posit that the nature of citizenship will sooner or later incorporate at least some of these changes in at least some of its components. Strictly speaking, I call this particular dynamic denationalization. It is an open question, empirically, operationally, and theoretically, whether this will also produce forms of citizenship completely located outside the state, such as post-national citizenship. While this

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distinction may seem and indeed be unnecessary for certain types of argumentation, it is an illuminating one if the effort is to tease out the changes in the institutional order within which citizenship is embedded. It puts the focus on the national rather than on the non-national settings within which some components of citizenship may eventually be and to some extent already are changing. But this national setting is getting partly denationalized—it may not be globalized, but it is profoundly, even if only partly, transformed. This fits into one of my larger concerns, which is to understand the embedding of much of what we call the global in national institutional settings and territories and how this transforms the national. It often occurs in ways that we do not recognize or do not represent as such and, indeed, continue to code or see as national. This brings with it the need to decode what is national in some of the institutional and territorial settings we continue to see or represent as national. And it suggests that a critical dynamic is a rearticulation of the spatiotemporal organization of relations between universality and particularity rather than simply an evolution of the nation-state.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and cochair of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www .saskiasassen.com). She is the author of several books, most recently Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2014). She has received diverse awards, from multiple doctor honoris causa to being chosen as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy, Top 100 Thought Leaders by GDI-MIT, and receiving the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize for the Social Sciences.

Notes 1. When not otherwise specified, this essay is largely based on these two sources; this is also where the reader will find a fuller conceptual, empirical, and bibliographic elaboration of the argument. 2. For a fuller development of this distinction between the incompleteness of the institution and the exclusions of that institution, please see Sassen 2008: chapter 6, 2009. 3. See, for example, Knop 2002; see also Sassen 1999: chapters 6 and 7. 4. See Ong 1999: chapters 1 and 4. Ong is one of the major and most original contributors to the elaboration and discovery of a very particular set of transnationalisms that alter traditional notions of citizenship. Her work goes well beyond the fact of crossing borders.

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5. Thus for Karst (2000: 600), “In the U.S. today, citizenship is inextricable from a complex legal framework that includes a widely accepted body of substantive law, strong law-making institutions, and law-enforcing institutions capable of performing their task.” Not recognizing the centrality of the legal issues is, for Karst, a big mistake. Post-national citizenship lacks an institutional framework that can protect the substantive values of citizenship. Karst does acknowledge the possibility of rabid nationalism and the exclusion of aliens when legal status is made central. 6. For some of the earlier conceptualizations from the perspective of immigration, see Soysal 1994 and Jacobson 1996. There is a growing literature that is expanding the content of citizenship. For example, some scholars focus on the affective connections that people establish and maintain with one another in the context of a growing transnational civil society (see generally Fraser 2007; Marlies, Kaldor and Anheier 2003; Cohen 1995; Lipschutz and Mayer 1996). Citizenship here resides in identities and commitments that arise out of cross-border affiliations, especially those associated with oppositional politics, though it might include the corporate professional circuits that are increasingly forms of partly deterritorialized global cultures (e.g., Menjivar 2000; Smith 2005; Moghadam 2005). 7. See Sassen 2008: 289–90, where I develop elements for deciphering conceptual parameters that capture the complexity of citizenship today and, more generically, the formation of rights-bearing subjects. 8. The challenge of negotiating the inclusion of citizens and the question of diversity is an old one. Saxonhouse (1992) observes that ancient Greece confronted the problem of diversity and thereby produced political theory—we might add, to rationalize exclusion. 9. For example, it is becoming evident that in the Muslim world the sphere of the public is being affected by current dynamics, notably the growing use of the Internet, which is enabling the formation of a transnational Muslim public sphere (Eickelman and Anderson 1999). 10. This has been the official position of the French, explicated in the case of the demand by some Muslim sectors in France for girls to wear veils to school: they can be worn at home but are prohibited in public spaces, including public institutions. 11. Even in a rich country such as the United States, old and unreliable voting machines and difficult-to-access polling stations can reduce participation. 12. At some point, we are going to have to ask what the term immigrant truly means. People in movement are an increasingly strong presence, especially in cities. Further, when citizens begin to develop transnational identities, it alters something in the meaning of immigration. In my research, I have sought to situate immigration in a broader field of actors by asking who are all the actors involved in producing the outcome that we call immigration. My answer is that there are many more than just the immigrants, whereas existing law and the public imagination tend to identify immigrants as the only actors producing this complex process.

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13. See also the chapters in Isin 2000, which elaborate these issues from the specific angle of the city and the locality. 14. See notably Soysal’s (1994) trend-setting book; see also Bosniak (2000a), who, while using the term denationalized, is using it to denote post-national, and it is the post-national concept that is crucial to her critique as well as to her support of some of the aspirations signaled by the term post-national. 15. In this regard, Bosniak’s (2000b: 980) conclusion contains both of these notions but conflates them when she asks whether denationalized citizenship can ultimately decouple the concept of citizenship from the nation-state. 16. Bosniak (1996: 29–30) understands this when she asserts that for some (Sassen 1996; Jacobson 1996) there is a “devaluing” (for me, rather, a repositioning) of citizenship but that the nation-state is still its referent and in that regard is not a post-national interpretation. 17. In this regard, I have emphasized the significance of the introduction in the new constitutions of South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and the central European countries of a provision that qualifies what had been an unqualified right (if democratically elected) of the sovereign to be the exclusive representative of its people in international fora (2008: chapter 6, 1996: chapter 2). 18. One example comes indirectly through changes in the institution of alienage. In Karst’s (2000) interpretation of U.S. law, aliens are “constitutionally entitled to most of the guarantees of equal citizenship, and the Supreme Court has accepted this idea to a modest degree” (599; see also 599 n. 20, where he cites cases). Karst also notes that the Supreme Court has not carried this development nearly as far as it could have (and he wishes), thereby signaling that the potential for transforming the institution may well be higher than the actual disposition to change it. Smith (2001), Neumann (1996), and Bosniak (2006) provide developed and in-depth accounts of the status of immigrants and aliens generally in the Constitution and in US law more generally. A significantly transformed institution of alienage would have an impact on changing at least some features of the meaning of citizenship. For an extraordinary account of how the US polity and legal system has constructed the subject of the immigrant, in this case the Asian American, see Palumbo-Liu 1999. 19. See, for example, Teubner’s (2004) argument about a right of access to digital space as part of a larger argument about decentered constitutionalism.

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CHAPTER 2

Justice and Culture New Contradictions in the Era of Techno-Nihilist Capitalism Mauro Magatti

Introduction Modernity is oriented towards overcoming closed self-referential systems of power, typical of traditional communities, and favors open and universalistic societies founded on a contract. The idea of justice played a major role in this shift, pressuring local power coalitions, based on particular cultural backgrounds, to engage in creating living conditions that are more respectful of individual freedom and abiding of general rules. This engagement was primarily grounded on two concepts: the first is the idea that speculative reason is the basis for universal judgments. It is viewed as standing free of all contexts, as liberated from the bonds of pragmatic action, as well as autonomous with regard to any specific moment in time. The second concept is the idea of nature as the “original,” as a preinstitutional condition able to limit the exercise of political power. Based on these two concepts, modernity moved forward to shatter rigid hierarchical cosmologies. Its capacity to refer to general principles of order that were external to local social orders was crucial to push towards more open and fair solutions.

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The Precarious Balance Between National Universalism and Individual Rights in the Era of Corporate Capitalism In the course of this long development, the twentieth century tried to find its equilibrium on two distinct points that were soon doomed to enter into conflict. The first was an effort to enthrone the principles of universalization in the nation-state and its institutions. During the twentieth century, what was public originated from the state, and what came from the state was considered universal to the extent that it was democratic. However, in reality the nation-state, even while at the height of its success—a success that coincided with that of corporate capitalism (CC) during the first half of the twentieth century—was never able to embed the general principles of justice into the different practices of social life. This was true even within the limits of the concept of citizenship, with its delimited spatial and cultural boundaries. Within this model, civil rights represent the best possible synthesis between abstract principles of order and national cultural references. This was the most advanced equilibrium found by national societies. Universalistic generalizations were only and exclusively maintained within the borders of an institution defined by territorial and cultural integration. The universality of justice only applied within specific territories, even when these territories conceived of themselves as democracies. Thus, in spite of significant variations, the national project perceived all social groups, and potentially every individual in its territory, as members of an imagined community (Anderson 1983), a community where differences could be mediated and somehow reconciled through the dynamics of parliamentary democracy, but within the framework of a shared cultural heritage. The second point of equilibrium was the emerging attention to individual rights, which was largely inspired by the extraordinary event of the 1948 United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which individual rights were defined as inviolable. Conceived as a tool for limiting the autarchic political power of the state in its ability to define the nature and scope of justice, the Declaration vigorously proclaimed the existence of a sphere of individual freedom that should be respected at all times. As mentioned earlier, these two points of equilibrium, which were originally quite distinct, progressively entered into tension. Reference to

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the idea of the individual, without any further specifications, rapidly led to contradictory conclusions that soon became evident. Starting from the 1960s, this second focus came into explicit conflict with the first, encouraging a new social dynamic that is still active today.

The Project of Deliberative Rationality The crisis and difficulties of CC are intimately related to attempts, developed in the past decades, to reunite these two originally distinct approaches through what can be defined as the project of deliberative rationality. This project is fuelled by a growing mistrust, throughout the twentieth century, towards the ability of the speculative mind to ground universal knowledge. Faced with an awareness of the limits of reason and the multiplication of viewpoints on reality, a new and more modest conception of reason arose—a conception of reason that, on one hand, abandons the quest for universal judgments, and, on the other, nonetheless carries on its methodological problem-solving role in personal and collective life. Deliberative reason understood in this way can be defined as a tool capable of expressing judgments that (1) are useful to coordinate the actions of a large number of social actors, (2) are applicable within the limits of a specific context, and (3) refer to a given historical moment. In adopting this conception, we move from an axiological to a procedural understanding of reason. The goal is not so much anymore to distinguish what is good from what is bad as it is to discover temporary agreements among participants, who themselves remain anchored in different principles. The implications of such a project are threefold: first, a radical downsizing of reason that leads to a reduction of its claims and thus to the growth of the space of the indefinite—and therefore of negotiation— in social life. Second, the recognition of the value of different points of view—and of the failure of a unique criterion of reference—enables social life to accept and accommodate differences. Third, the weakening of systems of legitimization—which can no longer count on absolute values, but only on limited, shifting and transitional negotiations—also weakens all hierarchical orders and boosts social dynamism. Within the crisis of CC, the project of deliberative reason presents itself as a practical solution to the peaceful coexistence of different positions in a climate of mutual respect.

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The Crisis of Corporate Capitalism In view of the extraordinary transformations that took place since the introduction of this project, it is possible to ask to what extent deliberative reason has shaped our social life. The hypotheses I wish to pursue are the following: the establishment of the project of deliberative reason is one (but not the only) prerequisite of techno-nihilist capitalism or TNC, which refers to the model organizing social life in response to the double crisis that has affected developed countries since the 1970s. Within TNC, the institutional framework supporting the project of deliberative reason has been profoundly transformed in a way that undermines the conditions of existence of this project. This explains why today many of the promises of that project seem betrayed, revealing the project’s insufficiency. From a social-historical perspective, TNC was born as an answer to the crisis CC had been facing since the second half of the 1960s, when the two points of equilibrium that originally supported the universalism of national societies first truly collided. With regard to the relation between individuals and institutions, TNC is the response to a growing number of issues relating to subjectivity, issues that are deeply linked to the crisis of speculative reason and to the establishment of a more modest and limited conception of reason. Sociologically, this process led to two main developments. The first is the neo-liberal idea of laissez-faire, in which freedom is identified with choice: I am free when I choose. While it is obviously true that choice constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for freedom, exclusively emphasizing this aspect dangerously underestimates other aspects of freedom. For example—but the explanation should be longer—simply identifying freedom with choice, apart from being deceptive in a world where the options of choices are endlessly multiplied, ends up destabilizing relationships and social worlds, as is often pointed out by Bauman (2000). The second development is a subjective and anti-authoritarian approach inherited from the May 1968 movement, which Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) call “the artistic critique.” This is the sentiment that rebellion against modernization can find some relief in the search for one’s uniqueness. Freedom is gained to the extent that one is given space to express one’s uniqueness, which leads to a fundamental diffidence towards all forms of institutional authority (including parents, teachers, and superiors).

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In spite of their apparent opposition—and often of their open conflict—these two courses of development actually flow together into a unique process. From an institutional perspective, the crisis of the 1970s touched the main institution—the national state—by showing both its inadequacy (deficits, bureaucratization, strictness) and its limitation: once domestic markets are saturated and once social justice—based on the idea of citizenship—is realized, economic growth cannot be supported within national boundaries. That is why, according to neoliberal theory, the market must replace the state as the main institution. Two other reasons also support this transformation: first, the market expands individual opportunities by giving access to resources that are not limited to the nation, but extend to a global domain; second, unlike the state, the market only has a limited need of cultural homogeneity and explicit authority. It is thus a strong candidate to operate as an ideal transcultural institution. From this point of view, neo-liberalism offers both a cultural justification and the institutional infrastructure necessary for individuals to be able to systematically exploit emerging global opportunities that extend far beyond the spatial organization of the state. More specifically, this reorganization of the system takes place in two ways: first, as the result of the gradually more efficient administration of fluxes of property, information, and people made possible by increasing mobility (Castells 1996) and, second, by the use of abstract codes that enables negotiation beyond the bounds of cultural, ethnic, religious, or linguistic differences (Thrift 2005). TNC then replies to the double challenge arising from the crisis of the 1970s and marks a new stage in the long-term historical process defined by Max Weber ([1922] 1981) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its specificity is an enduring development of technical rationalization together with the contradictory phenomenon of re-enchantment.

Features of the Contemporary Rationalization Process In order to understand the above statement, let us first consider what happens in the case of rationalization. With regard to the earlier historical configuration of corporate capitalism, TNC is characterized by two important traits. The first relates to its spatial extension: the industrial revolution rationalized the workplace (the factory) and urban ar-

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eas (urbanization); CC rationalized territories and social relations within individual countries—via infrastructures, bureaucracies, law, and education. However, the technical rationalizations produced by TNC go well beyond the boundaries of national states and involve large parts of the planet and of the world population through the creation of new technical infrastructures, codes, and protocols that do not have any spatial or cultural limitation. The crystallization of organizational practices through standards and formal procedures has made this technical logic potentially exportable everywhere. What is engineered is not only the interior of the corporation or the national territory, but the entire world. In order to make possible and to sustain contemporary human activities, airports, roads, banks, hospitals, universities, sewer systems, electric lines, digital networks, procedures, and identification codes are increasingly and necessarily organized on a supranational scale. In consequence, we are faced not only with a progressive anthropomorphizing of physical space, but also with a dramatic reduction of the spaces in which society can express itself without any reference to technical codes. The second trait relates to an inclusion of the biological dimension, including human life, into the process of rationalization. This second element is particularly important. It is not only the human body that is designated as workforce for use in the factories but—through consumer behavior, the media, and biotechnologies—we witness the rise of bio-politics in the sense used by Foucault (1994)—that is to say, a system of power that directly acts at the biological, mental, emotional, and relational levels. The reorganization of the institutional infrastructure produced by TNC operates in two principal ways. The first can be called the macro technical system (MTS). The constantly growing technological development is not produced chaotically; rather, it is coherently determined by a dominant logic that selects innovations in relation to an inclusive system that progressively covers the entire planet. What Gras (1997) calls MTS connects distinct technological elements by a series of cross-references through which they mutually endorse one another. This process results from the effort to create compatibility among different technologies, and the value of an innovation augments tremendously when codes and devices are integrated and reinforce the existing system (Flichy 1995). The convergence encouraged by MTS also becomes a meta-criterion that influences the process that selects innovations. The second is the rise of functionalized institutional spheres (FIS), which constitutes a further evolution of the universal bureaucratic model

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described by Max Weber. These spheres take form around formalized codes that make possible the organization of various institutions independently of their political space of reference. Whether it is law, economics, engineering, or medicine, our social life is more and more organized around institutional systems that stabilize practices through formal procedures based on codes and algorithms, rules and procedures, as well as rational, primarily technical, vocabularies. These systems, because they are encoded at a highly abstract level, are independent of any specific political and territorial context. They aim to fit in different cultural realities, facilitating the exchange of properties, services, people, and information. Developing an idea of Luhmann ([1984] 1990), Gunther Teubner (1992) speaks of “polycentric globalization” as a process in which different spheres of life simultaneously break free from their regional boundaries and form an autonomous global sector. Each of these constitutes a different model of an independent “global village.” These spheres represent highly specialized forms of legal production, embedded within functional subsystems. They do not emerge from an informal coordination between actions or from a gradual process of repeated interactions; rather, they come from agreements that take place in the decisional process of “specific formal organization” (Teubner 1992: 41). As such, functionalized institutional spheres tend to define real institutional systems—i.e., systems of rules and formalized procedures integrated together—with a regulative ability that is independent of the law of national states and of international public law (Teubner 1992: 41-42). One characteristic of these domains is their self-organizational tendency, which is based on an internal rationality that renders external authority superfluous. In fact, in principle, these spheres do not welcome heterogamous regulative interventions. They encourage a shift from the logic of government to the logic of governance: the more functionalized institutional spheres grow, the less there is need for a centralized government. However there remains a need for (public or private) authorities that guarantee, through competence from within, respect for rules, the resolution of conflicts, and mediation between the actors’ decisions. Their legitimization criterion is purely functional: institutions are acceptable to the extent that they function in conformity to their constitutive logic (for example, a health system must cure the sick), that they can solve organizational problems of social life, or when they satisfy individual needs. This is an important stimulus that sustains internal selection and the dynamics of self-organization. Consequently, contrary

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to institutions of the national state, functionalized institutional spheres do not have a general narrative power and actually minimize, and if possible eliminate, the cultural contents upon which they depend. This makes them constitutionally transnational. Through these two developments (MTS and FIS), the new model of accumulation tries to overcome its dependence on the institutions of the national state, focusing instead on reinforcing a procedural, rationalistic universalism that bases its legitimization on technical codes and languages. It is important to note that such an evolution is hardly compatible with the project of deliberative reason. The problem is that the two central characteristics of contemporary rationalization lead to new problems that deliberative rationality can only face with difficulty, for in order to do so it has to deal with a high level of cultural complexity (i.e., the multiethnic cohabitation caused by the rising mobility of products, symbols and people). The consequence is an ongoing reduction of the ambitions of deliberative reason, which tends to become a mere technical ability.

Deterritorialized Aesthetic Space and the Reversibility of Meaning In sociological literature, there is a shared consensus that contemporary social reality is characterized by a weakening of cultural boundaries and by the fact that traditional institutional apparatuses are losing their consistency (Hannerz 1992). The evolution of the last few decades has created a situation of cultural undifferentiation, which is such that J. Lull (2000) speaks of “deculturalization” and “superculture.” By these expressions the American scholar means that we are facing a revolution where “the fundamental terms of institutionalized social power are cast into crisis by individuals and groups when they have the availability of new resources of the cultural sphere” (Lull, 2000: 272). An interesting aspect of this observation is that changes over the past decades have modified the integrative function of culture, relative to how it has traditionally been described in anthropological and sociological literature. In fact, since more or less the mid-twentieth century, the possibility of defining stable lifestyles, repertoires of beliefs, behavior-modes, values, and symbols—in other words, the possibility of describing a stable culture shared by a specific group attached to a specific territory—has definitely been challenged by the “permanent revolution of the communicative systems through which an incredible surplus of

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cultural and symbolic references, mostly used ‘autonomously and creatively,’ is available to all” (Hannerz 1992: 66). More precisely, because it is today so easy to move products, symbols, and people, there is a rising permeability of external (and extraneous) contents and of symbolic references. It becomes increasingly difficult to locate cultural meanings in any place, institution, or group (Meyrowitz 1986). In consequence, both the life-world—the niches of tradition and relationships where we spend our daily life—and the institutionalized world that tries to build a distinct culture, guaranteed by the nation-state, are constantly being invaded and forced to adapt. Concretely, it means that what we have called culture so far, the well-established ways of doing, thinking, and judging that are embedded in socially-shared institutions, is now stratified over multiple layers, which makes the process of taking root more precarious (Lash 2002). This is why some authors speak of “detraditionalization” (Heelas, Lash, and Morris 1996) underlying the difficulty for cultural elements to be reproduced in time. If by “superculture” (Lull 2000) we mean the body of symbolic resources that are diffused and reproduced through the more complex and permeating system of media communication, it is helpful to introduce here the concept of deterritorialized aesthetic space (DAS) that, operating in extra-national and potentially global space, joins MTS and FIS as a key element structuring the social logic of the present. Specifically, the DAS appears when the cohesive cultural spatialization of CC is replaced by multiple spatializations determined by the increased mobility of people, products, and cultural symbols. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the acceleration of this phenomenon has made it harder to locate cultural production dynamics within a single institutional and/or territorial order. Our contemporary condition forces us to face a pluralization of worlds and of the references through which we build our social experience (Hannerz 1992). This transformation is especially striking in the fact that the DAS is directly accessible to an isolated individual, without any institutional mediation, as “a matrix of symbolic resources, of daily life circumstances and any other form of unmediated cultural representation, in addition to all the activities that people engage in to expand their views, to share emotions, to build social networks, to define lifestyles and engage in a meaningful and pleasant life. The Aesthetic Space is a space-in-between here and there, between society and oneself, between the material and the symbolic, because culture today is obscurely located in-between

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the local and the global, the collective group and the individual, and between mediated and direct experiences” (Lull 2000: 268). To accurately describe the DAS, we must immediately emphasize a difference. The institutionalized social space created by CC was aimed at guaranteeing order by organizing and structuring hierarchical classifications, types of worlds, laws, obligations, and loyalties that link people to the reality that surrounds them. In the DAS, it is instead transitional, plural, and partial orders that are predominant, within a framework where change and contamination increase exponentially. This major transformation is caused by the fact that, in the DAS, cultural production is less hierarchically dependant on the institutional order of the nation-state, which was still predominant in the previous era; rather it is regulated by the “spectacularization system” (Debord 1967). Such a system can be heard even where background noise is very high, and, most importantly, it is able to invert the meaning of things. With the establishment of “spectacular society,” the more experience declines and is downgraded in reality, the more seductive and powerful becomes its representation in the form of a spectacle. In the contemporary system, the multiplication of broadcasters, the speed of circulation, the spatial extension of communicative fluxes, and the permeability of communication tools make symbolic productions available in the DAS more anarchic and pluralistic than what existed in the past because it aims at the highest level of diversity and contradiction. The DAS aims to become an empty form that cannot be attached to any specific contents—a pure machinery that grinds, consumes, and sterilizes all content. Consequently, whereas the space of communication built around the traditional idea of social order was characteristically fixed and rigid, the DAS—because it is emotionally determined through a guided focus of curiosity and by the search for intense experiences—is unstable, fragmented, noncoherent, and open to a dramatic permeability of meanings. In this world, everything can happen and everything can be done; however, nothing can be done once and for all—there is no finality, and everything that happens happens unexpectedly and departs without further notice (Bauman 2000). Built with images and sounds, sensations, and emotions, the stability and power of the DAS seems more flexible, subjectively understandable, and inclusive than the cultural space of corporate capitalism, which was connected to a very specific institutional architecture and aimed to mirror its hierarchy and values in a framework where (written and spoken)

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rational discourse was considered undoubtedly central. In opposition to that model, the DAS embodies the dream of immediacy, simplicity, universal access, and complete horizontality. A substantial portion of the symbolic forms that the DAS produces leave relatively extended margins of freedom for interpretation, manipulation, and contamination: the whole of social life is interpreted as a permanent process of recombination, where individuals or groups put their sensibilities and knowledge in play, starting from an excessive supply (Hannerz 1992). As such, the DAS produces a dramatic effect of disorganization on established cultures and represents an element of criticism for any institutional power, whether autocratic or democratic. Nevertheless, contrary to a possible superficial interpretation, the DAS is neither pure disorganization, nor pure chaos. First, even if it is detached from institutional regulation, the DAS still needs technical and material support to exist. Its condition of possibility is not a shared culture, nor reference to a hierarchic order, but an exponentially more advanced technical system, built upon complex hardware and technological infrastructures. Even if they pretend to be value-neutral, these infrastructures actually determine communicative fluxes, not only because they reflect power struggles (i.e., for the ownership of machinery, networks, and production), but mostly because their very nature determines the content of communication (as McLuhan understood when he claimed that “the medium is the message”). Second, the DAS remains consistent to the logic that built it and only retains criterions of truth that confirm it. Emphasizing sensorial and perceptual dimensions, the DAS dislikes the written word and oral discourses, communicative forms that are too daring, sensorially weak, and barely emotional. It prefers hermeneutically richer and less analytical languages—such as images and music—that have the advantage of producing a more dramatic sensorial impact, of appearing less constrained from the point of view of their significance, and of being free from any single linguistic community. Politicians and advertisers know this very well—a striking image is more convincing than a long speech, and a good pitch is more convincing than a perfect argument. Within the DAS, the true criterion no longer refers to coherence with an established system of beliefs and values, or to the legitimacy of a system of authority, or to scientific truth, or to irrational belief. Rather, it is ecstasy, in the sense of “being taken,” that determines what is considered as truth (Nancy 2003). In this way the experience of ecstasy is secularized. It moves from a vertical (transcendent) to a horizontal (immanent)

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plane without losing its power to utter the truth: where ecstasy is—as the effect of any kind of aesthetic experience—something is present, because it is through ecstasy that you “feel” reality. Directly involving the senses, the DAS puts the body at the center and, with it, what is immediate. The type of experience that becomes available is founded on the hic—“here”—of the body and the nunc— “now”—of the present moment. With Alfred Schutz and Tomas Luckmann (1973), we can argue that the hic et nunc of aesthetic experience is the realissimum of our consciousness. This type of purely sensual experience, involving people, objects and situations, engages all senses simultaneously, while the sensorial impressions that it creates are full of cognitive and valuational significance. Finally, emphasizing the strength of aesthesis—in the sense of the sensorial and perceptive dimensions—the DAS activates—hyperstimulates—the imagination, with apparatuses specifically designed for this purpose. From this point of view, then, we can say that the DAS is structured as a regime of spectacle from within, where each meaning is forged to build a consensus that is often reduced to mere assent. In the regime of the spectacle, the race towards visibility pushes towards a constant search for what is new and excessive. This defines specific criteria to select values and behavior models that are temporarily affirmed, producing new forms of common sense: instability becomes a value, because everything is in motion, fast, and in transformation; when nothing is stable, change becomes an imperative. The more reality is rich, the more it is exciting; the more it is indeterminate, the more it appears interesting; the more it is contingent, the more it is seductive. For this reason, it is not important in the DAS to settle and to find a stable position in the world or in social space; what is crucial is to move, to change, to experiment, to renew, to never stay still and at the same place, and to avoid the risk of becoming predictable. Rather than a search for coherence and agreement, it is a search for difference and eccentricity, so that in the DAS the experience of transit becomes general: it is in constant shift from one world to another, from one social sphere to another, from one country to another, from one cultural place to another. Because nothing is a priori excluded from the possible experience of existence, everything can potentially become familiar (nothing is unheimlich). The DAS grants individuals the possibility of living experiences of involvement and of proximity, making it progressively harder to distinguish between reality and fiction: apart from the material institutionalized world in which we live, we always have the option of moving into imaginary worlds made available by the system of communication. This

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process has a double effect: on the one hand, it “un-makes” reality, in the sense that it makes reality less binding; on the other hand, it transforms what is imaginary into things, making the imaginary perfectly real and accessible to bodily experience. This generates a regime of equivalences, where the distinction between the two becomes unstable. As Lull puts it, “sensation is a physical and emotional stimulation. . . . Sensations create a break between culture and consciousness, generating cognitive structures that are not integrated” (Lull 2000: 275). By creating a regime that emphasizes pluralism, one where simultaneity is the only temporal category, the DAS both exaggerates and undermines the symbolic dimension. It emphasizes the significant against the signified, form above content. What is at stake is the destabilization of signification through legein.

On the Separation of Functions and Meanings In the post War World II era, a characteristic and enabling element of CC was the rigid but effective integration of functions and meanings in the institutions of the national state. These institutions, as mentioned earlier, grounded universalization in a specific cultural consciousness articulated to the frame of liberal democracies. In that context, the project of a deliberative rationality invoked great expectations. It expressed the demand of a wider and easier circulation of ideas that were still bound to a common frame of reference. By promoting a complete independence between functions and meanings, TNC deeply modified that frame of reference: now functions claim to be abstractly effective, justified on the mere basis of their technical legitimacy without any reference to context, while meanings, even when they are related to the DAS, become deeply rooted in individual freedom and, in consequence, are not amenable to any authoritative pressure. It was hoped that in this way, a more tolerant and freer society could arise, a society in which the search for agreement and the possibility to develop widespread diversity could prevail. But is this true? Working simultaneously on the structural elements (MTS, FIS, and DAS), TNC pretends to transform the logic of integration, which previously operated on the basis of a reconciliation between the systemic and cultural levels (Lockwood 1964). While systemic integration is increasingly being achieved on a global scale, social integration appears superfluous, if not damaging: complex systems which support TNC claim to be effective even if they reject social integration in the tra-

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ditional sense. This is the basis from which techno-nihilist capitalism (TNC) gains its shape. It is named capitalism because it is a system of economic and political power that is well-grounded in history and oriented towards the achievement of profit and the accumulation of wealth on a global scale; techno because the basic resource by which it reaches this goal is the expansion of technology that aims to include the entire world and all forms of life—including human beings—within the logic of instrumental rationality; and nihilist because its own Weltanschauung is the reversibility of sense—in other words, the complete availability of all meaning, which leads to what has been called the “banalization of nihilism” (Carr 1992). TNC is capable of swallowing every meaning within its system of equivalence; in consequence, all possibility of critique disappears (Castoriadis 1978, 1996). There is no beyond, no external point. Everything has been absorbed into the stream of contingency and of absolute immanence. For this reason, relativism degenerates into nihilism. Even if contrary to what happened in the past, nihilism does not lead to historical decadence, or, for example, to the exaltation of Nazi Supermen. Rather, the apparent lack of meaning in which an ecstatic daily life takes place fixes the indefinite frame of possible material developments and the acceptance of ordinary strategies. TNC presents a new nihilistic form that—though incapable of producing stable meaning—produces and wastes an enormous number of meanings, creating an illusion whereby a vacuum gives the impression of fullness. Through technical development, through the multiplication of freely pursued goals, and through the reversibility of sense, TNC provides the scene where social life happens. Each thing only lasts as long as the twinkling of an eye, but this short time is enough to generate the chimera that allows human beings to spend the necessary psychic resources for the goal of maintaining their own lives. We can now, therefore, understand why, according to the imaginary of freedom of the last decades, we usually only define as “free” the person who can express him or herself beyond any external influence, beyond any limitation determined by authority. The desiring subject becomes the keystone of the model: the human being is constantly moving, suspended between existential limitations and the endless possibilities of his or her nature. TNC is the system that organizes this exploitation of desire. Reducing desire to mere pleasure, TNC makes it productive. That is why the development of the DAS is crucial to allow TNC to bring about the extreme consequences of an adjustment that was introduced in the earlier

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phase: the shift from a culture centered on work to a consumer culture. In the existing world, it is mainly practices of customers that establish the partnership of a person with the surrounding social world. This reveals the peculiarities of contemporary hegemony. The consumer, whose role is to choose among different opportunities decided by other social actors, is originally passive in a context that introduces him to an emotional dimension, which is the principle of this sphere of social life. Such a state of things, indeed, does not imply the rejection of social integration (which is impossible). The foremost problem is how to achieve this target. It is done by articulating two different domains: the first is the spirit of competition, fixed by the prevailing functional logic of MTS and FIS; the second is the methodical exploitation of emotional and communicative resources. The first sets up goals to be attained (i.e., advanced market efficiency, improvement in problem-solving, etc.); in the second, communication stimuli, activated by the logic of spectacularization, create a kind of shared, though ephemeral, meaning. In consequence, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve social integration through a public debate that compares different positions and tries to find good reasons. This goal is more easily achieved by means of the systematic exploitation of collective emotions—such as fear or uncertainty (Dumouchel 1995). Thus we can easily explain the previously made statement that TNC is an enduring development of technical rationalization together with the contradictory phenomenon of re-enchantment. We can also understand why, faced with the progressive weakening of speculative rationality, the hope to find in deliberative rationality an instrument with which it is possible to build a more tolerant social life and reach binding collective decisions has been largely betrayed. In fact, the last few decades have confirmed what can be seen as an opposite trend, which I wish to illustrate with two examples: (1) Within TNC, the spaces and the possibilities of agreement become weaker. The present state of affairs and the capacity to produce an effect prevail over all other elements of social life. (2) Within TNC, problems of justice become more important, but there are not adequate ways to address them. In this case, results again diverge from prior expectations.

From Agreement to Effect According to Weber ([1922] 1981), social life is possible because there are only a few ways in which the never-ending indefiniteness of human

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freedom can be broadly limited so that individual behaviors become mutually predictable. Unlike CC—which strove to solve the tension between freedom and regulation by relating functions and meanings—TNC tries to change that main pattern of relationship itself; it seeks to stabilize social relationships in the absence of reference to meanings, values, or beliefs, on a mere procedural basis, which, through deliberative rationality, would allow social actors to live together without explicit debates on values. The lack of meaning implied by such a solution is to be counterbalanced by the intensity of collective experiences, constantly formed by exploitation of the DAS. The central ambition of deliberative rationality is to create conditions where debates and deliberations can increase and flourish in public life. However, if we look at the reality of TNC, things have taken a rather different turn. TNC invests the totality of its resources in stabilizing functional machineries (teukein) and refuses the construction of shared social meanings (legein). Here is the foremost question. Given that social life is now organized on a scale that does not correspond to national states, it is not clear which institutional apparatus can permit a social debate on values. Beck (1992) recognized this problem when he argued that, in risk societies, the arenas of public debate must be rebuilt. An effective teukein and a feeble legein leave TNC open to the emotive and affective dimension, while reflective formulations (personal or collective) disrupt its effectiveness and its references. As TNC increasingly weakens the grounds of discussion and of super-individual evaluations—guilty of slowing down the speed of becoming—we are paradoxically exposed to the consequences of other people’s decisions (as are other people to our own); furthermore, we are subject to the aggregation effects of multiple actions, within an increasingly powerful structure. As a result, the pursuit of agreement and the recourse to deliberative rationality are made impossible, now that they are submerged by transparent technical systems spread out by the enchanting skillfulness of the contemporary trickster. In many ways, the first kind of rationality on which we focus is instrumental rationality. This allows teukein to embody the maximum of power, without any responsibility in terms of legein. The only validity requirements are those based on the “achievement of the effect.” Therefore, we seek a form of rationality that separates and distinguishes and thus becomes a source of fragmentation. From this standpoint, it is only what works that has a value. Faced with an endless chain of possible meanings, “what works” defines reality, and the argumentative effort

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(embedded in legein) can be avoided. TNC conceives the relationship between truth and reality as determined by human aptitudes: human beings are able to settle reality, to produce an effect. For this reason, “what works” gradually pervades all social life—the entire world in which human relations take place. As A. Gras (2003: 130) wrote, the technical infrastructures of our society are so successful because their “truth could not be reached by discussion, mediation or exchange of points of view—in other words by communication forms between human beings—but is rather the product of a pure technical logic. Logos presents itself in a material device (according to the notion of device gestell of Heidegger).” In functional technical systems, the world is objectivity that can be measured, and measure is truth. In this way, technical action organizes the world; it creates it institutionally because it defines the rules, the rituals, the power relationships, the terms of possibility, and the evaluation criteria, as well as the way that everything is interiorized into a system of beliefs, in shared emotions. In addition to this, because it is action, technology gains an incredible exemplary value that becomes the basis on which deliberative reason is founded (Ferrara 2008). Technology is convincing because it is exemplary. As a matter of fact, in our daily experience, the test of reality is brilliantly passed by technical systems that show up as tools people can use (the same quality that CC’s institutions demonstrated in the first decades after the Second World War). For example, if we go to an airport, we know that we will find restaurants, toilets, a check-in desk, shops, and most assuredly that the plane will take off, perhaps with a short delay, and take us to our final destination. Technical systems are designed to perform, to be able to co-ordinate contingencies. They never disappoint expectations. Apart from the certainty of technique and of its functional apparatus, another way to pass the reality test involves the strength of emotional investment, the capacity of feeling. In a world in which teukein prevails over legein, pathos takes revenge by progressively erasing the basis of legitimization on which, in the past, constructions of meaning were founded (i.e., authority, tradition, reason). Contemporary culture, after excluding from the very idea of truth whatever cannot be connected to science or to technical apparatuses, believes that feeling has a central role to play. In a world where we are overexposed to stimuli and where legein withdraws dramatically, we recognize as true whatever has the strength to capture us, to take us, to absorb us, and for that reason we also perceive it as larger than ourselves. Apart from the assertions of

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technology, there is at least one other element upon which truth today is grounded: the intensity of emotional and physical involvement. Because of the way it in which has been defined, what becomes evident in the experience of our senses—authenticated by the power of immediacy—cannot be called into question. It does not matter if the effect is ephemeral; actually, today’s sensitivity abandons all ambition to withstand the test of time. This way, the danger of being trapped is avoided, and we remain open to new experiences. The issues of coherence or of wisdom vanish. To some extent, the aim is to achieve the effect immediately, with no engagement with what happened before or will happen after. Massumi’s (2002) work can help us understand this more deeply: “affection”—as a relationship to the world—has neither shape nor structure. For this reason, this relationship can be transmitted and transformed not only or primarily through the mind, but far more so through the body via its specific capacity for “affection” (pathos). According to Massumi, our inner nature is not self-sufficient in terms of energy. Going beyond the traditional mind/body divide—where our inner nature is separated from the environment—he believes that there is no clear distinction between what happens inside the person and what is outside. This is because it is impossible to separate the body (which is the door to the world around us) from the mind. Quoting important findings in neuro-sciences (Damasio 2000), Massumi (2002) believes that it is crucial to talk about affection because often the information received can be less important than what subconsciously comes from the source of the message. Massumi implies that the whole body is involved in the process of creating meanings. Think of music, for example. Its physical effects do not match its capacity to create meaning. To understand the impact that music produces requires investigating its effects without reducing it to a purely mental sensation. This can be seen when we listen to a piece of music, and more evidently when we go to a concert: the intensity of our physical-sensorial sensations can carry more meanings than the “meaning” of what we are actually listening to. The pleasure that we experience when listening to music is not dependant on the communication of a meaning, but depends more on the capacity of “moving something inside of me.” Music, as Nancy (2003) puts it, literally “touches me”: the production of meanings takes place through that physical experience inside of me that also speaks to my mind. A similar effect can also be caused not only by music, but by many other forms of communication, either directly between people—as when

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we say, for example, “that person captured my attention”—or through the media—a movie that involves us and moves us can “talk” to us more directly than any discussion. The idea of “meaning” is no longer defined as something that is limited to one dimension, but involves our entire physical self. In a sense, nothing new is being claimed here; many cultures in the past dedicated a great attention to feeling. What Massumi is saying is that even in today’s culture—which considers itself highly rational— there are fundamental physical elements of communication and meaning that cannot be erased from human experience. The problem, though, is that, in TNC, as soon as “being touched” becomes the criterion of immediate truth, the construction of intensity and the capability of “touching” become tools for the power structure, both within private relationships and in the public sphere. Powerful technical tools are involved to reach this final goal: images, sounds, and gestures are invoked to persuade and create a strong “reality effect.” A good part of “affective economy” (Pine and Gilmore 1999) tends in this direction. However, it is mostly in the DAS that the virtual aspect of the effect is amplified. Through the systematic exploitation of the emotional and sensorial dimensions, the DAS is structurally built to determine the highest level of individual involvement by the highest number of people. In all these cases, the final goal is, as we say in Italian about runaway media sensation, to “punch the screen.” To break the coating of heartlessness created by the excessive hyper-sensorial stimulation to which we are exposed is a major necessity, as if the audience needed to be awakened from its mediatic sleep. As any good producer knows, a media triumph (a movie, an event, a piece of news) is judged by its capacity to engage bodies and subjectivities, not only to determine or send a message.

On the Crisis of Justice From the standpoint of society, the consequences of the prevalence of effect over agreement—testified by the deterioration of the public sphere as well as by the delegitimization of democratic institutions in advanced societies—are more and more severe. In particular, the inadequacy of the project of deliberative rationality comes into view through the growing difficulties of contemporary societies in meeting high standards of social justice, at the local as well as the global level.

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Most of all, I wish to stress how distant from the ideal model these facts are. In a context where the logic of accumulation is not based—as it was in the corporate phase—on the inclusion of different social strata on a national scale, but rather built up by the management of global markets, by technical improvement, and by the growth of individual opportunities, a massive redistribution of resources has been achieved on the global scale. This redistribution triggered a remarkable increase in social disparity indicators in the last twenty years. Compared to technical systems, individual persons today appear largely powerless, swallowed up by a process they cannot know or control. Indeed, all through the 1980s and 1990s, in every advanced country there was a tendency toward the reduction of social rights and of state obligations. Compared to the motherly model of the welfare state, which prevailed in the post-Second War World era, a more severe model now reasserts itself: faced with the urgent demands of global competition, the state can no longer take care of those who cannot participate in the collective production of wealth. Therefore, in order to deserve protection, the subject must be a diligent participant in the common effort. The basic target is the fight against laxity and the establishment of discipline. Such a tendency, for example, manifests itself in workforce policies, whereby weaker social strata are lead to rejoin the work market as soon as possible and forced to accept retraining measures. The citizen who stays on the border of the production process can be regenerated and readmitted into the cycle only if he accepts the terms offered. Broadly speaking, TNC determines an increasing disproportion between the functional and meaning spheres. In relation to technical systems (including the economic domain), we observe a progressive oligopolization of powers because working at the required level of complexity is becoming extremely difficult. Although network priority mitigates this effect (exploiting decision forms, networks represent an alternative reference model), during the last decades, impressive processes of concentration and of concealment of power took place in many areas of social life (i.e., the massive financial centralizations disclosed by the economic crisis). In the cultural domain, making use of a huge deterritorialized aesthetic landscape, TNC creates a reserve in which symbolic and identitymaking exchange can always take place without any visible consequence to existing power relationships. This explains the disappearance of traditional social conflicts and their replacement with a competition so heterotrophic as to be ephemeral, especially in terms of the symbols and differences that represent it. Behind the apparent identity-making

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offered by TNC, things are very different in “the world out there,” where the existing systems of power grind reality, arranging life and world as they see fit. The phenomenon, on a closer view, is due to technical development and to communicative arrogance, which constantly extend the spaces of their dominion. Weak subjects suffer passively (and implicitly justify) logics they can no longer challenge, because they are involved in an ever more complex self-referential technical system and plunged into a deterritorialized aesthetic landscape where what is represented is true. One consequence of these transformations is the growing importance of new kinds of social issues, such as the relationships between different social groups, the territory, and the rights of access. Sassen (2006), for example, speaks of two social groups that exhibit paradoxical features: some people are “unauthorized and recognized” while others are “authorized and unrecognized.” Irregular workers compose the first group, conspicuously present in all advanced countries. This group, although formally unrecognized, makes an important contribution to the production of wealth. Its invisibility creates a parallel world that we pretend not to see.1 The second group of those who are “authorized and unrecognized” is made of agents who, though they are formally members of the political community, as a matter of fact assist in the denial of their own rights. The negotiation on access to citizenship rights represents a high point of conflict and its solutions can vary extremely, either at the constitutional level or, more simply, at the level of facts. Central here is an increasing separation between territory and rights, with the consequent crisis of the idea of citizenship as it was defined in the twentieth century. On the one hand, there are people who live in one territory but who do not have rights. On the other hand, there are citizens who, even when they move their activities somewhere else, still keep their original rights. From this point of view, particular importance must be given to the need of the organization and control of what Bauman (2003: 58) has called “wasted humans.” Acting exclusively on the basis of internal criteria, TNC exacts some very high human costs all over the world. In the past two decades, the increase in disparity between rich and poor has been dramatic; the destruction of local cultural tradition has continued without interruption; the quickly accelerating process of urbanization has led to an immense expansion of slums in big cities; a significant redistribution of work and wealth on a global scale has taken place; and huge new migratory fluxes have damaged the immigrants’ abandoned homelands and created

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problems in welcoming societies. In this contest, where the scarcity of resources and the valorization of perfection are dominant preoccupations, people who are not involved in production are in danger of being marginalized, even if they are eligible for rights. This same dynamic is repeated, but upside down—inverted —if instead of a group of people we consider a territory. As shown by extensive research on urban suburbs, the general trend is towards the heterotypization of these neighborhoods—that is to say, the creation of separate and isolated worlds adjacent to each other (Magatti 2007). That separation leads to a weakening of universal criteria. The nation-state grows weaker and pushes towards the total exteriorization of these different worlds and their pathological setting within the logic of local cultures. In the grey areas of the big urban ghettoes, the rights of citizenship are erased and entire communities are abandoned to their destiny.

Conclusions The price imposed by TNC on human beings is very high, and it is not the result of imperfections or side effects but points to a deeper and more fundamental reason: the crisis of the national institutions, which is not a peaceful crisis, reveals the inadequacy of the project of deliberative rationality at the very moment when support for its founding institutions is lost. Expanding quickly across the globe, sinking deeply into every corner of our social and personal lives, TNC separates functions and meanings, exposing entire social groups to the danger of quick impoverishment. Forced deculturalization manages to erase basic traditional defense mechanisms used in various social groups. It erodes the fundamental basis of compassion, generosity, and mutual care. The main issue here is that a purely procedural law is unable to deal with the complexity of present social phenomena and, in the end, supports only what is given in particular existing powers, eliminating even the possibility of questioning what is given without negotiation. Paradoxically, a criteria of justice that is very broad and universal, totally abstract and detached from the flesh and blood of daily life, becomes a screen allowing established powers to avoid all criticism and critique. A quick glance at the world today should be enough to understand the dangers generated by this perspective. In view of what has been said, we can understand the paradox of developed countries where increasing social disparity does not cor-

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respond (as expected) to the growth of social conflicts, which instead seem to have progressively disappeared. This is because TNC was able to involve all the different social groups, from the elites to middle class, including what used to be the working class. As H. Arendt argued a long ago, contemporary hegemony establishes its power by controlling desires, so that those members of society who belong to the lower class pursue the ambition of being included in the circuit of pleasure from which they are currently excluded. To the world of the TNC, the substantive issues of poverty, marginalization, and exploitation are unintelligible alien concepts; in consequence, they are re-defined as issues of law and order and public security. After years where issues and themes were very different, now the army and the police corps are once again central to social life (Garland 2001). For example, in 1970, US federal and state prisons held 196,429 prisoners, while today the number is up to 1.5 million, not counting the 7,500,000 prisoners that are held in local prisons (JFA Institute 2007). To the extent that the issue of social cohabitation is simplified through this technique, security profiles necessarily become one of the main characteristics of TNC. We can say that with the arrival of TNC, the fable of modernity is over. After centuries during which the underlying tension was to free closed cultures through the use of universal criteria (limited to the nation), today we face the problem of finding the right balance between universal needs—often pure abstractions—and the needs of the particulars—weighted with concreteness and emotions—that nourish human beings. Unless this mediation takes place, it remains impossible to establish the justice that we seek, and we remain imprisoned between an abstract and impersonal universalism—which is therefore inhuman—and a reactive and fundamentalist particularism that, searching for some kind of foundation, turns to any topic that runs off the track in the discussion. The crisis of TNC is the proof of this. In summary, the limit of the project of deliberative reason lies in its failure to live up to the present transformation, where more rationalization leads to more re-enchantment. On the one hand, this model seems unable to translate concretely the values that it defends abstractly. On the other hand, it does not dispose of solid institutions that are able to improve the deliberations we urgently need to have in response to the immense questions investing our personal and collective life. After centuries, Pascal’s question is thus far from being solved: the reasons of the mind and of the heart still seek for some form of balance.

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Mauro Magatti is professor of sociology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan (Italy). He is the director of ARC—Centre for the Anthropology of Religion and Cultural Change. In 2006–07, he was visiting professor at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and in 2013–14 at the Kellogg Institute, Notre Dame University (US). His main scholarly interests concern the relationship between economy and society, the spirit of contemporary capitalism and civil society. His most recent publication is “La nuova prosperità: Quattro vie per una crescita integrale” (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2014).

Note 1. Although the information is approximate and not official, in the U.S. the number of illegal immigrants is estimated at about 12 million people.

References Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2003. Wasted lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications. Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello. 1999. Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard. Carr, K.L. 1992. The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth-Century Responses to Meaninglessness. Albany: State University of New York Press. Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge: Blackwell. Castoriadis, C. 1978. Les Carrefours du Labyrinthe. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1996. La montée de l’insignificance. Paris: Seuil. Damasio, A. 2000. Emozione e coscienza. Milano: Adelphi. Debord G. 1967. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet Chastel. Dumouchel P. 1995. Emotions: Essai sur le Corps et le Social. Paris: Institut Synthelabo. Ferrara A. 2008. La forza dell’esempio. Il paradigma del giudizio. Mirano: Feltrinelli. Flichy P. 1995. L’innovation Technique: Récents Développements en Sciences Sociales, vers une Nouvelle Théorie de L’innovation. Paris: La Découverte. Foucault, M. 1994. Dits et écrits. Paris: Gallimard. Garland, D. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gras, A. 1997. Les Macro-Systèmes Techniques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2003. Fragilité de la Puissance. Paris: Fayard.

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Hannerz, U. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Heelas, P., S. Lash, and P. Morris. 1996. Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity. Cambridge: Blackwell. JFA Institute. 2007. Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce American’s Prison Population. www.jfa-associtaes.com. Lash, S. 2002. Critique of Information. London: Sage Publications. Lockwood, D. 1964. “Social Integration and System Integration.” In G.K. Zollschan and W. Hirsch (eds.), Explorations in Social Change. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Luhman, N. (1984) 1990. Sistemi Sociali. Bologna: Il Mulino. Lull, J. 2000. Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press. Magatti, M. 2007. La Città Abbandonata: Dove Sono e Come Cambiano le Periferie Italiane. Milano: Il Mulino. ———. 2009. Libertà Immaginaria. Le Illusioni del Capitalismo Tecno-Nichilista. Mirano: Feltrinelli. Massumi, B. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Meyrowitz, J. 1986. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. Nancy, J.L. 2003. Noli me Tangere. Essai sur la Levée du Corps. Paris: Bayard. Pine, B.J. and J.H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Sassen, S. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schutz, A. and T. Luckmann. 1973. The Structures of the Life-World. Translated by R. Zaner and H. Tristam. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Teubner, G. 1992. “Social Order from Legislative Noise? Autopoietic Closure as a Problem for Legal Regulation.” In G. Teubner and A. Febbrajo (eds.), State, Law and Economy as Autopoietic Systems: Regulation and Autonomy in a New Perspective. Milan: Dott. A Giuffee Editore. Thrift, N. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. London: Sage Publications. Weber, M. (1922) 1981. Economie e Societa. Milano: Ed. Comunità.

CHAPTER 3

Making Commonality in the Plural on the Basis of Binding Engagements Laurent Thévenot

How do people differ while trying to justify their concern within a community living together, with the additional constraint that they share a common humanity on an equal footing? Among the array of answers, two contrasted positions come out. One refers to universalization and universal rights, while the other is geared towards what makes sense in a particular culture with its specific mores and morals. Each answer is phrased in a distinct vocabulary and anchored in a distinct scholarly discipline. This chapter introduces an analytical framework which strives to overcome these two contrasted answers and their respective biases. Benefiting from the fieldwork of several international comparative research programs, which I run with international colleagues on dispute and justification in such various worlds as Western Europe, the United States, and Russia, among others, I have laid out three grammars of commonality in the plural, which we empirically found diversely combined in these worlds. Justifiability varies from one construction to another, depending on the mode of differing that can be defended in common. After a first section presenting the notion of commonality in the plural within a broader sociology of engagements, each of the three following sections displays a distinct grammar that integrates a plurality of the following: orders of worth for the common good, individuals opting in the liberal public for interests or opinions that are options accessible to all, and personal affinities to commonplaces.1 We also consider how each grammar bounds commonality because of the kind of bonding it builds upon, through (1) the fate reserved to the newcomer, a perspective which enlarges the approach of exclusion and boundaries; (2) the

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abusive exploitation of the structural power associated with commonality; and (3) the exclusion of the goods and damages that cannot be taken into account since they are experienced in regimes of engagements that the grammar of commonality leaves out. The fifth conclusive section points to the need to correct political and critical theoretical frameworks because of biases that prevent fully capturing the interplay between the different grammars in our contemporary worlds, and to tackle innovative protests that experience new combinations between them.

Analytical Tools: Regimes of Engagement and Grammars of Commonality in the Plural How might statements that are justifiable in common take into account the wide variety of goods and evils that affect people’s lives? Responses rest on culture, a public space of debate, the aggregation of individual preferences or interests, negotiated interactions or competing habitus, etc. My contention is that most of them suffer from too heavy—and implicit—assumptions about what is shared. They oversimplify the problematic character of coordination needed for making commonality. I propose to go a step further and look at the process of integration of a variety of concerns, beginning with those highly personal attachments to the world that are most challenging for coordination and most difficult to share in common. Less collective than habitus and less communicable than interests, they are yet fundamental to the maintaining of the person who engages with the world and herself through such attachments. Think of the kind of intimate attachment of people to their personal belongings, which look like a pure mess to anyone else. It is part of the coordination process with themselves through the world that I call a “regime of engagement.” Engagement in familiarity—in this case—brings them a deep-seated ease in maintaining themselves. How can the damage to this intimate good of ease be taken into account in common when the deprived dweller of the Brazilian favela or of the French suburban block has her home promised to demolition, even with the assurance of being rehoused in a new standard home? At this level of personal familiarity, what remains social in this engagement is not yet the level of recognition of the person—even in the sense of Honneth’s (2007) “family sphere of recognition”—or that of negotiated interaction with her, but the acknowledgement that her mess contributes to the good and capacity of ease which maintains herself, although obscure

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in the kind of personal grip and accommodation that are involved, and rather inappropriate in terms of coordination with most others, those who lack intimacy with her. We can then differentiate the possibilities and conditions of mutuality based on each regime of engagement: intimacy or close friendship grounded on each person engaging in familiarity, coordinated project and contracts between individuals based on their engaging in a plan, plural possibilities of large-scale coordination based on engaging in an order of worth. This differentiation departs from notions of collective and collectiveness that ignore the various kinds of bond created by these kinds of mutuality and their binding engagements, and rely instead on a limited notion of collective identity delimited by a boundary. In spite of the diversity of contents of these personal attachments, we can identify the format of engagement in familiarity that they involve and that demands intimacy for coordination with others. Concerns expressed as individual interest or opinions are less demanding for coordination. Instead of naturalizing these motives, we would rather identify a second format of concern. It relies on a regime of engagement in a plan, which involves projection of the self outside intimacy and detachment from close personal familiarity. A third type of concern is still more prepared for large coordination since it is expressed in a public format geared to universalization within a common humanity. It rests on the regime of engagement in qualified justification for the common good.2 A distinct kind of invested power or capacity of maintaining oneself rests on each regime of engagement. The engagement is valuable for a kind of good since it makes possible the correspondence of the person to herself from one situation to another through a plurality of ways, without too strong assumptions of personal—or social—identity. From such a good being damaged ensues a distinct kind of oppression. Oppression remaining below the level of publicly claimed injustice and criticism requires that we enlarge the scope of critical analysis. We identified the following kinds of good and invested power: the confident personal ease secured by engaging in familiarity, the assurance of self-projection in the future secured by engaging in a plan, and the qualification for the common good secured by engaging in public justification for an order of worth.3 Moreover, the notion of engagement emphasizes that the good brought by the invested power depends heavily upon the security deposited in the material environment.4 Each invested power relies on the disposition of a reality ready to be grasped in an appropriate format: at hand in familiarity, with a

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functional hold for a plan, or with a conventional benchmark for public worth justification.5 When the good of ease in familiarity is affected, worries are neither communicable nor even visible to someone who is not close to and familiar with the affected person. How can the plural concerns that rely on the plurality of engagements with the world, and which all contribute to a kind of power in maintaining oneself while being diversely demanding for coordination, be integrated into some kind of commonality? Approaching this issue with the analytical tool of regimes of engagement helps to identify what is preserved and what is lost when these concerns are transformed by universalizing models based on Rawl’s (1971) principles of justice, or Habermas’s (1992) public space of communicative action, or fundamental individual rights. It can also clarify what various notions of culture make of these worries. For the topics we are concerned with in this chapter, we need an additional tool that would relate these kinds of engaged good with the making of commonality. Comparative studies on both practical and theoretical ways of integrating differing concerns into common issues led to the identification of three grammars of commonality in the plural.6 I define grammars by two basic operations. Communicating is the first. The term should not be understood in the narrow contemporary meaning of exchanging information, but in the broader sense of practically connecting with some common locus, as different rooms communicate to a common corridor. The operation of communicating addresses how dissimilar personal attachments to the world can be transformed and allow for relations to others. Composing is the second operation to be done. It aims at arranging the different voices to form commonality. One should recall the significance of “composing a difference” as settling a dispute between dissimilar voices, which is archaic in English but not in the French expression “compose with” (composer avec) different positions in an effort to integrate them all. Composing the difference between a plurality of components that communicate thus results in the composition of commonality.

A Plurality of Qualifications for the Common Good: The Grammar of Plural Orders of Worth Bringing together empirical research on public claims for injustice and justification that appear most legitimate in disputes because they appeal

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to the common good, on the one hand, and normative constructions of polities by philosophers on the other (Augustine for the worth of inspiration, Bossuet for the domestic worth, Hobbes for the worth of fame, Rousseau for the civic worth, Smith for the market worth, Saint-Simon for the industrial worth), we identified six “orders of worth” and extracted the shared model of their requirements, which formalizes a sense of what is just and unjust in practice (Boltanski and Thévenot [1991] 2006). This model of qualifications for worth and of their critical test balances the demand for universalism in terms of abstract principles of justice that structure universalistic theories of justice, and the claim for substantial conceptions of what is valuable for a human community, which underlies theories of particularistic cultures. For the purpose of this chapter, I shall clarify this conjunction between universal justice and particular culture in a short comparison of our model with two other theories: John Rawls’ (1971) theory of justice, which is clearly oriented in the first direction, and Michael Walzer’s (1983) theory of plural spheres of justice, which is oriented in the second direction of shared cultural understandings.7 Walzer’s conception captures the injustice of the undue extension of one sphere of understanding when it overlaps another, but does not look for requirements or principles shared by all these spheres of justice. By contrast, modeling the demands that weigh on the orders of worth to make them compatible with the kind of equality that ensues from the principle of common humanity, brought two specifications to the fore—(1) a figure of common good (the worth of the great benefits the small) eliminates certain types of values and evaluations, and can be compared to the first part of Rawls’ second principle;8 (2) a condition of nonattachment of qualifications for worth to persons, which puts constraints at two levels: (2a) it excludes certain forms of evaluation or qualification (eugenics, for instance) from legitimate orders of worth; (2b) it demands that unequal qualifications for worth are kept open and re-actualized by the possibility of putting them to the test. This makes more precise Rawls’ stipulation that positions are open to all in conditions of fair equality of chances. It also draws attention to the situated judgment of qualification, which is a test that engages objects and arrangements that are coherent with the orders of worth and which serve in the evaluation of what is just. The environment is part of the process of justification and contributes to the moral complexity of an “equipped” humanity, as we can see for instance from an international dispute on the project of enlarging a road in the Pyrénées border between France and Spain (Thévenot 2002a). The road might qualify as a nature path for an emerging “green” worth, a scenic road for the worth of fame, or

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a European speedway worthy for the integrated market, depending on its concrete actualization and not only on argumentation. Institutions and organizations as well limit claims for injustice because of their material equipment (Thévenot 2002b). This dependency of justification on a qualified material environment puts material limitations on a situation judgment and brings exclusion in terms of learning and practical access to such settings. Justifiability is not only bounded by a kind of bind that depends on the boundary of a social group, but by the possibility of engaging with a qualified arrangement. The genealogy of orders of worth can be viewed as the result of an early modern effort to go beyond cultural particularities and look for universalizing constructions of commonality (Thévenot 2001). Particular customs or traditions that differ from one culture to another can thus be given a more general domestic worth on the condition that they are compatible with an idea of common humanity. Instead of being limited to communities of values, constructions of worth go beyond the boundaries of cultures by relying on systematized bonds that result from shared dependences on the material world: the moved body as the support of an emotional excitement in the case of the worth of inspiration, the traditional housing and inhabiting of the world generating the authoritative regard of the domestic worth, recognition signs and medias for the worth of fame, urban and city public amenities and representative tools for the civic worth, merchandises for the market worth, and techniques and methods for the industrial worth. These intermediations are not limited to the variety of medium identified by Parsons (1969) or systems by Luhmann (1995). They allow comparability and generalization while enhancing the capacities of human beings.9 This enhanced power, resulting from interdependence by the mediation of such equipped relations to the world, raises suspicion and concern for justice: isn’t such an equipped power, which gives rise to inequalities, abusive? Arguments answering this question may result in the elaboration of an order of worth, in an attempt to appeases the tension between unequal capacities qualifying for worth and common humanity. The claims are that capacities resulting from these interdependencies with the material world are worthy since they participate in the common good and benefit all, without being permanently attached to persons because of their being put to the reality test. Criticisms attack each of these claims. While further research on arenas of dispute about projects of public significance, or so-called participative democracy, dealt with the dynamics of integrating the plurality of orders of worth in deliberation

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within a particular community, On Justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) does not tackle this issue and contemplates arguing for the common humanity. The grammar of plural orders of worth is not the subject of the book, which concentrates on justifications based on a unique order of worth and the sentiment of injustice raised by the interference of other overlapping orders of worth. As stated by Ricœur (1992) in his comment on the book, life in a particular community demands the support of a plurality of orders of worth which brings compromising to the fore. Yet the book offers clear insights into the two operations of communicating and composing which characterize the grammar of commonality based on a plurality of orders of worth. In this grammar, communicating implies connecting one’s concern to worth. It means aggrandizing personal attachments through a huge transformation into worth so that they qualify for a common good and pass the qualification test for this worth. Composing commonality involves the requirement of taking into account the plurality of orders of worth to allow for differing. None should be forgotten in the making of commonality. The composition is controversial, and even confrontational, since each worth grounds critical denunciations of the rival pretension of another worth to specify the common good. Yet, because all orders of worth meet the same model, it facilitates the possibility of assuaging critical tensions between them and reaching a compromise (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). This compromise is consolidated by composite objects and devices which qualify for several orders of worth, while avoiding the breaking out of critical tension. Compromises take part in commonality, in contrast to private arrangements.

Bounds derived from the grammar of plural orders of worth: the blindness to the newcomer, the abusive power exploiting the hierarchy of worth, the disqualification of individual interests and personal attachments The first bound to justifiability derives from this grammar of plural orders of worth because of its being remarkably blind to the fate of the newcomer, and thus to the excluding or oppressing experiences she encounters. Misjudging the problems raised by the boundary of the community is the price of focusing on the most extensive common humanity which is aimed at by universalization.10 The newcomer is supposed to get assimilated into the community, which is then confused with the common humanity, and to cope with the universalization requirement by getting rid of former cultural loyalties.11 Yet, identified for-

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eigners are differently aggrandized to qualify for the different orders of worth. Strangers have the smallest state of domestic worth, although they are welcome under the hospitable protection of the host that entertains them as guests. By contrast, the foreigner is in a highest state of worth of inspiration since the epiphany of the encounter with the stranger promises a moment of sudden revelation or insight.12 The solidarity based on the civic worth is explicitly internationalist and particularly suspicious against any excluding boundary. Partaking in commonality leads to a structural power that some can capture and monopolize, the operations of the grammar becoming instrumental in bringing about this takeover, which is a second possible bound. The grammar of plural orders of worth makes explicit the problem of inequalities that result from reference to commonality. Unequal access to the appropriately disposed material environment and proper human disposition debases the justification test and results in power abuse. Therefore, the claim of legitimacy that rests on the model of worth, and its expected ability to assuage the tension between inequality and common humanity, face fierce suspicion and criticism against power abuse. Because each grammar builds on and transforms a certain regime of engagement to obtain commonality, the others are downgraded with their kinds of good kept out of the constructed commonality.13 Since the grammar of plural of orders of worth builds on the regime of qualified justification for the common good, it puts high pressure on the expression of individual interests based on the regime of engagement in plan, or on the primordial good of ease in one’s personally habituated and inhabited environment, which is secured by the regimes of familiar engagement. A third bond of justifiability results from their being both ignored as kinds of good and reduced to insignificant particularities or singularities on the axis towards generalization for the common good.

A Plurality of Options Chosen by Individuals in Public: The Liberal Grammar The previous analysis of the grammar of plural orders of worth helped me to single out features which characterize the liberal grammar of individuals in public. Obviously, this elementary model does not encapsulate the rich and various tradition of political liberalism. It is intended to grasp core features that are most significant to distinguish a diversity of grammars on the basis of the two principal operations that we have

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identified. The dramatic confrontation between claims referring to the common good is haunting the liberal grammar as a threat of civil war, which should be avoided by virtue of the more limited format of the good engaged in differing. Communicating within this grammar requires the good to be publicly expressed as a choice for options, which are named either individual interests or opinions. Options should be open to the public and made manifest in a format that is accessible to all other individuals, so that each individual can be treated equally on the same level. The transformation that this operation of communication requires might be quite severe, as we can see from the case of religious faith that resists the format of choice, or from loyalties and even intimate attachments that also defy this format. Composing proceeds by negotiating, finding trade-off and quid pro quo between individual choices for publicized options. The language of the balance of interests conceals the prerequisite of shared mediations needed to find such a balance. Mediations are not necessarily monetary but, at least, they rest on common knowledge, clear-cut and objective options staying between individual preferences. An important variant of the liberal grammar is relevant for our purpose since it aims at bridging the gap between cultures in a grammar of liberal multicultural individuals. We studied it in action, as other grammars, in the course of an international project (USA, France, Russia) comparing the learning of life together by students in their collective residence. In the “International House” of a California university, presented as a special place “to bring down cultural barriers,” the staff aimed at pairing the two roommates “to be as different as possible: Arab and Israeli would be together, Korean and Japanese would be together, depending what’s going on in the world, who are enemies at the moment” (Zambiras 2004; 31, 33). The operation of communication is still liberal and requires residents “to have independence and take responsibility for what they are doing,” and default of communication is phrased the following way by the staff: “some people exclude themselves, but I don’t think anyone is excluded . . . when you go to coffee hour, you don’t see any Asian there. . . . It is an open invitation to everyone, but they choose not to come, and they make it hard for other people to meet them” (Zambiras 2004; 38, 42). What is most relevant for our topic is that the liberal operation of communication demands the transformation of personal attachments so that they are exposed in public as individual preferences for commonknowledge cultural options. These options are to be made publicly visible and accessible, which requires a kind of stylization. During a training

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session, residents are asked to expose in public a “memorable intercultural experience.” Some participants feel oppressed by this format of public, stylized cultural preferences: “a difference becomes a stereotype, a generalization . . . you don’t want to feel like a freak show on parade. Why do you always have to show off how you’re different?” (Zambiras 2004; 78, 88). Masha, who has been living nine years in the US, describes a similar oppression: I was performing at Sunday Supper last semester and I was doing salsa with a professional salsa dancer, his name is Rafael, an incredible guy, Mexican . . . his nationality has nothing to do with why I decided to do this. . . . We had some guests who actually had the guts to call me up and ask me to do some kind of performance for the faculty club or something, or for some older ex-professors, and she didn’t say, “well, I just thought you were good,” she was like “well, I thought it was great that there was a Mexican guy dancing with a Russian girl, I thought that was SO culturally great.” I was just like “are you kidding me?” To her, he was just a monkey, it was like a show! . . . And I felt like she was treating him like some kind of ape, and not a human being. And me as well, because she was saying this for both of us. Like “oh, let’s put you in a cage, we’ve never seen a Russian girl with a Mexican guy before,” and I’m just like “you’re the most racist person I’ve ever met.” We connected like two human beings, not as a monkey and a rooster, or something that needed to be put in a cage and showed around. (Zambiras 2004; 88–89)

Bounds derived from the grammar of individuals opting in the liberal public: the liberal demand on the newcomer, lobbying interests, the disqualification of engagements for the common good, and familiar attachments The liberal grammar was developed among individuals who were relatively alien to one another, opening the possibility of welcoming highly differentiated populations and immigrant newcomers. Among the three grammars, this is the only one that treats the newcomer on an equal footing, the reason why it is so needed for our contemporary migrant societies.14 However, newcomers may have a hard time learning this grammar and the liberal civility that goes with it, which are very far from the current understanding of liberty induced by marketing slogans for exporting liberal democracy. This first kind of bound is visible when a foreigner expects the considerate hospitality that is congruent with the grammar of personal affinities to commonplaces and considers that he is rudely received by the liberal equal footing.

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By contrast with the previous grammar, the liberal grammar does not acknowledge the structural hierarchical position associated with the power to take part in commonality that is found in all constructions of commonality. This grammar claims to emancipate people from hierarchies and obtain horizontal equality between the individuals that compose the public through the exposition of their choice in favor of one opinion or interest. As long as the liberal civility is respected, differing is much less confrontational than within the grammar of orders of worth since no claim engages directly a specification of the common good. Formal procedures are intended to frame the negotiation and obtain the expected balance of interest. The third bound to commonality derives from procedures and not only from the list of stakeholders. Strong power abuse results from unequal access to the format of the optional individual, some stakeholders staying in a hierarchical position vis-à-vis others. The liberal grammar of the plurality of individuals opting in the public builds on the regime of planned engagement involved in formatting the options (individual plans or projects) that individuals chose, and requires, in addition, the transformation of these individual plans in publicly accessible options (interest, opinion) that can be ready for negotiation in the composition of commonality. As a consequence, a third bound comes from the oppression on the regime of qualified justification for the common good, which it disqualifies as impractical, too abstract, or ideological. The grammar also oppresses the intimate good of ease obtained through the regime of familiar engagement, which it downplays as egotistical and narcissistic. In addition to the former case of liberal multiculturalism, which brings to the fore some of the bounds of this liberal grammar, another case study highlights all of them. NGOs proposed to use a new device, the “roundtable,” for a globalized governance based on this liberal grammar, in which communicating rests on the similar formats of individual interest, stakeholder, or interest group.15 WWF was instrumental in the making of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO),16 which pretends to get rid of the “failures of governments” caused by their “incapacity to take a quick decision,” cross boundaries between nations and cultures, and bring together as equal stakeholders “growers, processors and traders, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers, banks and investors, environmental/nature conservation NGOs, [and] social/developmental NGOs.” Since RSPO governing is based on the production of private and nonmandatory standards and certifications, this is a clear case of “governing by standards” (Thévenot 1997, 2009, 2010).

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This case makes clear both the exceptional opening to the foreigner and the first bound of commonality deriving from the liberal grammar because of the cost to be paid by the newcomer when he copes with the liberal grammar. The second bound results from the possible power abuse ensuing from the exploitation of the structural hierarchical position of more common features, in this case procedural forms. Thus, the small planters are excluded from the strategic restricted groups in which is drawn up the agenda of the annual roundtables and which appoint the experts for the working groups. Let us consider more in detail the third bound coming from oppressions on engagements for the common good and familiar attachments. The capacity of the stakeholder to be “practical,” “realistic,” and “effective” against what is “absolute or the ideal” points to the engagement in a plan and the associated preparation of the environment, which are both needed for communication according to the liberal grammar. The operation of composition demands further requirements that are key features of the public civility in this grammar: be aware of the others’ options (“to understand the stakes”) and express vividly one’s own (“I want that!” “not to be shy,” “to be proactive,” “to intervene,” “to make the first move,” “to take the floor”). Composition is a negotiation between kinds of good that have to be formatted as opinions and preferences for publicized options: “I go there, and I am of the opinion that biodiversity loss should be stopped. And then, there are farmers, and they tell me, that is all very fine, but ‘I want to develop, I want to cut the forest to install a farm and make a living.’ And then we sit down, talk to each other, and come to a decision that allows him to cut maybe part of this forest, and conserve the rest, or whatever. So that’s negotiation” (NGO, in Cheyns 2011). Participants of local communities and small family farmers, “smallholders,” as they are openly designated in spite of the pretension of equal footing, are considered incapable of participating in the right format for “cultural” reasons. By contrast, directors of Indonesian companies “are used to negotiating, to speaking with other cultures, for example European cultures” (certifier, from the Netherlands quoted in Cheyns 2011). A first source of oppressions comes from their being disqualified when they refer to specifications of a common good – or worth, in particular the civic worth – which sustain their denunciations of their domestic subjection (due to the companies which they depend on), market subjection (due to the highly fluctuating fixation of prices), and industrial subjection (due to the over-emphasis on high productivity). Civic arguments concerning solidarity and “value sharing in the value chain”

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between family producers and the downstream operators in the chain were exposed in the public consultation on the Internet, but sidelined in the forums of the roundtable. They gave way to a different formatting that fit the liberal grammar. NGOs promoted, and industry accepted, the equality of “rights,” which are comparable to the liberal conception of individual legal rights although constructed in a nonmandatory framework: the right to be informed, the right to give prior consent, the right to a minimum wage, the ban on exercising any form of discrimination based on “race, caste, national origin, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, union membership, political affiliation or age” (RSPO 2013; 39). Second, smallholders are also disqualified when they engage in their most familiar attachments and concerns of their daily life. Whereas the former statements are “too abstract,” these are “too specific”: “they use this forum to express complaints about one particular case . . . there is this tension, between somebody expressing his own problem and raising an issue which is of general interest of the discussion” (NGO). Viewed from the smallholders themselves who are engaged in this regime, they defend their very life: “The difference between them and me is that they are here as part of their job whereas I am here to defend our very lives, and we aren’t paid for that” (Indonesian farmer, in Cheyns, 2014). In contrast with the functional formatting of the world and the functional utilization of language, the format of information for this familiar engagement (Thévenot 2007) needs pointing to specific cases and narrating entangled and emotional stories.

A Plurality of Common-Places: The Grammar of Personal Affinities to Commonplaces The two prior grammars disqualify personal attachments—and their damages—because of the distancing from familiar engagement that the modern public space and its potentiality for universalizing demand. This presumption of the public distance makes the categories of contemporary political and social sciences biased. This bias precludes a correct understanding of the harsh confrontation between globalized modernity and those ways of making commonality that do not assume such a public distance and are thus relegated as archaic. The grammar of personal affinities to commonplaces is more hospitable to this engagement in familiarity, though this engagement has to be transformed for coordination on common issues.17 Widely spread in ancient cultures, this

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grammar is also a significant component of the up-to-date social networks cultures, which are equipped by information and communication technologies and which rest on personal tastes to be expressed through common-places, which are in that last case largely “marketized.” The spatial meaning of communicating, in the sense of apartments that communicate to the communal parts of the building, fits this grammar particularly well. Communicating is achieved by personal affinity to a common-place, the term common-place being here hyphenated to signal that it is devoid of the pejorative sense of a trite saying or topic. In this grammar, one infuses a common-place with one’s most intimate concern and invests in it in this sense, short-circuiting any other intermediation. The result of this short circuit between intimacy and common-place is an emotional arousal, which signals that the operation has been fulfilled, this emotion being itself communicative. On the contrary, the deprecatory meaning of cliché indicates the failure of the operation, when connecting to the commonplace is nothing but superficial because of the lack of any strong personal experience infusing into it. Such things and spaces invested in common are deposited in language or literature and the arts. This limited list of shared topoi is denigrated, when viewed from the liberal grammar or the worth of inspiration, as a source of rigidity, prejudice, and lack of creativity. Such views miss the fact that a person who goes through a commonplace to take part in commonalty makes this topos her own; she is herself by personally relating her intimate situation to this commonplace. This grammar does not produce unanimity. In spite of communal parts—or because of them—there is plenty of room for differences and need to compose them. Differing is not only the result of diverse personal affinities to the same common-place, but also of the plurality of possible associations between one shared common-place and other ones. Hence, composing operates by bringing to the fore the common-place that proved to be hospitable to a plurality of affinities. Another distinctive feature of this composition is the variable geometry of common-places. The size of commonality is quite variable, without the threshold marked by limitation of the common good in the grammar of orders of worth, or by the public space of individuals in the liberal grammar. One can already compose commonality with close friends. As a consequence, this grammar does not offer the frames of procedural arguing that the two former provide, and which contribute to a public space governed by democratic equality. The kind of equality that this grammar fosters is obtained in festive and convivial moments, when everyone meets up again with the humanity of every other par-

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ticipant, in spite of the strongest differences. But this high-spirit celebration is still brought together by some commonplace.

Bounds derived from the grammar of personal affinities to common-places: the foreigner hosted as immature and possibly inimical, autocrats manipulating commonplaces, the disqualification of orders of worth and individual interests The first bound of commonality derives from the grammar in that the foreigner lacks the frequentation of common-places. Yet, because of the range of common-places with very different scopes, some of them allow communication between the host and the guest, although without the rich entanglement of numerous common-places that is available to long-standing community members. There is no visible hierarchy among persons who communicate through a common-place, and the grammar can be presented as horizontal, in contrast to the domestic worth, which also builds on engaging in familiarity. Yet common-places generate the structural hierarchy of commonality. The second bound of commonality is an abusive power which takes advantage of this hierarchy, when a person gets mixed up with a common-place as a leader, leading other persons to invest in her while passing through this commonplace in person. Authoritarian or even autocratic power is made possible by such commonplace leaders. Since this grammar builds on the regime of familiar engagement, with the additional requirement of infusing familiar attachments into a commonplace, the third bound comes from the resulting oppression of the regime of publicly justified engagement that requires, by contrast, a conventionally formatted qualification for the common good. Such a convention of worth is disregarded as too formal and insufficiently infused by authentically personal concern. This grammar also downgrades the good of the regime of the engagement in plan, which is viewed as preventing the simplicity of the direct relation between most personal attachments and common-places. The elaboration of the third grammar benefited from fieldworks in various cultural contexts of Western or Eastern Europe and Brazil. Laura Centemeri (2010) studied the paradox of inhabitants of Seveso, in the region of Milano, who rejected the civic solidarity of an international social movement after one of the most severe European environmental disasters occurred in 1976. She explained why the leftist militants were

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unable to understand the way Seveso people strove to restore the kind of noncivic commonality which was affected by the tragedy. Recently, former internationalist activists, environmentalists, feminists, and various members of the local community settled in Seveso and cooperated to deliberately build new common-places on the ground of personal relations of care towards places affected, and created among them a “memory path” made up of displays telling the accident’s story through texts and photos and located in situ: “The memory we are here writing must be a tactful memory, respectful of the personal suffering” (Centemeri 2010). Troubles in close familiar relations to the environment were oppressed by the civic aggrandizement to be heard in the public space. Associated with the French-Russian comparative program in “From close to public binding engagements. A French-Russian comparative perspective” (Thévenot 2005), Olga Koveneva (2011a, 2011b) contributed to the identification of the operations of communication and composition according to this grammar of personal affinities to common-places, and of its bounds, while putting it systematically to the empirical test of a large collection of data. I will now turn to this research for our discussion. Koveneva carried on a detailed and extended observation of various ways of living together, building commonality, and protesting against what threatens it in Moscow and Paris suburban areas, two comparable settings combining the natural and urban context. In the Russian case, literary and artistic common-places, such as songs, films, and poems that lyrically evoke the intimate relationship between human beings and nature are most frequented in defense of the territory against various threats of degradation such as a housing project. Common-places can be materially anchored space, such as a spring, which appears to be a key passing point in protests. In spite of various supports, all common-places allow the same kind of communication by affinity, on the condition human beings personally invest in them, which entails acting personally to maintain them in good shape, taking care of them rather than only discussing them. Even a manager of the protected natural park demonstrates her concern by not picking out and making public small infractions to regulations when they relate to such common-places as “places to drink,” organize barbecue parties with emotional singing, and provide “small benches to help tired mothers” (Koveneva 2011a, author’s translation) to rest and intimately feel natural life. A self-proclaimed spring keeper “neither willing to join a local environmental association nor to make his action public, . . . is fueled by strong familiar and personal attachment to this

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place and, at the same time, oriented toward the conservation of this spring as a commonly shared place, treasured and cherished by local residents” (Koveneva 2011a, author’s translation). Common-places appear to be quite hospitable to differing attachments: Iossif, the Jewish spring-keeper is taking care of the spring, which is also a common object of attachment by pagan practitioners of purification baths and a common object of worship by Orthodox believers. In addition, the plurality of common-places allows multiple associations between them in the composition of commonality in spite of strong differences. The potentially conflicting uses of nature are supported by members of the common Sporting Club of the park, from nature walks to the Russian Winter four-wheel-drive races organized by the Pure Energy Festival of Extreme Sports and sponsored by Nestlé. Yet, they can be interconnected to the commonplace of life, in the sense of a primordial liveliness among human and other living creatures. Koveneva’s analysis of the case also fully demonstrates the three kinds of bounds of commonality deriving from this grammar. First, commonplaces are, by construction, rather foreign to strangers as shown by visitors from abroad who complain that Iossif, a Jew, is the caretaker of the holy spring. Common-places can be even closed in a “we” that excludes foreigners, as observed in protests against foreigners who strive to appropriate nearby habitations and shops. It makes the transition with the second bound of commonality: making common-places instrumental in support of authoritarian power. Personal investments in these commonplaces can themselves pave the way for an abusive power based on their commonality. An apparently personal initiative called “Let’s roll up our sleeves!” and devoted to taking care of and maintaining commonplaces such as a spring or a children’s playground actually prepared a campaign in favor of a new team of local and allegedly independent candidates to local elections. Presented as opposing the inefficient present local government which they eventually evinced in the competition, they finally appeared to be closely linked to their predecessors, the initiator getting involved in a big scandal of corruption (Koveneva 2011b). Koveneva (2011a) makes the third bound of commonality clearly visible from her fieldwork, pointing to structural obstacles to a democratic public space. Thus, the park manager’s understanding attitude towards personal investments in commonplaces goes hand in hand with her contempt for any public forum that would contribute justifications to be publicly expressed and contradictorily debated.

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Possible Ways of Trespassing Bounds of Commonality: Correcting Bias of Political and Critical Theory What can we learn from investigating the three grammars of commonality in the plural? First, rather than limiting exclusion to boundaries of identifiable groups, these grammars in use demonstrate a broader variety of bounds of justifiability held in common, and of possible exclusions from this commonality. Second, the category of engagement illuminates the binding dimension of the bond by grasping the dependence of human capacities on appropriately prepared—or disposed— environments and human bodies. This bond is not only an interaction, i.e., a relationship between individuals. It involves a milieu of nature or artifice which highly constrains engagements. Third, by contrast to critical stances—in practice or in theory—that are narrowly restricted to one grammar to unveil wrongs and harms, the perspective offered by the full range of these three constructions of commonality allows us to correct bias and sheds light on the respective potential and limitation of each and on their strained relationship.18 This analytical clarification helps to characterize innovative protests that experience new combinations between them and the conditions of their conciliation.19 The case of the “sans papiers” (undocumented immigrants in France) differs from former, mainly civic mobilizations in France in that a main support comes from the mobilization of parents whose children attend the same classes as the children of undocumented immigrants, who are forced by the government to move back to their country of origin, the children being deported with them (de Blic and de Blic 2006; de Blic and Lafaye 2011).20 Displaced persons are no more foreigners once they durably inhabit and familiarize a place that is distant from their former attachment.21 In many aspects, their primordial attachment to the world is oppressed, although these oppressions are difficult to address within current critical stances. Other persons get involved on the basis of familiar engagement and frequently have no former experience of activism.22 Even if they have, they do not bring it to the fore because of these oppressions leading the network to resist undue generalization and the strategic public format of political activism. Strikes and demonstrations are viewed as too impersonal. The main participative format (Richard-Ferroudji and Barreteau 2012) is neither the publicly justifiable engagement for an order of worth, nor the voluntary engagement in an individual plan, which is encapsulated in the word volunteer (Eliasoph 2011). A profound and passive feeling of disquiet results from their familiar environ-

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ment being suddenly affected by a shock. This affection is expressed as “the uneasiness ensuing the loss of control on a familiar environment,” and the emotional shock fuels action.23 Mobilization involves a constant presence, which generates the assurance of mutual familiarity with the threatened family. Taking care of this family implies preparing their applications and accompanying them in the process of regularization.24 Yet mobilization does not remain within the boundaries of this familiar engagement. It implies embarking upon actions in common. Commonality is, in many respects, informed by the grammar of personal affinities to common-places. Common-places that are used to coordinate actions are not the conventional qualifications of the grammar of orders of worth, nor the individually chosen options of the liberal grammar. They remain loosely defined and interconnected; above all, they are personally and emotionally invested.25 Schools, hostel, and police station are invested as common-places of a neighborhood community based on the quarter that was not formerly a current basis for civic mobilization. People come to feel that “they are over here with us, they pay taxes, their children are the buddies of our children, we stay at their side.” The previous argument, as well as some of the devices involved in the protest, are combined in this last grammar with civic worth. Thus, petitions which usually make visible civic solidarity are signed in favor of a particular family and circulated by closeness. “Figures have a face” is one of the Réseau Education Sans Frontières (Education Without Borders Network) slogans. Another earlier mixed device was the “civic godparent” (parrainage civique). A famous artist becomes the godparent of a young “godchild” who is threatened to be deported. Some activists criticized the paternalism of the godparent, as a classical denunciation of domestic worth from civic worth (Boltanski and Thévenot [1991] 2006), and reacted by creating a collective “civic godparent” of the undocumented immigrant. This case shows how the grammar of personal affinities to common-places allows persons to pass over cultural boundaries and create strong bonds across them, leading participants to take care of the familiar attachments of the person they get close to, without passing through the generalizing qualification of customs and tradition for the domestic worth, nor the public stylization required for liberal multiculturalism. But how can the way be paved from affected personal attachments to public claims of justice? Our analysis clarifies the needed transformations of engagements and formats of expression required to aggrandize the intimate trouble—which frequently stays mute—up to public claims for rights. Among other activist organizations, the French League of Human

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Rights (Ligue Française des Droits de l´Homme et du Citoyen), founded in 1896 to defend Alfred Dreyfus, developed a specific expertise in the promotion and defense of universal human rights, with an extension to economic and social rights that allows for social criticism in addition to the liberal criticism of flouted individual rights. To face issues raised by undocumented displaced persons, local branches had to open specific permanent offices to be in touch with people in trouble who come and narrate at length their embroiled distress. This first segment of the chain is extremely demanding and straining since it assumes to familiarize and take care of the affected familiar attachments of another person who is initially a complete stranger, and to go across what is publicly treated as cultural difference. Women, more than men, are personally involved in this communication. They criticize this gendered division of labor, and complain that other—male—activist members of the League focus too exclusively on the civic cause and the format of rights. Contemporary debates about globalization, even when they open to a wide variety of possibilities such as Shmuel Eisenstadt’s (2000) multiple modernities or Nancy Fraser’s (2008) scales of justice, are frequently skewed towards the liberal grammar, which implicitly informs descriptive categories. Thus, international political and social theory is too strongly marked by a restricted idea of the Western enlightenment project. My contention would certainly not be to fight against this project in a conservative mood, neither to call for area-specific counter theories. It would be completely inaccurate to think of a correspondence between the three grammars and the political cultures of France, the US, and Russia. The three grammars are empirically all found in action in these three countries, among others. My concern is that biased western political and social theories are even inadequate for the West. They are too strongly involved in the modernization project to correctly grasp resistances to it, and even to correctly reflect upon it. We need to enlarge our basic analytical and descriptive tools so that they can also account for the a-liberal grammar of commonality in the plural, which also rests on the ideal of common humanity and should not be reduced to an archaism.26 The framework presented in this paper is one step in this direction. It offers insights into modernization and globalization in our contemporary world, which gain an understanding of the conditions of the confrontation between the all-embracing liberal grammar and other grammars of commonality. The confrontation recurrently leads to conservative, reactionary, and closing momentum in the history of Western democracies until our time of multiple populist regimes. They currently close the opening aspirations for universalization and bring to the fore

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the substance of a proper culture. But such reactionary substantialist responses should not prevent us from studying the engagements and grammars that are structurally oppressed and give rise to such dangerous reactions. Once a more balanced view is gained thanks to the acknowledgement of the different grammars, we are better equipped to analyze the dynamic and creative crafting of mixed combinations.27 Thus, we can recover some of the remainder that was left over in the shadow of the Enlightenment and consider democratic variants that are more engaging in the sense of being more hospitable to the whole range of engagements that compose life together and the complexity of human personality.

Laurent Thévenot is directeur d’études (professor) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (Center George Simmel), and senior researcher at the Center for Research on Economics and Statistics (CREST), Paris. With Luc Boltanski, he founded the “Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale” in 1984 and coauthored On Justification ([1991] 2006), which analyzes the most legitimate repertoires of evaluation governing political, economic, and social relationships. In his later work (L’action au pluriel: sociologie des régimes d’engagement, 2006), he offers an extension of the analytical framework of justification to deal with a plurality of ways people engage with the environment and with others, from intimacy to the level of public conventions.

Notes 1. I here choose the term “commonality,” rather than the usual “public,” because the construction of personal affinities to commonplaces does not sustain the kind of detachment of the public that is supported by the two other constructions, although it stills governs commonality. See more on this issue in Thévenot 2014b. 2. This sociology of regimes of engagements was first introduced in Thévenot 1990, and fully presented in Thévenot 2006. In English, see Thévenot 2002a for an introduction; 2007 for a presentation focusing on the plurality of cognitive formats; Thévenot 2011a for a more complete account of its development, before and after On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot [1991] 2006), including a comparison with Bourdieu’s critical sociology and Dewey’s pragmatism; Blokker, Brighenti, and Thévenot 2011 for a perspective on engagement, critique, commonality and power; Thévenot 2012 for accounts of these different engagements in a combination of literary and a scientific prose; Thévenot 2013 for further developments on the notion

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

of engagement in connection to various domains of empirical research; Thévenot 2014a for its contribution to the analysis of politics of participative art; Thévenot 2014b for a presentation with a particular focus on the grammar of personal affinities to common-places. In a reformulation of his theoretical construction of recognition, Axel Honneth shifts from the building block of interaction to a notion of engagement with the material world. He grounds his theory on an attitude of recognition in front of the nonhuman world. He views it as a more elementary “existential” mode of recognition with regard to the more substantial ones he studied formerly. He relates this existential recognition to Martin Heidegger’s “Besorgtheit” (concernedness) and John Dewey’s “engagement,” which he regards as both challenging the opposition between the subject and the object and promoting a concerned and engaged relation of human beings to the nonhuman world (Honneth [2005] 2007). The regime of familiar engagement grasps features of such experiences (with references to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty; Thévenot 1994, 2006) while it accounts for their social acknowledgement. This regime takes place in a variety of other kinds of engagement with the material environment, which support other kinds of mutuality and thus recognition. This is the reason I chose “engagement” rather than “commitment.” For a full presentation of these extensions of the notion of engagement, see Thévenot 2013. A first elaboration of diverse grammars used to “make oneself heard” (“faire entendre une voix”) was presented in a 1999 article included in Thévenot 2006 and in the chapter in English “Justifying Critical Differences” (Thévenot 2001). On political grammars of pluralism, see also Thévenot and Lamont 2000. On convergences and divergences with Rawls’ second principle of justice and with Walzer’s conception of plural spheres of justice that captures the injustice of their undue extension but does not look for shared requirements or principles, see Thévenot 1995 and Boltanski and Thévenot 2000. “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” (Rawls [1971] 1974: 83). This view contrasts Jürgen Habermas’s understanding of systems. For a critical analysis of his misunderstanding and of the resulting deficit of cognitive order and confusion with normative order, along with a parallel analysis of Honneth’s “cognitive gerrymandering,” see Strydom 2010. Joan Stavo-Debauge (2005, 2009) brought a remarkable and original contribution to political and moral sociology by considering the community from the testing experience and path of the newcomer and of the hospitable guest. The case of so-called republican France illustrates too well this dangerous blindness.

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12. This orientation informs Jacques Derrida’s particularly generous moral philosophy of giving hospitality ([1997] 2000), which lacks, however, the symmetrical regard to the path followed by the person to whom hospitality is given. For a clarification of this issue, see Stavo-Debauge 2009. 13. A feature that came into view once the three grammars had been built inductively from the fieldwork and the analytical framework of the two basic operations. 14. In particular to France, where this grammar is mostly rejected or confused with market worth laissez-faire or right wing business orientation. 15. In the following section, I rely extensively on the observations and analyses in Cheyns 2011. See also Silva-Castañeda 2012 and Cheyns 2014. 16. Other roundtables are organized on other agri-food industry commodities: soy, coffee, cocoa, sugar cane, cotton, and biofuels. 17. More on how this third grammar contrasts with the previous two can be found in Thévenot 2014b. 18. Whereas politics of difference are backed by the liberal grammar, politics against socioeconomic inequality and for redistributive justice rely on the grammar of orders of worth and a major compromise between the civic and industrial worth. For a systematic analysis of fifty years of policy evaluations through a statistical survey, see Thévenot 2011b. 19. In her acute comments on a first version of this paper, Reiko Gotoh refers to a recent movement of residence-based welfare in Japan in the following question: How does the grammar of personal affinities to commonplaces involved in this experience cope with invasions of other grammars involved in conventional welfare services, orders of worth for the common good, and individuals opting in the liberal public? 20. In Paul Dumouchel’s (2010) classification of types of multiculturalism, which focuses on the factual situation and secondarily on politics in reaction to it but not on normative models, this situation of undocumented immigrants in France is typically that of “economic multiculturalism” and demonstrates the failure of the “national multiculturalism,” which relegates cultures to private expression and promotes a political culture independent of cultural or ethnic attachments. 21. Marc Breviglieri’s (2009, 2012) own creative contribution to political and moral sociology rests on the systematic examination of the anthropological dimensions of “inhabiting” and draws from it political lessons on the way to approach modes of living together and the affirmation of the self. For a charming and penetrating account of the experience of changing inhabited places, enlightened by his theoretical framework, see: Friedland 2014. 22. The Réseau Education Sans Frontières (RESF; Education Without Borders) network consists of groups of parents who gather in a school when one parent has been arrested or received obligation to leave the French territory. 23. Research by Claudette Lafaye and Damien De Blic presented at the seminar “Sociology of a liberal world: fascination, oppression, depression,” or-

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24.

25.

26.

27.

ganized by Laurent Thévenot, Nicolas Auray, and Marc Breviglieri, EHESS, Paris, 25 January 2010. And to hide them as well, despite the fact that any support provided to an “illegal” resident faces a penal punishment in France. Thus participants now fight against the growing trend of considering solidarity as an offence. Individuals who do not participate, at the cost of breaking off close bonds with friends, explain that they refused because they were afraid they would “get caught up.” Some readers may object that Robert Nisbet’s Sociological Tradition (1966) corrected such a bias. However, his impetus is conservative and thus suffers from another bias. By contrast, Fuyuki Kurasawa’s (2004) reading of Western social thought as fueled by an “ethnological imagination” shows that encounters with non-Western cultures contributed to de-familiarizing and denaturalizing the Western modernity. Without being the ultimate model for democracy, internet social networks bring together the liberal grammar and elements of the grammar of personal affinities to common-places. On folksonomy which is involved in such networks, see Auray 2007.

References Auray, N. 2007. “Folksonomy: A New Way to Serendipity.” Communications and Strategies (65): 67–91. Boltanski, L. and L. Thévenot. (1991) 2006. On Justification: Economies of Worth. Translated in 2006 by C. Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Originally published as De la Justification: Les Économies de la Grandeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). ———. 2000. “The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgment.” Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action 3(3): 208–31. Blokker, P., A. Brighenti, and L. Thévenot 2011. “On Engagement, Critique, Commonality, and Power: an Interview of Laurent Thévenot.” European Journal of Social Theory 14(3): 383–400. Breviglieri, M. 2009. “L’insupportable. L’excès de proximité, l’atteinte à l’autonomie et le sentiment de violation du privé.” In M. Breviglieri, C. Lafaye, and D. Trom (eds.), Compétences critiques et sens de la justice. Paris: Economica. ———. 2012. “L’espace habité que réclame l’assurance intime de pouvoir: Un essai d’approfondissement sociologique de l’anthropologie capacitaire de Paul Ricœur.” Études Ricoeuriennes–Ricoeur Studies 3(1): 34–52. Centemeri, L. 2010. “The Seveso disaster’s legacy.” In M. Armiero and M. Hall (eds.), Nature and History in Modern Italy. Athens: Ohio University Press. Cheyns, E. 2011. “Multi-stakeholder Initiatives for Sustainable Agriculture: The Limits of the ‘Inclusiveness Paradigm.’” In S. Ponte, P. Gibbon, and J. Vester-

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gaard (eds.). Governing through Standards: Origins, Drivers and Limitations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 201–235. ———. 2014. “Making ‘minority voices’ heard in transnational roundtables: The role of local NGOs in reintroducing justice and attachments.” Agriculture and Human Values, 31(3), pp. 439–453. De Blic, A. and D. de Blic. 2006. “Solidarités à l’école autour des familles sans papiers.” Esprit no. 8–9. De Blic, D. and C. Lafaye. 2011. “Singulière mobilisation, le Réseau éducation sans frontiers.” Projet (321): 12–19. Derrida, J. (1997) 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantel Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Translated by R. Bowlby. Standford: Stanford University Press. Dumouchel, P. 2010. “Nationalisme et culture.” In P. Dumouchel (ed.), Nationalisme et multiculturalisme en Asie. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 173–191. Eisenstadt. S. N. 2000 “Multiples Modernities” Daedalus 1: 1–29. Eliasoph, N. 2011. Making Volunteers: Civic Life After Welfare’s End. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fraser. N. 2008. Scales of Justice. Cambridge : Polity Press. Friedland, R. 2014. Amore: An American Father’s Roman Holiday. New York, Harper. Habermas, J. (1981) 1986. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press (translated by T. McCarthy). Honneth, A. (2005) 2007. La reification: Petit traité de théorie critique. Translated by S. Huber. Paris: Gallimard. Koveneva, O. 2011a. “Les communautés politiques en France et en Russie: Regards croisés sur quelques modalités du ‘vivre ensemble,’” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 66(3): 787–817. ———. 2011b. “Vivre ensemble dans la nature et dans la ville: regards comparés sur les grammaires de la mise en commun en France et en Russie.” Thèse de doctorat de sociologie, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Paris—Institut de Sociologie de l’Académie des Sciences, Moscou. Kurasawa, F. 2004. The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Luhmann. N. 1995. Social Systems. J. Bednarz & D. Baeker. tr. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nisbet. R. 1966. The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books. Parson. T. 1969. Politics and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Rawls, J. 1971 . A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richard-Ferroudji. A. and O. Barreteau. 2012. “Assembling Different Forms of Knowledge for Participative Water Management: Insights from the Concert ‘eau Game.’” In C. Claeys and M. Jacqué (eds.), Environmental Democracy Facing Uncertainty. Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang. Ricœur, P. 1992. “Unicité ou pluralité des principes de justice.” In J. Affichard and J.B. de Foucauld (eds.), Justice sociale et inégalités. 71–84. Paris: Ed. Esprit. RSPO [Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil] 2013, Principles and Criteria fot the Production of Sustainable Palm Oil, Kuala Lumpur, RSPO Secretariat.

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Silva-Castañeda, L. 2012. “A Forest of Evidence: Third-Party Certification and Multiple Forms of Proof—A Case Study on Oil Palm Plantations in Indonesia.” Agriculture and Human Values 29(3): 361–70. Stavo-Debauge, J. 2005. “Mobilising Statistical Powers for Action against Discrimination: The Case of the United Kingdom.” International Social Science Journal 57(183): 43–55. ———. 2009. “Venir à la communauté. Une sociologie de l’hospitalité et de l’appartenance.” Thèse de doctorat de sociologie. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Strydom, P. 2010. “Towards a Cognitive Sociology for Our Time: Habermas and Honneth or Language and Recognition . . . and Beyond.” Irish Journal of Sociology 19(1): 176–98. Thévenot, L. 1990. “L’action qui convient.” In P. Pharo and L. Quéré (eds.), Les formes de l’action. Paris: Ed. de l’EHESS (Raisons pratiques 1). ———. 1994. “Le régime de familiarité. Des choses en personne.” Genèses 17(17): 72–101. ———. 1995. “L’action publique contre l’exclusion dans des approches pluralistes du juste.” In J. Affichard and J.B. de Foucauld (eds.), Pluralisme et Équité. La Justice Sociale dans les Démocraties. Paris: Esprit. ———. 1997. “Un gouvernement par les normes; Pratiques et politiques des formats d’information.” In B. Conein and L. Thévenot (eds.), Cognition et Information en Société, Paris: EHESS (Raisons Pratiques 8). ———. 2001. “Justifying Critical Differences: Which Concepts of Value are Sustainable in an Expanded Coordination?” In S.T. Kwok and S.W. Chan (eds.), Culture and Humanity in the New Millennium: The Future of Human Values. Hong-Kong: The Chinese University Press. ———. 2002a. “Which Road to Follow? The Moral Complexity of an ‘Equipped’ Humanity.’” In J. Law and A. Mol (eds.), Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2002b. “Conventions of Co-ordination and the Framing of Uncertainty.” In E. Fullbrook (ed.), Intersubjectivity in Economics: Agents and Structures. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. L’action au pluriel. Sociologie des régimes d’engagement. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2007. “The Plurality of Cognitive Formats and Engagements: Moving between the Familiar and the Public.” European Journal of Social Theory 10(3): 409–23. ———. 2009. “Governing Life by Standards: A View from Engagements.” Social Studies of Science 39(5): 793–813. ———. 2010. “Autorità e poteri alla prova della critica: l’oppressione del governo orientato all’obiettivo.” Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 51(4): 627–60. ———. 2011a. “Powers and oppressions from the perspective of the sociology of engagements: a comparison with Bourdieu’s and Dewey’s critical approaches to practical activities.” Irish Journal of Sociology 19(1): 35–67.

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———. 2011b. “Conventions for Measuring and Questioning Policies: The Case of 50 Years of Policy Evaluations through a Statistical Survey.” Historical Social Research 36(4): 192–217. ———. 2012. “At Home and in a Common World, in a Literary and a Scientific Prose: Ginzburg’s Notes of a Blockade Person.” In E.S. Van Buskirk and A.L. Zorin (eds.), Lydia Ginzburg’s Alternative Literary Identities: A Collection of Articles and New Translation. Translated by J. Bourghol. Bern: Peter Lang. ———. 2013. “The Human Being Invested in Social Forms: Four Extensions of the Notion of Engagement.” In A.S. Margaret and A. Maccarini (eds.), Engaging with the World: Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations. London: Routledge. ———. 2014a. “Engaging in the Politics of Participative Art in Practice.” In T. Zembylas (ed.), Artistic Practices: Social Interactions and Cultural Dynamics. London: Routledge. ———. 2014b. “Voicing concern and difference. From public spaces to common-places.” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 1(1): 7–34. ———. (sous la dir.) 2005. “Des liens du proche aux lieux du public: une perspective Franco-Russe. Rapport au Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, au titre de l’action concertée incitative.” Internationalisation des sciences humaines et sociales. Paris: Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale. Thévenot, L. and M. Lamont. 2000. “Exploring the French and American Polity.” In M. Lamont and L. Thévenot (eds.), Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walzer, M. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York:Basic Books. Zambiras, A. 2004. “L’apprentissage de la vie en commun pour les étudiants Américains: les modèles contrastés de la fraternity et de l’International House.” Mémoire de Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies de Sociologie de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales sous la direction de Laurent Thévenot.

CHAPTER 4

On the Poverty of Our Freedom Relevance and Limits of the Hegelian Ethical System Axel Honneth

There is no normative guiding belief more implicit or attractive today than the idea of individual freedom. If one follows the journalistic coverage of world events even only periodically, like Hegel did, one immediately sees just how important this value is for the motivation or justification of social action: political party manifestos are drawn up, structural changes to the labor market are legitimized, legal reforms are publicly defended, and even vital decisions in personal relationships are justified—all in the name of individual freedom. Of course, such claims to freedom are almost always accompanied by other values that are construed either as a conducive condition for these claims or, more seldom, as that “for-the-sake-of-which” (Worumwillen)2 they are made: freedom, in its accepted form, is only feasible among equals and presupposes a universal security, which is why a provision of equality or political stability represents a necessary and enabling prerequisite; love, too, demands uncoerced and voluntary attention, which is why individual freedom is cherished for the sake of love and thus functions as its prerequisite. However, in such lines of argumentation, freedom is always the key insofar as, without it, the complementary values either completely lose their attractive relevance or their attractiveness becomes normatively unintelligible. If we consider just how central a value individual freedom is for our cultural and social self-conception, it can only amaze us how obscure its conceptual meaning remains in contemporary social usage. We speak openly of “freedom” as if it existed and were implemented in only one way, although we certainly know, and can even see formally, that there are vast differences between the freedom of political representation, the freedom of entering into contractual agreements, and the

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freedom, as it were, of the spontaneous union of people in love. So far, all philosophical efforts to provide conceptual redress, namely by distinguishing between different forms of freedom, have failed in achieving their self-imposed objective. This applies most of all to Isaiah Berlin’s (1969) famous distinction between negative and positive freedom (Berlin, however, speaks of two types of “liberty”), which, while causing a storm in the world of philosophy, ultimately failed to deliver the necessary distinctions for our self-conception because, phenomenologically, its positive side remained too vague and lacked clarity (Geuss 1995). In the following chapter, I will try to show that Hegel’s concept of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) poses to this day a better and more persuasive alternative to such attempts. It offers a philosophical source that continues to provide the means with which we can articulate the conceptual distinction between differing forms of freedom, both those we practice and those we value. One of the main tasks of Hegel’s conception of modern ethical life—in addition to many others to be discussed below—is that of educating the members of modern society about these necessary distinctions in their usage of “freedom.” What is more, Hegel’s theory of free will—developed in his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (2008)— can even be read as a kind of instruction manual on how to distinguish between the different forms of individual freedom, so as to give each its appropriate place in the institutional fabric of a society differentiated through the division of labor. In a first step, I will attempt to demonstrate the extent to which Hegel’s concept of ethical life aims to distinguish between the different forms of freedom; even this is no simple task, however, considering that Hegel’s idea of ethical life seeks first and foremost to define a sphere of institutional structures that is immune to the perpetual interrogation and reflection that emanate from modern, “free” subjectivity, such that the connection with human freedom at this initial stage is not yet present. In a second step, I will then attempt to show how Hegel proceeds from his theory of the will to those determinations (Bestimmungen) that allow him to distinguish between different forms of individual freedom within modern ethical life. Here we must establish whether we are justified in assuming that Hegel’s concept can indeed classify on a conceptual level our different understandings of freedom and assign to each its own institutional position. Admittedly, Hegel’s concept of ethical life falls short in some aspects, most of which are due to his failure to take his own intentions seriously enough throughout his articulation and development of the concept. I wish to turn to these limitations in a third and final step to raise once again the question of Hegel’s contemporary relevance.

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Hegel’s Three Concepts of Freedom As is characteristic of Hegel’s Realphilosophie, i.e., the parts of his philosophical system tailored to the explanation of “reality” in his philosophy of right and the state (Rechts- und Staatslehre), i.e., his theory of “objective Spirit,” concepts are introduced in a dialectic (Doppelung) of logical determinations and phenomenological characterizations, something which remains to the present day one of the most attractive attributes of his entire undertaking. As Dieter Henrich (2003: 65) has shown, one of Hegel’s most outstanding talents is his ability—in the course of his efforts to achieve a formal-ontological blueprint (Erschließung) of reality—to define the respective equivalences in our natural and social environment with such concision and exactness that they are rendered intelligible even for readers unfamiliar with his science of logic (Logik). This ability to think in a highly abstract yet still concretely diagnostic manner made Hegel a kind of sociologist avant la lettre; before the discipline even existed, he had already established himself as a modern social theorist—whose insights are perhaps still unmatched today. In our attempt to comprehend the purpose and meaning of Hegel’s conception of ethical life, we can avail ourselves of the dialectical meaning of all concepts used in his Realphilosophie. On the logical side, as is well known, Hegel’s philosophy of right and the state attempts to define the process of realization—or self-realization—of the determinations of reason on the level at which these concepts manifest themselves in the objectivity of social reality. On the phenomenological or empirical side, however, Hegel strives to make us aware of those phenomena in our social existence that allow us to understand that we, as sons and daughters of modernity, are actively involved in the generation of the logical determinations of reason. If one were to draw up a contemporary program of social theory in order to illustrate this striving, one could perhaps claim that Hegel focuses exclusively on those “collective” assignments of status and function that harmonize with the organic attributes of overarching reason.3 However, as we know, Hegel’s dialectical analysis of modern society presupposes a protracted process of historical development that leads, for the first time around the turn of the nineteenth century, to institutional premises in which the determinations of reason are reflected. In order to understand the intention of Hegel’s philosophy of right and the state one must therefore be constantly aware that it first attempts its explanation at a point in history when social reality—via previous processes of maturation—has already become so saturated with reason that social processes and institutions

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can be understood as embodiments of the logical determinations of Spirit. This central premise of Hegel’s entire Philosophy of Right arises from his assumption—which he regards as a virtually self-evident fact— that only upon the breakthrough of modernity are social institutions at last able to actively facilitate the realization of freedom. From now on, not only is the individual, with his/her distinct and independent ethos and beliefs, to understand himself/herself as “free,” but the institutions necessary for the function of society are also to be understood in this way—so that they can enable the freedom of outward social action. It is above all in his philosophy of history that Hegel makes clear why this exit of freedom out of mere inwardness and into the objective world of social institutions implies reaching a stage in which the logical determinations of Spirit first find their full application. He demonstrates there the extent to which each new stage in the process of historical development brings with it an advancement of social reality, which can be understood according to the model of the self-realizing, self-referential subjectivity of Spirit, because with each historical progression falls off a portion of impenetrable, still-spiritless objectivity, which prevented it from being understood with the help of logical determinations. It is only after freedom has become the organizing principle of all central institutions, in the “new era” of modernity, that such a complete rendering of social reality using the concepts of logic becomes possible, for only then are human beings in their social objectivation able to relate to themselves in the way necessitated by organic, contemplated Spirit in its self-referentiality. Using these historico-philosophical premises, Hegel is thus able to complete his Philosophy of Right—which according to his systematic idea, represents a theory of the institutional realization of freedom in modernity—in the form of a formal-ontological explanation of social reality: everything that Hegel takes into consideration with regard to modern societies, in order to define the “reality” of freedom, must follow the concepts of a logic that ultimately attempts to describe Spirit in the process of its undiminished self-realization. As point of origin of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, these presuppositions immediately give rise to the need for an explication of “freedom”— in its modern understanding—that allows one to identify within it the characteristics of the incrementally self-referential Spirit. If the freedom realized in modern societies were not comprehended according to such a model, the theory of these modern societies could not be developed throughout according to logical determinations. Hegel addresses

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the ensuing problem in his “Introduction” (to the Philosophy of Right), which constitutes a fascinating attempt at repudiating the dominant understanding of the concept of “freedom” and simultaneously drastically expanding the scope of any “philosophy of right.” I wish to address here only a very rudimentary form of this extremely complex line of thought, which goes through several stages of logical determination, because I am solely interested in illustrating the application of Hegel’s idea of ethical life. This concept emanates from a quite primitive, yet— for modern society—highly influential conception of freedom according to which the individual subject is “free” only insofar as it possesses an outer sphere of autonomy in which no other subject is allowed to intervene. Whether the specific desires and intentions that are realized in that sphere are “free” or not, i.e., whether they are motivated by reasons the subject deems “right” and not by mere natural causality, is irrelevant for such a concept insofar as its essence is the unhindered realization of any arbitrary purpose. This formulation alone suggests that Hegel is toying here with what Isaiah Berlin (1969) will later call “negative liberty.” Berlin’s conception implies that individual freedom is granted to each subject insofar as he or she possesses the capacity to realize his or her own desires in an unobstructed fashion. It is not difficult to see why Hegel is forced to dismiss this conception of “freedom” as deficient; it comes nowhere near his own benchmark concept of “Spirit” because we aren’t certain whether the desires realized here concern the “Spirit” in any way at all, i.e., whether or not they are simply contingent on mere causal relations (kausal Bewirktes). For Hegel it is utterly impossible to speak of “freedom” in a philosophically ambitious, rational sense amid the obscurity of whether the desires in question can even be designated as “free.” Nonetheless, as we will see later on, Hegel will take up this primitive concept in his theory of social modernity and will assign to it a systematic position within the subsystem of “Abstract Right,” because he is convinced that without it we cannot fully understand the freedom of our institutional practices. The second concept of freedom, which Hegel also takes up in his “Introduction” due to its powerful relevance to our modern selfconception, is distinguished from the first “negative” form in that the emphasis is now shifted to the “freedom” of the desires that are to be realized in the external world. According to this second model, which Isaiah Berlin, presumably, would have added to his “positive” concepts of “liberty,” we are only able to call human actions “free” insofar as they are based on desires and intentions determined outside of natural causality, i.e., self-imposed motives that are viewed subjectively as “right.”

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It is self-evident to Hegel that this concept represents an important step beyond the merely outward concept of negative freedom; for the idea that freedom can only exist where the condition of rational selfdetermination is met already converges with the horizon of Hegel’s Spirit, which is also to be conceived according to the model of a reflexive relation-to-self (Auf-Sich-Beziehen). However, this comparison with the structural characteristics of Spirit shows why Hegel must also dismiss as still deficient this second, and to a certain extent Kantian, concept of positive or reflexive freedom. It is lacking—to use Hegel’s spiritual-philosophical (geistphilosophisch) terminology—that moment of objectivity required by Spirit in order to grasp the “other” of itself (Andere seiner Selbst), i.e., non-Spirit or object (Nicht-Geist oder Objekt), as a product of its own reflexive self-relation. If we translate the reservation hinted at here into the concrete and phenomenological language that Hegel consistently uses in order to make us aware of the equivalences between his logical determinations and our familiar social reality, then his criticism of the idea of freedom as “rational self-determination” reads as follows: individual freedom, as defined here, implies nothing more than the possession of rational intentions and desires, i.e., those based on reasons deemed subjectively “right”; however, freedom actually depends much more on whether or not we can also comprehend reality as “objectivation,” as the embodiment of subjective self-determination. In his “Introduction,” Hegel is thus faced with the difficult task of formulating a third conception of freedom that bears resemblance to the structure of Spirit insofar as, within this conception, the objectivity of social reality can be comprehended in one way or another as the product of rationally self-reflexive subjects. Of course, it should come as no surprise that Hegel also expects his concept of ethical life to meet this demand. It is perhaps not a bad idea to turn first to Hegel’s own formulations—concrete and based on perception (anschauungsnah) as always—in order to exhibit the translatability of his logical determinations into the commonplace phenomena that constitute everyday life. For instance, in connection with an explanation of freedom according to the model of a consciously autonomous, objectified subjectivity, he immediately turns to the concrete examples of “friendship” and “love”: “Here we are not,” Hegel writes, “inherently one-sided; we restrict ourselves gladly to relating ourselves to another, but in this restriction know ourselves as ourselves. In this determinacy a human being should not feel determined; on the contrary, by treating the other as other, it is there that he first arrives at the feeling of his own selfhood. Thus free-

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dom lies neither in indeterminacy nor in determinacy; it is both of these at once ([1820] 2008: 33). In the “self-restriction” mentioned here by Hegel, we can see first on the level of human sentience a pre-form of the rational self-determination that serves as criterion for all individual freedom according to our second, “positive” or Kantian model. If I choose to become friends with another person or to begin an intimate relationship, this is not the result of mere disposition or of my being led blindly by impulse; on the contrary, I am following here certain deliberations and reasons that, insofar as they convince me of the “rightness” of my action, can be understood as a source of rational self-determination and of the restriction of all my impulses to the person whose contact I seek. This notion of self-restriction resulting from autonomy, however, is misleading and one-sided— or so would Hegel perhaps argue—for in friendship or in love it is only through the other person that the realization of my own self-determination is enabled; instead of “self-restriction” (Selbstbeschränkung), we should perhaps speak of a “self-unchaining” (Selbstentschränkung). In such cases where the other person desires from me what I desire from him/her, this person, my opposite, must be understood as that which alone enables me to consummate my freedom. If we now translate these concrete references back into the formal language of Hegel’s conception of Spirit, we have the key element of his third, so-called “objective” definition of freedom. In the case of friendship or love, the subject relates to himself or to herself in such a way that he or she beholds, in the objectivity of the other, an objectivation of his or her own desires, insofar as he or she perceives in the other a reflection of this objectivation and thus sees there, in the “other,” the other of himself or herself (Andere seiner Selbst). If we abstract further from the specific examples of “friendship” or “love,” we can conclude that objective freedom is present wherever socially established institutions allow subjects to grasp the actions of their partners as objective embodiments of their own desires acquired in reflexive self-relation. Here, and only here, does the subjectivity of acting individuals take a shape resembling that of overarching Spirit, in that it allows them to perceive in the objectivation of institutionalized practices the product of their own reflexive self-determination. Hegel incorporates all the institutions that provide for the permanent enabling of such an experience into the section of social reality which he calls “ethical life.” He views this concept as superior to other institutional entities, not simply because ethical life gives individuals a sense of relief and liberates them from

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the pressure of reflection, but also because it imparts a form of freedom that towers above the other forms—praised by modernity—for their degree of reality and realizable noncoercion (Wirklichkeitssättigung). One instance of this superiority—at this point, it almost seems superfluous to make separate note of this—can be seen in Hegel’s demonstration that only “ethical life” can be fully reflected in the logical concepts of “Spirit,” while the forms of agency which are connected with the two other conceptions of freedom still contain the remains of obscure, completely foreign objectivity, which make it impossible to interpret them entirely according to the model of Spirit. Such obstacles are surmounted in Hegel’s conception of objective, ethically mediated freedom, because here the subjects perceive the object as the “other” of their self, i.e., as a product of their own self-relation. From this intermediate conclusion, Hegel only requires one last small step to define the entire program of his Philosophy of Right and the particular conception of “right” it contains. It is this precise point that will clarify for us what Hegel actually intends to achieve with the distinction—merely outlined so far—between the different conceptions of freedom. Hegel proceeds in strictly immanent fashion by first demonstrating how, in the prevailing philosophy of his time, arguments for the rights to which citizens should be entitled invariably presuppose a concept of individual freedom on which they are based. Pursuing this line of argumentation, depending on whether the “negative” or “reflexive” conception of free will is presupposed, the extent and forms of subjective rights to be guaranteed by the state vary correspondingly. The ingenious move made by Hegel is that such a derivation of “right” forces us to relinquish the idea that merely subjective rights are implemented here, insofar as we now take the objective conception of freedom as our basis and not one of the deficient conceptions as before. As soon as we comprehend that the actual form of subjective freedom is defined neither as a space of mere individual caprice nor as a form of Kantian reflexive self-determination, but rather as active involvement in ethical institutions, the entire idea of “right” must be qualitatively re-expanded, because these institutions themselves now acquire a normatively grounded right to exist. We might venture to say that Hegel dispossesses conventional philosophy of its own concept of “right” by demonstrating that this concept must also contain social elements if it is to determine a more plausible basis for subjective individual freedom. In Hegel’s words, the hitherto prevailing “definition of right . . . involves that way of looking at the matter, especially popular since Rousseau, according to which what is fundamental, substantial, and primary is sup-

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posed to be the will of an individual in his own arbitrary self-will, not the rational will in and for itself, and [S]pirit as a particular individual, not [S] pirit as it is in its truth” ([1820] 2008: section 29); however, if individual free will is to be understood according to the model of Spirit, i.e., as a self-recurring will in the objectivity of certain practices in its self-relation, then the definition of “right” must also be amended correspondingly, because it must now encompass the institutionalized practices that provide for such self-relation. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right demonstrates the implementation of the program outlined here; it operates with a socio-ontologically expanded concept of “right” in order to show as legitimately given—as justified spheres of action, dictated by the demands of individual freedom—all institutional practices which help modern subjects attain the experience of objectively mediated self-relation. Hegel’s next move is an attempt to split the idea of objective freedom into different forms and to assign each to its own particular position in the institutional fabric of society. I will try to show this in the following section, which will also serve as an explication of the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s ethical system—i.e., its capacity to provide us with a normative vocabulary with which we can separate and evaluate the different forms of our practiced freedom.

The Fabric of Freedom in Our Modern World Hegel intends with his concept of ethical life, as we have seen so far, to single out in the standard social apparatus those institutions that enable mutually communicative subjects to experience not only negative or reflexive freedom, but also freedom in the objective sense discussed above. “Objective” implies that form of individual freedom which allows each subject to recognize himself or herself in social institutions insofar as he or she can perceive in the habitual desires of fellow citizens a precondition—or perhaps even a product—of his or her own rationally attained desire. However, before Hegel can decorate such social institutions with the title “ethical” he must first solve a rather difficult problem, which arises from the ambition of his Philosophy of Right to deliver a universally valid analysis of the objective, institutional preconditions for the freedom of the individual. He therefore cannot allow himself to be content with a mere identification of rationally attained desires, but must provide the much more complicated proof that (1) all modern subjects, as stipulated by their rational self-awareness, share certain desires with one another that (2) can only be realized without coercion

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insofar as these subjects are actively involved in already historically established social institutions. It is (unfortunately) not the case, however, that Hegel goes to any great length to consecutively elucidate these two arguments. As always, the crux of his justification also here appears as a philosophical derivative within which we are unable to separate the arguments we are to follow from the logical determinations it expresses. If we nonetheless attempt to undertake such a separation ex post, we can perhaps discern the following with regard to the exoteric, concretely phenomenological side of Hegel’s argumentation. In contrast to Kant, Hegel is convinced that the individual—as a product of his or her rational self-determination—orients him/herself around the normative rules introduced in the process of socialization as the code of behavior of surrounding institutions. It would therefore be erroneous for Hegel to presuppose an arbitrary pluralism of individual desires whose moral rightness the individual can only evaluate afterwards; as rationally self-determining beings, we reach rather a sense of universal agreement in that we adhere in our actions to the maxims of those mutual practices that provided the moral fabric within which we grew. This said, Hegel allows us to assume that the subjects of his time—as stipulated by their rational self-awareness—only share as many desires as there are institutions that serve as educational establishments for their individual Spirit, once they have gone through them, and as places of rationally consensual practices. In short, the crux of Hegel’s ethical task is thus to identify the universal, motivation-inspiring institutions of his time that enable members of society to recognize in the actions of their fellow citizens the objectivation of their own freedom. Given Hegel’s outstanding sociological capacities, he is able to solve this task in a way that remains even today worthy of theoretical usage— which, though it is not applicable in all of its facets, certainly is applicable with regard to its structure. If one considers other social theories with similar ambitions that emerged much later, for instance those of Durkheim or Talcott Parsons, one immediately perceives the superiority of Hegel’s distinction between forms of freedom as found in his Philosophy of Right. After he gave up the idea—pursued enthusiastically in his youth—according to which the integration of complex societies can take place through the mere extension of interpersonal relations (e.g., intimate relationships and friendship), Hegel came to the much more realistic understanding that the reproduction of modern societies depends essentially on the combination of three universal, motivationinspiring institutions: In addition to the private relationships based on love and friendship—Hegel managed here to preserve elements of his

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original conception—he included the capitalist market economy and the political organs that make up a constitutional monarchy. However, despite his philosophical maturity, Hegel had not yet cast aside his original aspirations, and he again attempted to comprehend these three complex institutions according to that same model which he had previously used to interpret the reciprocal nature of intimate love. This, as we already saw in the example of “love and friendship” in Hegel’s “Introduction,” was tantamount to the task of identifying in these other institutions, the market economy, and the state, the same mechanism of reciprocal objectivation between self-determined actions that was introduced as the substance of “objective freedom.” Hegel thus arrives at the conviction—central for his entire Philosophy of Right—that the institutions of romantic love, market economy, and constitutional monarchy represent spheres of modern ethical life. Raised within the moral fabric of these three institutional structures, modern subjects are to develop—through the cultivation of their capacity for self-determination— rational desires and intentions, the realization of which they can understand as the uncoerced objectivation of their individual freedom. However, it is of course not enough for Hegel to simply list these three forms of objective freedom next to each other; indeed, in order to introduce and categorically distinguish them from one another, he must first rank them normatively so that he can compare them and assess each with regard to its normative value. In the course of this assessment, Hegel once again makes use of his organic concept of Spirit, which he applies to the three institutional manifestations of freedom as he did before in his assessment of the prevailing conceptions of individual freedom. Accordingly, he must prove that the differing forms of objective freedom are all the more consummate, and thus valuable, the less they are determined by remnants of natural causality, so that when at their peak they can then be completely understood according to the model of Spirit that recognizes itself reflexively and free of coercion in its objectivations. Here, too, Hegel astounds with his masterful ability to use purely logical determinations to provide us with a technically lucid and empirically intelligible blueprint of social reality. Thus, the practices of reciprocal care and affection that constitute love, friendship, and family represent a subordinate level of objective freedom because, in them, only our socially interpreted nature is satisfied intersubjectively; the institutionalized practices (e.g., the capital-mediated exchange of goods and services) that constitute market economy possess by comparison a higher degree of objective freedom, because reflexive considerations of utility are already contained in the defined interests that form their ba-

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sis; and the practices prescribed in the structure of constitutional monarchy (e.g., safeguarding of the community and the mutual protection of rights) represent the highest level of objective freedom because the desires and intentions it contains—on their way to objectivation—have completely detached themselves from all natural roots and are the expression of rationally determined characteristics of the pure Spirit. I do not contend here that the characterizations of these individual “levels” even back then—in Hegel’s time—were without their faults: his depiction of romantic love and of familial relations based on it, for instance, is starkly influenced—as is generally known—by the patriarchal prejudices of his time; furthermore, in his presentation of the organs of the state he seems no longer aware that his original intention pertained to symmetrical relations between citizens who can recognize reciprocally, in the principled actions of others, an objectivation of their own striving. These issues aside, however, the fundamental idea of this three-part conception of ethical life was back then and remains today an enormous challenge for the modern understanding of freedom. It forces upon us the serious question of whether it would be better for our overall understanding of freedom, to construe social institutions and practices neither as that which limits or enables merely subjective freedom, but rather as the embodiment of a communicative freedom. Hegel took great care to include all means necessary for such an expansion of our understanding of freedom in the structure and central concepts of his ethical system: he singled out and distinguished between needs, interests, and individual self-worth as the three types of individual intentions that can only be realized through institutional reciprocity and can thus confer a consciousness of increased freedom. He strove to demonstrate that such an intersubjective reciprocity was in principle only possible among equals; and ultimately he even outlined the institutional complexes within which these forms of ethical, social, or communicative freedom could manifest themselves. At no point in his Philosophy of Right, however, can we read whether—or if at all—the institutions under consideration could in future develop in a way that would accord more readily with Hegel’s underlying ambition of “reciprocity among equals.” Rather, his benevolent analysis of the institutions of his time preserved instead the sacrosanctity of the dominant familial, market, and state relations, insofar as it failed to consider their intrinsic dynamism, their immanent, conflict-driven development, as even a possibility. It is this conservatism of Hegel’s social analysis to which I would like to turn briefly in my conclusion, for it reflects a severe structural problem in his ethical system.

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Conclusion: A New Idea of Justice As suggested above, in no way did Hegel want to exclude the “deficient” forms of individual freedom from his ethical system; on the contrary, he was too much of a staunch liberal not to see the extent to which purely private prospects of self-delineation and of moral self-reassurance were constitutive of modern societies. After demonstrating the deficiencies of the merely negative conception of freedom and of the idea of individual self-determination in the introduction to his Philosophy of Right, these two concepts reemerge—albeit under different names—in the work’s main section as part of Hegel’s attempt to identify two longestablished institutional structures in social reality. Under the title of “Abstract Right” he recapitulates the liberal rights of freedom rudimentarily anchored in the society of his day that were to guarantee all mature individuals the inviolable right to life, ownership, and contractual freedom; under the title of “Morality” he conceives the institutionally warranted prospect of being able to assert one’s own subjective idea of “right” based on moral grounds. Although Hegel does present these two institutions as precursors to the objective, ethical forms of freedom, we must not conclude from this that he comprehends them as mere prior qualifications for participation in social institutions such as the family, market, and state—as if individuals were to quasi-forfeit their subjective rights and moral autonomy as soon as, upon self-contemplation and in light of their personal beliefs, they decided to involve themselves in those institutions of intersubjective reciprocity. On the contrary, Hegel is much more convinced that the right to subjective freedom and the prospect of moral representation effectively form the basis of all interactions within the three ethical spheres considered above, insofar as they provide subjects with the possibility of withdrawing themselves if need be from obligations to which they have already committed themselves or even of raising moral objection to them. Thus, in the words of the economic sociologist Albert Hirschman (1970), it remains constitutive for the entire sphere of ethical life that all members of society have permanent access to the options of “exit” and “voice,” i.e., voluntary withdrawal or morally justified protest. This inclusion of “subjective” freedom in institutionalized ethical life of course also sets off an element of dynamism, openness, and transgressivity into Hegel’s theory that he is no longer able to control; for nowhere in his presentation does he exclude the possibility that the individual right to objection could add up to a collective protest aimed at challenging the constitution of the respective social institutions them-

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selves. Although Hegel does briefly mention, above all in his analysis of capitalist market economy, the possibility of such “collective outcry” (kollektive Empörung), he does not at all take into account the dynamism thereby brought about in his concept of ethical life. This would imply, namely, that Hegel would have to leave his philosophical system open to conflictual, revolutionary changes that could in future arise from frictions that he himself allowed into his system of institutional freedoms. As we know, Hegel did not take that step; he did not see his Philosophy of Right as a kind of stepping stone to modern society’s self-understanding of its own possibilities of freedom. Rather, he took it as a book, complete in itself, that tells of how, from the perspective of Spirit—self-comprehending in its institutional embodiments—objective freedom could manifest itself once and for all in the institutions of the family, market economy, and the state. From our contemporary perspective, almost two hundred years after the inception of Hegel’s ethical system, we of course know better: the powers of individualization and of autonomy—the potential of negative and reflexive freedom—have unharnessed a dynamic that infiltrated his own system and that fundamentally altered each of the institutions from the normative condition in which they were originally presented. Thus Hegel’s Philosophy of Right can no longer serve as a theoretical model for establishing social freedom in any concrete way, but it can provide an outline or structural plan for such an undertaking. It can teach us with lasting effect how impoverished our understanding of freedom really is if we attempt to grasp its essence merely with the concepts of subjective rights, moral autonomy, or a combination of both; with Hegel we have to argue that, on the contrary, individual freedom must first and foremost be understood in the social context as a personal uncoerced expansion of the self that results when the universally applicable desires of each subject are endorsed by the likewise universal desires of others. If we understand this form of “objective”—or what we perhaps now may call social freedom—as the core of all of our conceptions of freedom, as opposed to the merely derivative conceptions considered before, then we must also—like Hegel did—draw the accompanying consequence of revising our conception of justice: that which is referred to as “just” in highly developed societies can no longer be assessed with exclusive regard to whether, and to what extent, all members of society possess negative and reflexive freedom, but rather to whether these subjects are also granted the equal chance to participate in the institutional spheres of reciprocity, i.e., in familial and personal relations, in the labor market, and in the democratic forming of the political will.

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Thus the core of Hegel’s idea of social justice implies that normatively substantial—i.e., “ethical”—institutions require the support and protection of legal, government, and civil structures in order to realize the claim to social freedom that forms their basis. Only in the labor-divided interplay of law, politics, and public solidarity can we ultimately sustain the institutional structures to which we owe the various facets of our interlocking forms of autonomy and thus our entire culture of freedom.1

Axel Honneth is professor of philosophy at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and at Columbia University. Since 2001, he is also the director of the Institute for Social Research. His English language publications include: The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Polity, 1995), Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (Columbia UP, 2009), The Pathologies of Individual Freedom. Hegel`s Social Theory (Princeton UP, 2010), The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (Polity, 2012), and Freedom`s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (Columbia UP, 2014; Polity, 2014).

Notes Translated by Gabriel Borrud 1.. The original German (rendered here as “ethical system”) is Sittlichkeitslehre and implies the teaching (Lehre) of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). In English usage, the terms “ethics” or “ethical” are more or less synonymous with “morality” or “moral.” This is not the case with Hegel. His concept of “ethical life,” with which this chapter is principally concerned, refers to the freedom conferred by participation in social institutions, or in Hegel’s own words, the “concept of freedom developed into the existing world” (Hegel ([1820] 2008: section 142). (Translator’s note.) 2. Throughout this essay, the original German is included in parentheses where a standard translation does not exist or in cases that warrant reference to Hegel’s original terminology. (Translator’s note.) 3. Cf. Emundts and Horstmann 2002: 69–75.

References Berlin. I. 1969. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emundts, D. and R.-P. Horstmann. 2002. G.W.F. Hegel. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam. Geuss, R. 1995. “Freedom as an Ideal.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary 69: 87–100.

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Henrich, D. 2003. “Zerfall und Zukunft. Hegels Theoreme über das Ende der Kunst.” In Fixpunkte: Abhandlungen und Essays zur Theorie der Kunst. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G.W.F. (1820) 2008. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press. Hirschman. A. 1970. Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

PART II

Beyond Imperial Universalism

CHAPTER 5

Western Humanitarianism and the Representation of Distant Suffering A Genealogy of Moral Grammars and Visual Regimes Fuyuki Kurasawa

“One cannot be at one and the same time the champion of justice and of charity. One must choose, and the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] has long since chosen to be a defender of charity.” —Jean Pictet, The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross: Commentary

In a world in which large-scale disasters and emergencies seem to multiply and their coverage appears daily in Euro-American public spheres, humanitarianism confronts despair with a note of hope. Its singleminded devotion to rescuing victims of such situations and to relieve their suffering appears to embody the highest of human ideals, and this at a time when the normative limits of nationalism and territorially delimited notions of responsibility for others are exposed for all to see. Like human rights—the counterpart with which it shares much and intersects on several matters—humanitarianism seems to speak to a post-ideological political moment (Ignatieff 2001), one that seeks to invent cosmopolitan solutions less concerned with ideological rectitude than with the urgency of helping distant strangers whose lives are at risk. However, to critically interrogate contemporary humanitarian practice, we must recontextualize it in relation to the constitutive paradox that appeared at the moment of Western humanitarianism’s in-

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stitutional founding in the mid-nineteenth century, with the formation of the Red Cross in response to the horrors of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 (Dunant 1862).1 On the one hand, the Euro-American humanitarian movement has been built around an unwavering commitment to humanist universalism, borne out of the difficult lessons from the devastation of the Battle of Solferino in 1859. Accordingly, it was believed that war and other catastrophes could only be surmounted through a vision of a united humankind in which all persons are tied to all others above and beyond national, religious, ideological, and sociocultural divisions. From the moment of its institutionalization, Euro-American humanitarianism has been underpinned by two universalist principles: impartiality, according to which humanitarian organizations must care for victims of crises regardless of their status and location; and charity, an unbounded notion of benevolence for the less fortunate around the world (Dunant 1862; Pictet 1979). On the other hand, many of the European founders of humanitarianism believed that these universal principles could only be produced out of the historical trajectory and sociocultural superiority of European civilization, through various intellectual currents and systems of meaning (notably Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Romantic expressivism) that established its exceptional developmental route and standing as the embodiment of the most advanced stage of human progress (Brauman 2005; Destexhe 1993). Hence, the Euro-American humanitarian movement simultaneously erased and reinscribed hierarchical distinctions between peoples of the world, leading it to be distinctly ambivalent about the norm of justice and its egalitarian implications—as suggested by Pictet’s words that serve as an epigram to this chapter. How has Western humanitarianism attempted to confront this paradox? In many ways, it has done so through what could be termed humanitarian sentimentalism, a discursive and visual ensemble of techniques cultivating human unity through the display of persons in distress and the corresponding evocation of sentimentality amongst Euro-American publics.2 In other words, the humanitarian movement has aimed to overcome the original tension contained in its simultaneous commitments to explicit egalitarian universalism and implicit civilizational chauvinism by deploying a “sentimental grammar” that legitimizes the imperative to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings through a normative worldview seeking to trigger feelings of sympathy, pity, and compassion (Boltanski 1993); the creation of emotional bonds with distant strangers, represented as suffering victims, has been the principal means by which humanitarian agencies could begin

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to erode the indifference of these Euro-American publics vis-à-vis crises and emergencies in other parts of the world.3 In this chapter, I want to explore two problematic implications of this constitutive tension imbedded at the core of the regime of humanitarian sentimentalism. In the first instance, as mentioned above, the latter is entirely compatible with racially or ethnoculturally grounded conceptions of a hierarchical scale of humankind, for appeals to Euro-American publics’ altruistic emotions can strengthen their sense of civilizational superiority due to their supposedly distinctive capacity to be devoted to humanity as a whole and to feel the pain of remote others (Festa 2006; Moyn 2008; Rai 2002).4 From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this meant that Western humanitarianism did little to address rampant prejudices about non-European peoples, and therefore either was silent about, complicit in, or blatantly supportive of European colonialism. While the contemporary humanitarian movement has clearly rejected such ideas, traces of it inadvertently remain in the reproduction of the sociopolitical and symbolic construction of asymmetrical roles between rescuers and victims in crises or emergencies. Secondly, this constitutive tension has led Euro-American humanitarianism to privilege a strongly sentimentalizing discourse of charity and “tugging at heartstrings” over a more overtly political discourse of justice in the face of large-scale, conflict-derived disasters,5 relying on the invocation of feelings to electively assist the less fortunate as a ready substitute for an egalitarian politics of struggle against the structural causes of such disasters. Accordingly, the humanitarian ethos becomes a question of a personal, emotionally-driven choice to engage in charitable acts and manifestations of generosity toward victims of large-scale emergencies or crises, rather than a politically and normatively mandated collective responsibility underpinned by an emancipatory politics of global justice. To this extent, humanitarian agencies have socially and symbolically constructed the recipients of assistance as victims to be rescued because they suffer, instead of subjects whose rights have been being violated as moral equals. It is less solidarity with these moral equals that is sought to guide Euro-American public opinion to support humanitarian work than sentimentalized bonding with those constituted as victims through what is posited as a shared experience of suffering—one that tends to flatten out structures and relations of domination between recipients of humanitarian aid in the global South and Northern publics. The chapter examines these two implications of humanitarian sentimentalism by focusing on their interplay within the visual economy of Western humanitarianism, that is to say, the hitherto neglected yet

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crucial ways in which a relational system of visual codes and symbols circulating through social institutions sustains a sentimentalizing moral grammar to publicize large-scale emergencies. In particular, I am interested in the manners in which iconographic conventions used in the visual representation of an event or situation through technologies of reproduction of reality (namely, photography and film) symbolically constitute this event or situation as a humanitarian crisis and assign designated roles to the subjects portrayed in still or moving images. However, before elaborating this argument, I need to flesh out the aforementioned constitutive tension at the heart of the Euro-American humanitarian project.

Retracing Western Humanitarianism’s Constitutive Tension I want to begin by briefly reconstructing the three principal philosophical sources of the mainstream Euro-American humanitarian worldview. The first of these is the aforementioned Christian notion of charity (caritas), the act of giving to, and sense of benevolence and devotion toward, the poor and the less fortunate.6 Strongly influenced by the Biblical story of the good Samaritan, founders of the ICRC, understood, among other things, the latter’s purpose in terms of evangelical morality, for the rescue of victims of war and other crises was viewed as a duty steeped in Christian teachings (Brauman 2005: 170–71; Huber 1945).7 The aristocratic ethos of noblesse oblige represents the second of these sources, as it designates the moral obligations stemming from inherited privilege, which were subsequently incorporated into the bourgeois mindset (and finds its contemporary manifestation in the notion of philanthropy). Accordingly, assisting the vulnerable and those in need enables dominant sectors of society to honor their superordinate social positions by fulfilling the duties associated with them without putting into question the legitimacy of such positions. As for Western humanitarianism’s third philosophical foundation, it consists of European expressivism (Taylor 1989: 368–90), the current of thought that emerged in the late eighteenth century through a belief in the worldly expression of the self’s inner depth. Expressivist arguments about the intrinsic moral sentiments of sympathy—fellow-feeling, as discussed in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 2002), and pity, the aversion to cruelty and the suffering of others, advanced in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality ([1755] 1983)—allowed the humanitarian movement

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to anchor its normative orientation in defining conceptions of human nature, to which it could readily appeal for legitimization. All three sources coalesce in the interpretation of the idea of humanity employed by Euro-American humanitarianism, which contains a double meaning that is revealing for our purposes: “Humanity is therefore the sentiment or attitude of someone who shows himself to be human. Following Littr[é]’s dictionary, we would define humanity as a sentiment of active goodwill towards mankind. The word humanity in this sense is so perfectly suited to the Red Cross that it was chosen to designate its essential principle. At the same time, the word also serves to specify human nature and even the human species as a whole” (Pictet 1979: 8). Hence, not only does “humanity” designate both a universalist ideal of a unified humankind and a moral sentiment of compassion or kindness toward others, but the former is dependent upon the latter in a manner that binds human beings to each other emotionally without necessarily requiring recognition of their moral and substantive equality. Put differently, because of its sentimentalist grounding, the humanitarian movement’s universalism has not needed to be tied to intercultural or intercivilizational egalitarianism essential to a project of global justice. Here again, Pictet’s words are illuminating in his explanation of the principle of impartiality: “This is why society has taken as a fundamental postulate the equality of rights between men. In the final analysis, this idea is the most convenient one for regulating relations between individuals. It does not seriously harm anyone and although it does not attain the highest level of justice, it does nevertheless provide a certain degree of justice. It is certainly not without value because, as one thinker has expressed it, This has made it possible for the world of masters and the world of servants to come together and constitute a single and undivided humanity” (Pictet 1979).9 Thus, because they are entitled to sympathy or pity, recipients of humanitarian charity are to be treated with humanity, yet still can be considered ethnoculturally or civilizationally inferior to superordinate persons and groups around the world. Until the wave of decolonization that swept across the globe in the aftermath of the Second World War, mainstream humanitarianism’s ambivalence about universal equality was reflected in the fact that its sentimentalism was entirely compatible with European colonialism and that the period of its institutional formalization corresponded with that of aggressive imperial expansionism during the second half of the

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nineteenth century (Brauman 2005: 170). Indeed, the First Geneva Convention (1864) did not question the right to foreign conquest nor that of engaging in wars of colonial expansion, but instead was concerned with setting the limits to such conflicts (Brauman 2005: 170); for most Euro-American humanitarian agencies, then, the raisons d’être of colonial projects were self-evident and their devastating effects on colonized populations could not be considered humanitarian situations in which they were to intervene.10 Such populations had an ambiguous status, for in many instances, it was believed that their civilizational inferiority and state of savagery (concretized through tropes of the primitive and the Oriental) rendered them incapable of experiencing the higher moral sentiments undergirding the humanitarian worldview (compassion, pity, etc.) or to domesticate aggressive instincts necessary to extend humane treatment to others (Boissier 1978: 365–67; Brauman 2005: 170–71). As such, for many humanitarian organizations, colonialism’s civilizing mission was a perfect vehicle through which to morally educate and thus “humanize” and “elevate” colonial subjects, with Europe being the self-designated carrier of humanity’s most refined sentiments and lofty norms; the colonial project could thus be legitimized as a humanitarian “burden of civilization.” Gustave Moynier, one of the cofounders of the Red Cross and its first president, was also the editor of L’Afrique explorée et civilisée (Africa Explored and Civilized), a journal devoted to the various dimensions of the legitimization, description, and management of European imperialism on that continent (Brauman 2005; Destexhe 1993). Like many of his contemporaries, Moynier believed that humanitarianism could only succeed where Westernization had already taken root, a process that could itself most effectively be achieved by participating in its global spread through support for colonial endeavors that would diffuse universal European values to the four corners of the earth (Boissier 1978: 365–67).11 However, given the high level of differentiation within the field of Euro-American humanitarianism, it is crucial to keep in mind that its constitutive paradox has been addressed in various ways. During the interwar period, for instance, Left humanitarian agencies—whether affiliated with the Communist International or the independent trade union movement—went against the current of their mainstream and more prominent counterparts by explicitly criticizing Western imperialism, as well as introducing an alternative moral grammar that sought to displace notions of charity and benevolence with those of international working-class solidarity and anticapitalist economic justice.12 More recently, progressive humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)

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with roots in political activism (Médecins Sans Frontières, Secours Populaire Français, etc.) have put into question the mainstream humanitarian principle of neutrality, asserting that it may prevent criticism of political actors committing injustices against populations and thus make the humanitarian movement complicit with such injustices. For their part, mainstream, liberal humanitarian NGOs have aimed to pluralize their philosophical underpinnings in the last few decades by, among other things, constructing an overlapping moral consensus about core principles derived from universal norms shared amongst the world’s major religions and ethical systems (e.g., the Golden Rule) (Pictet 1979). Similarly, several large NGOs with Christian origins (the ICRC, Save the Children Fund, etc.) went through processes of ideological and discursive secularization, in order to widen their public appeal and to be able to operate in non-Christian settings.13 And humanitarian liberalism has relied on the supposed intercultural neutrality of liberal individualism, with a conception of human beings as abstract, generic subjects stripped of their sociocultural particularities to establish individual moral equality. Nevertheless, today no less than in the past, all ideological strands of Euro-American humanitarianism face the daunting task of generating a sense of public concern for the suffering of distant strangers; as a result, within the humanitarian movement, use of more politicized and egalitarian discourses tends to be overshadowed by a continued reliance on sentimentalism, which remains more instrumentally effective in rapidly mobilizing Western public opinion and garnering political support. Left discourses, with their seemingly abstract appeals to principles of global solidarity and justice, remain comparatively marginal within humanitarianism in general, which puts the accent on individual decisions to exercise charitable feelings instead of collective responsibilities to resist forms of global injustice bringing about conflict-based humanitarian emergencies. Of what, exactly, does this sentimentalist moral grammar consist? Its foregrounding of the suffering of victims of humanitarian crises is designed to cut across conventional civilizational, ethnocultural, or racialized modes of differentiation between segments of humankind, in order to present such a condition of distress as a shared human condition. Suffering becomes a universal, acultural trait of existence, disembedded from the specific lifeworlds and situations of victimized groups and persons. Accordingly, humanitarian sentimentalism seeks to cultivate certain aforementioned moral sentiments among Euro-American publics toward these victims, in order to create bonds of commonality with others that may concretely “humanize” them and possibly expand

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the boundaries of the moral communities toward which such publics experience a sense of mutual responsibility (Laqueur 2001; Rorty 1998). Implicit in this sentimentalist grammar as expressed above in Pictet’s description of humanity is a philosophical anthropology according to which feelings of sympathy, compassion and pity toward others are inherent in all human beings and, more significantly, define our highest attributes. In light of this understanding, then, the task of humanitarian discourses becomes one of awakening or nurturing dormant emotions amongst Western publics, so as to transcend hostility or sheer indifference toward those who lie outside of these populations’ conventionally defined moral communities; the triggering of specific emotions is meant to bypass or erode typified perceptions of subjects needing to be rescued in the global South as ideological enemies or stigmatized ethno-racial others, yet does so by reducing them to an essentialized condition of suffering beings—that is to say, embodiments of “bare life” (Agamben 1998) to whom we are bound by virtue of our common humanity. Although, at first glance, this process of sentimentalizing transcendence or bypassing of differences between human beings may appear attractive because of its expeditiousness and effectiveness in establishing human ties beyond borders, it simply reinscribes the constitutive tension of Euro-American humanitarianism by leaving in abeyance its ambivalence toward norms of universal equality and global justice. In effect, the turn to sentimentalism depoliticizes humanitarian situations by invoking what Arendt (1963: 88–89) famously termed a “politics of pity,” thus rendering these situations into emotionally driven public spectacles to a degree that obfuscates public consideration of the political and socioeconomic forces that underlie them; structural causes and systemic factors producing conflict-based humanitarian emergencies (neoliberal capitalism, the global arms’ trade, primary resource extraction, etc.) are thereby sidelined in the rush to represent and communicate what victims are feeling to Western audiences. Additionally, humanitarian sentimentalism leaves intact, or can even bolster, these audiences’ sense of their own ethnocultural or civilizational superiority vis-à-vis vulnerable populations in the global South, since to feel pity for and be charitable towards others does not entail that one treat them as moral or political equals—and may in fact produce the opposite effect (Festa 2006; Rai 2002).14 Strikingly, it fails to promote critical reflection on the unjust sources of material and symbolic asymmetries, producing positions of domination and subordination upon which relations of charity are premised, and is built around the naturalized reproduction of

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such relations rather than their eventual end: “the world of masters and the world of servants can come together,” yet remain structurally intact. The effect of this neglect of the faculty of critical reflection is a privileging of visceral reactions on the part of Euro-American publics, for Western humanitarianism seeks to generate human unity by provoking strong emotional responses towards victims in distress in a manner that makes possible the “manipulation of sentiment” (Rorty 1998) as well as favors the instinctual grounding of the moral imagination upon which concern for suffering victims is constituted. Yet such emphasis on sentimentalization tends to blunt or obscure these publics’ capacity to acquire a better understanding of the distinctive circumstances of each humanitarian emergency (e.g., the interplay of the forces of the global economy, the political history of an affected country or region, etc.) and to suspend public debate about the legitimacy of a humanitarian organization’s appeal for support and purposes for which funds will be used. What matters, for humanitarian sentimentalism, is swiftly and vigorously to puncture the veil of collective indifference through an emotionally laden politics of pity that shifts public opinion and leads to a steady stream of donations. Within Euro-American humanitarianism, two principal sources of a sentimental grammar exist. The first of these, narrative in character, is found in fictional or realist oral and written accounts of humanitarian crises (novels, eyewitness testimonies, journalistic reports, etc.). However, for my purposes, it is the second of these sources, visuality, upon which the rest of this chapter will be focused, given the oft-overlooked yet essential role of still and moving images for the humanitarian movement.

The Visual Regime of Humanitarian Sentimentalism Since its inception, the Euro-American humanitarian movement has rapidly incorporated into its fold various technologies of visual representation of its ideals as well as of the causes and emergencies in which it has involved itself. Sometimes overlapping with their human rights counterparts, humanitarian NGOs and social movements grasped very early on the unparalleled symbolic power of still and moving images to evoke Western viewers’ moral sentiments and thereby garner their financial and political support. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the antislavery movement—which is often considered the first large-scale international humanitarian movement—extensively

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relied on illustrations both to “humanize” slaves in the eyes of the populations of the North Atlantic region and to mock (often through political cartoons) the perpetrators of the slave trade and their supporters (Hochschild 2005; Wood 2000). Pictorial, allegorical, and caricatural art could thus be utilized to present slavery as an injustice and form of exploitation, but in a more influential way, as a cruel system inflicting existential and corporeal suffering onto one segment of humankind.15 In the early twentieth century, the Congo Reform Association (CRA) active in the Anglo-American world depended on photographic evidence of the severe mistreatment of the Congolese population by the colonial regime of Belgium’s King Leopold II in the Congo Free State to denounce this regime and mobilize public opposition to it (Hochschild 1998). Indeed, the CRA created the first humanitarian campaign to utilize photography for its own purposes (Sliwinski 2006), relying on the latter to record and document the litany of atrocities committed against Congolese subjects (ranging from flogging to the severing of limbs). Accordingly, the CRA organized the production, circulation, and distribution of photographs of such atrocities in Anglo-American public spheres via newspapers, pamphlets, books, and what were known as “lantern lectures” because of their use of slides projected with magic lanterns. It was through these lectures, in particular, that visual mechanisms of evocation of the humanitarian grammar of sentimentalism became explicit, for they exploited the act of seeing still images to create rituals of “collective effervescence” (Durkheim [1912] 1995) through which viewers’ sympathy and outrage could be fostered to oppose King Leopold’s rule. During the interwar period, the ICRC experimented with and pioneered the production of documentary films depicting humanitarian work. Illustrating the dire living conditions of Eastern and Central European populations in the aftermath of the First World War as well as the Red Cross’s rescue and aid activities there, these films stylistically were characterized by a sentimental impressionism, with a deliberate selection of tragic narratives and an underscoring of the misery of victims to maximize public impact (ICRC 2005; Natale 2004).16 Around the same period, one of the largest humanitarian aid campaigns in history, organized in response to the 1921–23 Russian famine, saw several Western NGOs involved in the production and dissemination of photographic and cinematic portrayals of the famine’s effects. This visual material particularly focused on depicting malnourished or suffering children in Russia, for they corresponded to still-dominant Victorian conventions about the sentimentalization of childhood (as a period of innocence and vulnerability). More broadly, the humanitarian movement’s creation

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of a massive visual archive of the Russian famine—which circulated in Euro-American public spheres through several forms (postcards, pamphlets, film screenings, public lectures, newspaper articles, newsreels, etc.)—was designed to help Western viewers emotionally identify with the plight of the Russian people, in order to portray them as simply starving or vulnerable human beings rather than reducing them to ideologically suspect Bolshevik supporters (Kurasawa 2013). In the last few decades, humanitarian sentimentalism has consolidated itself via newer technologies of visual representation and distribution. Humanitarian NGOs and Euro-American news organizations contributed footage of the Biafran famine (1967–70), the first famine of the televisual age, which consisted of searing footage and photographs of starving children broadcast and published around the world. At the same time, one of the consequences of this event was the emergence of an endogenous critique of a sentimentalist visual regime, since its depoliticized depiction of the famine and the overarching humanitarian principle of neutrality championed by the ICRC were being rejected by certain emergency aid workers in Biafra, who eventually broke with the latter agency to found Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF); indeed, these critics interpreted the ICRC’s (and mainstream humanitarianism’s) refusal to denounce the Nigerian regime’s and armed forces’ severe abuses of the Igbo people during the civil war over an independent Biafra as complicit with such abuses. The most recent globalized and archetypical images of mass starvation come from the Ethiopian famine (1983– 85), which was characterized by an unprecedented proliferation of still and moving pictures documenting its devastation. Visual material disseminated in documentation and publicity from NGOs, media reports, and the 1985 Live Aid concerts converged in graphically highlighting corporeal traces of the victims’ suffering while naturalizing the famine’s causes. Pity toward these victims, with their distended stomachs and fly-ridden mouths, was a recurring visual and narrative effect sought after to generate large numbers of donations to humanitarian relief efforts in Ethiopia (Campbell 2003).17 And while the 2005 Live 8 concerts and events organized to draw attention to the campaign to end global poverty (notably in sub-Saharan Africa) marked an important discursive shift from a discourse of charity to one of justice, the images used during the concerts retained a strongly sentimentalist bent in their depictions of humanitarian crises.18 Having briefly reconstructed some of the defining moments in the interface between modes of visual representation and humanitarian crises, I want to consider the question of the functions that such modes

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have performed within Euro-American public spheres. From its very inception, the Western humanitarian movement discovered and exploited the unique socio-symbolic capacities of images to support a sentimentalizing grammar, one that could trigger four kinds of reactions on the part of audiences in the North Atlantic region: pity (sorrow toward the situation of victims of humanitarian emergencies); compassion (sympathetic concern for the suffering of these victims); shock (revulsion at the scale and intensity of suffering being depicted); and guilt (culpability in relation to the possible consequences of bystanding and indifference).19 In turn, humanitarian NGOs must work to harness and direct these reactions toward direct or tacit support for their projects, whether by favorably mobilizing public opinion or leading a successful fundraising campaign. Indeed, images act as powerful devices to cultivate these audiences’ moral imaginations, for they can encourage engagement in a process of phenomenological reconstruction of the experiences of victims of humanitarian crises being portrayed, or even of partial transposition into their positions—that is to say, a process whereby viewers imagine themselves in the place of victims and thereby attempt to apprehend their suffering. Yet for these sorts of processes to function effectively, humanitarian agencies have pursued certain policies of moral education of Euro-American publics by training the latter to interpret images of crises and emergencies through a sentimental lens that will provoke the four emotional responses enumerated above. Hence, humanitarian NGOs have developed a vast array of didactic and editorial techniques of presentation of images that direct viewers to see them in particular ways; aside from the selection of images itself, oral or written commentaries expressing opinions or describing events in captions or headlines for printed or electronic material (such as advertisements and pamphlets), as well as the use of music and editing for public lectures and films, are designed to assist publics to recognize scenes of distant suffering and, in some instances, to reflect on the experiences of victims. While mechanisms of this kind are used intensely during the initial phase of deployment and adoption of a new technology of visual representation, their explicit presence tends to diminish over time as publics eventually acquire habitualized practices of viewing, which are facilitated by the repetition of iconographic conventions. This last point is crucial, since the visual regime of humanitarian sentimentalism is sustained through symbolic codification and framing, with NGOs and media organizations producing or selecting images that employ certain iconographic tropes and typifications inscribed with specific, collectively shared meanings. What must be made clear is the

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historical constitution of this visual regime and its formation of an established set of conventions consistently reproduced in representations of distant suffering, to which Euro-American audiences have been repeatedly exposed and which thereby become recognized as valid depictions of events or states of being surrounding humanitarian crises. In particular, three major typifications are found in still and moving images of such crises, each of which should be explained in turn: personification, massification, and care, the features of which are summarized in Table 5.1. Table 5.1. The Iconographic Conventions of Humanitarian Sentimentalism Typification Personification Massification Care

Intended Sentiment Pity Shock Benevolence

Aesthetic Archetype The Scream The Disasters of War La Pietà

The first of these, personification, is a representational genre that singles out a specific person’s condition as both a figurative and literal embodiment of the gravity or intensity of the suffering caused by a humanitarian emergency. It is created by a close-up shot of a single victim (or, occasionally, a small group of victims) most commonly portrayed in a state of raw emotional, psychological, and/or physical distress. The subject thus appears as a solitary figure, isolated from others and seemingly alone in her predicament, in a manner stripped of any contextual information about underlying socioeconomic or political circumstances. The iconography of personification predominantly operates in an expressionist aesthetic style, which aims to convey unfiltered strong emotions corporeally inscribed or etched in the victim’s facial traits. The trope of the starving or injured child is a pervasive trope of personification, conveying lack of personal responsibility for the relevant humanitarian crisis affecting the child and, consequently, their status as an innocent victim “deserving” to be rescued or helped. For humanitarian agencies, personification is intended to generate pity toward this victim, as Western publics are to experience a sense of sorrow at seeing the victim in a condition of acute distress and vulnerability. Although possessing multiple sources in the history of Western aesthetics, personified iconography finds its modern archetype in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), the proto-expressionist painting that has become an emblem of the modern age because of its vivid portrayal of a lone subject psychically and emotionally experiencing (and corporeally expressing) a state of existential angst. Two of the earliest and most strik-

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ing artifacts produced or disseminated by humanitarian agencies that contributed to the formation of the trope of personification consist, first, of multiple photographs taken by a member of what eventually became the Congo Reform Association, each of which captured a Congolese person maimed by colonial troops,20 and second, of a 1921 image of a starving girl leaning against a doorframe during the Russian famine.21 Since then, the trope of personification has been repeatedly utilized to capture famines, notably in sub-Saharan Africa: advertisements for humanitarian agencies during the 1968 Biafran famine often featured pictures of a starving child,22 as did some of the iconic still and moving images of the 1983–85 Sahel famine23 and a much-discussed and Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a child who had collapsed while a vulture awaited in the background, taken during the 1993 famine in Sudan.24 Similarly, one of the best-known images from the vast undernourishment in Niger in 2005 portrayed a close-up of a woman’s face, whose mouth was covered by her baby’s skeletal hand.25 Within the visual regime of humanitarian sentimentalism, massification represents the second typification. Usually created through wide shots, massified images depict an undifferentiated mass of victims, regrouping a large number of corpses or survivors in close proximity within the frame in order to convey the magnitude of a humanitarian crisis; as such, massification quantitatively signifies and visually symbolizes the scale of suffering and devastation wrought by such a crisis, rather than its experiential dimensions per se (by contrast to personalization). In iconographic terms, massification functions within the aesthetic genre of realist impressionism, which insists on an unadorned reflection of observable reality. Therefore, the Euro-American humanitarian movement has sought to use portrayals of massification to engender feelings of revulsion or shock amongst Western publics by confronting them with the size of the affected population and the effects of an emergency upon it. In Western aesthetics, Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810s) supply the archetypical Ur-iconography of massification, with its haunting, stark black-and-white etchings of masses of dead or agonizing bodies. Among the first photographs of a humanitarian crisis to conform to this representational style is one depicting a mound of unburied corpses piled up on the snowy grounds of a cemetery during the Russian famine.26 Various iterations of it circulated in Western public spheres via newspapers, postcards, pamphlets, and documentary film footage produced by humanitarian NGOs as a mainstay of their fundraising campaigns; to this day, the image remains one of the defining portraits of the Russian famine.27 In the second half of the

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twentieth century, massification was a trope extensively reproduced in the visual representation of various humanitarian disasters in sub-Saharan Africa: the famines in Biafra28 and Ethiopia,29 as well as the 1994 Rwandan genocide,30 among others. The third typification that constitutes the visual regime of humanitarian sentimentalism is organized around care, which represents an interpersonal relationship between a suffering victim and a dispenser of aid attempting to rescue him or alleviate her pain.31 Structurally, the symbolic conventions of care thus include two clearly demarcated roles: the recipient of assistance is in a position of helplessness or acute vulnerability, whereas the aid worker has the capacity to save her and demonstrates compassion toward him. Accordingly, Euro-American humanitarian organizations have deployed care as a representational trope in order to develop among their publics a sense of concern and benevolence toward those affected by a humanitarian emergency, which is produced through a process of identification and transposition of members of these publics with the aid worker depicted in a still or moving image. La Pietà, the Christian scene composed of a mournful Mary cradling the body of Jesus after his crucifixion, has served as an iconographic archetype of care and has thereby invested reiterations of this scene in humanitarian visuality with a quasi-sacred dimension that still implicitly resonates with many Western audiences. It is found throughout the early history of humanitarian imagery, from a 1918 advertisement for the American Red Cross featuring a nun holding an injured soldier lying on a stretcher32 to that of a nurse working for the Save the Children Fund feeding a child during the Russian famine.33 As a visual archetype, care was consolidated during the conflict and famine in Biafra, for Western newspapers published numerous photographs of aid workers treating malnourished children,34 in a manner that was echoed nearly two decades later during the Ethiopian famine.35 Explicit reframings of La Pietà to convey humanitarian crises continue to appear with some regularity in public spheres, most recently through a widely circulated image of a woman whose outstretched hand is covering the forehead of a victim of the Darfur genocide lying in a bed.36

The Symbolic Reinscription of Humanitarianism’s Founding Paradox Having analyzed the visual tropes and conventions through which the Euro-American humanitarian movement has sought to emotionally im-

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plicate Western publics in its activities and the fate of populations in distress in the global South, I want to discuss the ways in which this dependence on visually generated sentimentalism has sustained the constitutive tension between humanitarianism’s commitment to egalitarian universalism and its implicit civilizational hierarchization. This tension is itself visible in the history of representations of humanitarian situations, which iconographically constitute the asymmetrical roles of recipient and provider of aid in intersubjective terms. The former role is one that can reduce victims of humanitarian crises to morally inferior objects of pity and charity, for they appear to exist in a state of permanent vulnerability in which they need to be protected by external regimes of humanitarian aid and remain eternally dependent on outside assistance. Moreover, images of recipients of aid symbolically underscore two characteristics attributed to them: passivity, namely, their personal and collective inability to positively affect their own circumstances or to act as authors of their own fate (being deprived of agentic capacities, they must be rescued by others); and innocence, a literal or figurative condition of childhood that makes victims unaware of the functioning of the structural forces behind their difficulties and, more importantly, not responsible for such difficulties. Conversely, providers of humanitarian assistance are depicted as agents of history, possessing both the material and symbolic capacities to transform the situations within which helpless populations find themselves; iconographically, they are invested with heroic or benevolent qualities that attribute a moral superiority to their roles vis-à-vis those whom they are rescuing. One of the effects of this visual reproduction of humanitarianism’s constitutive tension is the erasure of difference at several levels. First, as explained above, the visually based cultivation of Euro-American publics’ sympathy for victims relies on mechanisms of emotional identification and transposition that are fraught with ethico-political difficulties. It assumes an ability to perform transparent and flawless processes of transposability, whereby publics are believed to be able to unproblematically imagine themselves in the place of victims whom they see portrayed in images of humanitarian crises. On the contrary, an egalitarian global politics must recognize the limits of the moral imagination when engaging in these sorts of exercises of transposition, notably the existence of an experiential gap between viewers of images and the subjects represented in them; victims’ suffering should be approached by Western audiences as a form of alterity that is not reducible to what is familiar or easily grasped, for such suffering contains an excess that remains inaccessible to these audiences (who cannot know what it feels

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like) (Young 1997). Put succinctly, to see still or moving images of a humanitarian emergency and have an emotional response to them does not entitle one to believe that one can put oneself in the shoes of those being depicted. In addition, the belief that sentimentalism enables perfect transposability has the effect of obscuring the dominant positions of most viewers in the North Atlantic region—who enjoy relative material comfort and physical safety—in relation to victims of humanitarian crises in the global South. Facile identification with their suffering may prompt Euro-American publics to equate these realities with their own experiences of distress, which are of a different degree and kind given that few members of these publics can imagine, let alone intimately know, starvation or genocide. Not to be forgotten is the fact that such emotional identification fails to put into question the structural relations of power and systemic mechanisms of the global economy that entrench the reoccurrence of humanitarian emergencies, and thus reproduce asymmetrical North-South relations that themselves generate the vulnerability of populations to the effects of these emergencies.37 Secondly, the erasure of difference occurs through the assimilation of the representations of specific humanitarian crises into visual tropes and narratives to which Western publics are accustomed, since photographs and news or documentary film footage of an emergency tend to be created and presented in a way that conforms to the three iconographic typifications detailed in the previous section. As a result, the phenomenological and structural particularities of such an emergency can be flattened out in order to fit within established Euro-American visual and narrative conventions about humanitarian crises, thereby neglecting the ways in which the interpretations of persons being represented and the institutional conditions causing an emergency situation may radically diverge from these conventions. Dependence on the latter to portray all humanitarian crises leads both to simplification and a misleading impression of familiarity on the part of Western viewers, who can thus sidestep the analytical task of learning about these crises’ historical and sociopolitical circumstances as well as the hermeneutical work of listening to and making sense of the self-understandings and subjective lifeworlds of affected populations. Such extensive utilization of sentimentally driven iconographic typifications by Euro-American humanitarian and media organizations tends to homogenize all situations and persons depicted by translating them into generic, recognizable categories, with subjects being reduced to their condition of victimhood while cultural, political, historical, and socioeconomic contexts underlying these situations are evacuated from public discourses.

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If the erasure of difference is one of the consequences of the reinscription of humanitarianism’s foundational paradox, another one is the relatively weak critique of global inequalities and modes of domination. As previously mentioned, the visually based sentimental grammar of Western humanitarianism retains a conception of the latter as form of charity, since personal financial donations to humanitarian NGOs are presented as the principal means through which persons can express their public support for the activities of these NGOs; visual and textual material about humanitarian emergencies convey the idea that public involvement in campaigns is accomplished through individualized philanthropic choices on the part of concerned (and morally elevated) citizens, who perform “good works” imbued with humane moral sentiments (benevolence, noblesse oblige, sympathy, etc.). Consequently, the symbolic and socioeconomic mechanisms of domination underlying North-South relations are left unexamined. Among those left in suspense are implicit civilizational and sociocultural hierarchies between donors and recipients of humanitarian aid, given the ethno-racial stigmatization of vulnerable populations in the global South (notably in sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia) still prevalent in Euro-American public spheres. Similarly, systemic factors that fuel structural violence and situational crises are rarely denounced by humanitarian discourses. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Congo Reform Association denounced the atrocities committed under Belgium’s King Leopold II in the Congo Free State, yet remained silent about brutal practices committed by European colonial regimes in other parts of Africa. Today, with a few notable exceptions, the mainstream Euro-American humanitarian movement laments mass violence and severe material deprivation around the world as both unfortunate and undeserved, yet continues to neglect a more critical examination of the structural forces driving many conflict-based emergencies: structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, arms sales to authoritarian regimes by Western corporations (often with the tacit approval or lobbying by these corporations’ domestic governments), consumption patterns by citizens in the rich world, and so on.

Conclusion Are the moral grammar of sentimentalism and its attendant regime of visual representation inevitable, or at least necessary, components of the project of Western humanitarianism? To my mind, this need not be the

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case, if the humanitarian project is repositioned within the framework of a critical cosmopolitanism fully committed to egalitarian universalism. Instead of a charitable or philanthropic exercise in helping to rescue distant strangers, humanitarianism can become a political practice of solidarity with structurally disadvantaged populations around the world and a mode of resistance to an unjust global order. Therefore, what can be employed is an alternative moral grammar, that of global justice, in order to view humanitarian campaigns as normatively grounded manifestations of emancipatory political struggles, constructed around principles of the moral equality of all human beings and disproportionate Northern responsibility for the current world order; in other words, humanitarianism can become a form of rectification of historical and contemporary transnational injustices—and the existing institutional configuration of international governance—from which inhabitants of the global North derive direct or indirect benefits (Beitz 1999; Pogge 2002). Presented in this manner, humanitarianism mobilizes a different set of moral sentiments, namely, outrage and revolt at the perpetuation of structural injustices and the reproduction of massive socioeconomic inequalities imbedded in a globalized system of neoliberal capitalism, in order to foment contestation of this system and of the world order more generally. Far from being the exclusive province of Europe, such principles of a redefined humanitarianism are found in various civilizations’ intellectual traditions, moral systems, and social imaginaries; thick interculturalism is required if we are to achieve greater recognition of this fact and thereby arrive at a dialogically constituted and more genuine universalism (Parekh 1999; Wallerstein 2006). Victims of humanitarian emergencies, estranged from Euro-American publics by virtue of mechanisms of moral, spatial, and sociocultural distantiation—themselves embodied in the very phrase “distant suffering”—can thus be perceived as fellow human beings to whom these publics are bound by structural forces, and with whom these same publics can participate in struggles to transform the existing global order. Their suffering is thereby neither a naturalized nor a sentimentalized state of being, but a sociopolitically generated effect of an unjust transnational institutional configuration. For its part, Western audiences’ moral imagination can be redeployed from being a device for the cultivation of pity or sympathy for those affected by humanitarian crises (enabling viewers to “feel the pain” of victimized distant strangers) to one that fosters solidarity with them on the basis of their equal standing and its violations due to global injustices. Humanitarianism, then, can only resolve its constitutive tension if the discourse

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of justice, which involves the correction of wrongs committed against moral and political equals whose obligatory and enforceable rights have been violated in a logic of sociocultural symmetry, displaces that of charity, which draws on elective favors or gifts selectively granted to those who find themselves in “unfortunate” circumstances in a logic of sociopolitical asymmetry. At that moment, humanitarianism will have become simultaneously an expression of universal justice and pluralism, that is to say, an ensemble of emancipatory political practices aiming to articulate norms of equality and the recognition of sociocultural differences across borders that may designate its own end as a sentimentalizing project.

Acknowledgments The research for and writing of this chapter were made possible by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thanks are due to the following research assistants for their work on various parts of this project: Mike Christensen, Marcia Oliver, Jazba Singh, Philip Steiner, and Steve Tasson.

Fuyuki Kurasawa is associate professor in the department of sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada, and a faculty fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. He is the author of The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and is currently researching the history of the visual representation of humanitarian crises.

Notes 1. In the aftermath of that battle, Henry Dunant, one of the founders of the Red Cross, wrote Un souvenir de Solferino, which became one of the founding documents of the modern humanitarian movement. 2. A distinction needs to be made between moral sentiments (a sense of inner morality experienced through feelings grounded in the self’s human nature, derived here from philosophical anthropology rather than sociobiology) and sentimentalism (the exploitation or manipulation of emotions by social institutions, practices, and discourses). Whereas the former can

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

play a vital role in political struggle by tying the resistance to structural injustices or forms of domination to certain feelings (of empathy, outrage, revolt, etc.) fuelling political mobilization, the latter depoliticizes such injustices or modes of domination by reducing their overcoming to a matter of experiencing pacifying and privatizing emotions (of pity, sorrow, guilt, etc.). As Jean Pictet (1979), one of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s most important legal and administrative leaders in the twentieth century, commented, “Pity is one of the driving forces of charity. It is a spontaneous movement, an instantaneous affective reaction to the suffering of others. Littre defines pity as ‘that sentiment aroused at the sight of suffering that prompts one to relieve it.’ It is also called compassion, that stirring of the soul which makes one responsive to the distress of others, according to Larousse. Pity is like a forerunner of charity” (emphasis in original). I want to thank Renisa Mawani for drawing my attention to Festa’s and Rai’s books. Throughout the chapter, I will be referring to humanly constructed and conflict-based humanitarian crises and emergencies (famine, genocide, civil war, etc.), not those caused primarily by natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, etc.). I want to thank Craig Calhoun for specifying the parameters of this distinction for me. Moreover, the term “humanitarian crisis” refers not only to situational emergencies, but also to structural injustices violating principles of human dignity (e.g., slavery). See the Oxford English Dictionary Online definition of “charity” (consulted on 15 February 2010). Pictet (1979) is explicit about this: “Charity is above all an expression of Christian morality and is synonymous with love for one’s neighbor.” The Littré defines humanité as a “sentiment actif de bienveillance pour tous les hommes” (see http://francois.gannaz.free.fr/Littre/xmlittre.php?requete =h1911 [accessed 15 February 2010]), whereas the Oxford English Dictionary’s primary definition of humanity is “the quality of being humane,” with the latter referring to “Originally: civil, courteous, or obliging towards others (obs.). In later use: characterized by sympathy with and consideration for others; feeling or showing compassion towards humans or animals; benevolent, kind.” Yet the OED also recognizes that humanity refers to “human beings collectively, mankind” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, consulted on 15 February 2010). The italicized passage is a quotation from J.-G. Lossier (1958: 224). Emphasis in original. Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is of more recent vintage (1948), remains silent about colonialism (Wallerstein 2006). The 1931 Congress of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, devoted to colonization, went so far as to condemn the latter’s imperialist leanings, yet claimed that it could be justified only for humanitarian purposes, namely, the modernization of non-European societies (Brauman 2005: 169–70).

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12. For instance, one can mention humanitarian organizations such as the Internationale Arbeiter Hilfe (created to lend assistance to populations affected during the 1921–23 Russian famine) and groups affiliated with the French Communist Party, which organized an anticolonial exhibition in Paris as a counterpoint to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in that city. 13. Even though its original emblem (a red cross against a white background) was intended to represent neutrality rather than Christianity upon its adoption in 1863–64, the Red Cross has gradually moved to authorize the use of two other emblems: the red crescent (1929) and the red crystal (2007). For a discussion of this history, see http://www.ifrc.org/who/emblem.asp (accessed 20 February 2010). 14. With regard to human rights, Spivak (2002: 169) describes a similar logic as “the agenda of a kind of Social Darwinism: the fittest must shoulder the burden of righting the wrongs of the unfit.” 15. Unlike contemporary humanitarianism, which has come almost exclusively to signify aid and rescue operations in the face of large-scale emergencies, the early modern humanitarian movement in the Euro-American world also tackled systemic forms of inhumane treatment such as slavery. 16. These films were screened during the Tenth International Congress of the Red Cross (1921) in Geneva for the organization’s delegates and the general public. Newspaper reports at the time describe the sensational effect that these films had on audiences that viewed them (ICRC 2005). 17. Following the Ethiopian famine, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, in partnership with NGOs, sponsored analyses of the media coverage of the event. The various resulting analyses, which contain severe criticisms of this coverage, can be found here: http://www.imaging-famine .org/images_africa.htm (accessed 15 January 2011). 18. This was particularly striking in the highly choreographed presentation of Birhan Woldu during the London portion of the Live 8 concert. Bob Geldof, the event’s organizer, introduced news footage of Woldu from 1984 that had transformed her into “the face of the Ethiopian famine” due to its depiction of her acute state of starvation being broadcast around the world. The footage was shown to the concert’s audience, after which she appeared on stage to underscore her seemingly “miraculous” recovery. Madonna then appeared beside Woldu on the same stage and began serenading her with “Like a Prayer.” 19. On how experiencing such emotions still leads to Western publics’ collective denial of mass human rights abuses and atrocities, see Cohen 2001. 20. Such photographs were reproduced extensively in Congo Reform Association print campaigns and lantern lecture. A collage of some of them were published in Mark Twain’s (1905: 41) satirical pamphlet, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, and another is found in Sliwinski 2006: 352. 21. The image was taken in the town of Buguruslan in the fall of 1921 and is republished in the Nansen Electronic Photographic Archive (file 6a053): http://nabo.nb.no/trip?_t=0&_b=NANSEN_ENG&_r=1072&_s=E&_n=0&_

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22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

q=10&_l=www_eng_l (accessed 12 November 2009). It was published in newspapers—such as L’Illustration (a Paris-based illustrated weekly newspaper), 18 February 1922, 160; republished in Cosandey 1998: 30—as well as bulletins (AFSC 1921; FSR 1921: 29) and postcards from humanitarian NGOs; for the latter, see http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/famine10.htm (accessed 8 November 2009). See advertisements in The Times (of London) for UNICEF on 18 September 1968, p. 10, and for Oxfam on 27 July 1968, p. 17, respectively. Amongst the most iconic of these are the photographs of Sebastião Salgado in Niger and Ethiopia during the famine, many of which are part of his collection entitled An Uncertain Grace (1990). Television news reports by the BBC’s Michael Buerk (broadcast on 24 October 1984) and the CBC’s Brian Stewart (broadcast on 1 November 1984) about the Ethiopian famine also employed personification as a way to dramatize the situation. For the former, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOj_6OyuJc (viewed 20 January 2011), and for the latter, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF Pr-zAXNuc (viewed 20 January 2011). Taken by photojournalist Kevin Carter, the photograph was originally published in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. The photograph, taken by photojournalist Finbarr O’Reilly, won the World Press Photo of the Year in 2005. It can be viewed here: http://www.archive .worldpressphoto.org/search/layout/result/indeling/detailwpp/form/wpp/q/ ishoofdafbeelding/true/trefwoord/year/2005 (accessed 20 Jan. 2011). The photographs were taken in the city of Buzuluk in December 1921. See the Nansen Electronic Photo Archive (files 6a047 and 6a043): http:// nabo.nb.no/trip?_t=0&_b=NANSEN_ENG&_r=1091&_s=E&_n=0&_q=10&_l= www_eng_l and http://nabo.nb.no/trip?_t=0&_b=NANSEN_ENG&_r=1099& _s=E&_n=0&_q=10&_l=www_eng_l (accessed 8 November 2009). An article from the Swiss newspaper Le Temps (Haller 2003) mentions its widespread distribution; the article is republished on the ICRC’s website: http://www.icrc.org/web/fre/sitefre0.nsf/html/5QKJLH (accessed 25 October 2009). For instance, the image was printed with another photo of a single corpse to accompany an article entitled “The Tragedy of Russia” in the 20 April 1922 issue of the Manchester Guardian (p. 5) and in the 11 February 1922 issue of L’Illustration (p. 135), reprinted in Cosandey 1998: 6. One postcard was published by a Brussels-based Belgian organization devoted to Russian famine relief. See http://www.artukraine.com/old/famineart/fam ine10.htm (accessed 12 November 2009). For instance, the 8 September 1968 issue of The New York Times contains an image of a group of starving children aboard a truck (p. 29), and the 3 March 1969 issue of The Times (of London) carried a photograph of a cart with human remains (p. 8). In particular, see Salgado’s (1990: 92–93) photographs of Ethiopian refugee camps in Bati and Korem during the famine. Some of the most famous and disturbing photographs to emerge from the

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31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

genocide portrayed corpses and human remains strewn on the floor of a classroom or in a field. This typification is often presented in gendered terms, involving a male victim and a maternal female figure as the dispenser of aid. This image by Alonzo Foringer was entitled “The Greatest Mother in the World”—making explicit the aforementioned gendered relations—and was part of a poster reproduced millions of times as part of a highly successful campaign in the US. It is found here: http://www.redcross.org/museum/ exhibits/posters.asp (accessed 1 February 2011). This photograph was found in The Record bulletin from the Save the Children Fund, 2 (May 1922), 249 (Slim and Sellick 2002, Reel 1). See photographs in The New York Times accompanying the articles headlined “Aid is Snarled for Starving Millions in Biafra” (3 July 1968, p. 1), and “Priest in Lisbon is Link to Missionaries in Biafra (12 August 1968, p. 2). In 1984 and 1985, the Euro-American media was replete with images of Western aid workers and public figures coming to the rescue of starving Ethiopians. See, for instance, the 28 January 1985 cover of People magazine, which featured members of the Kennedy family in Ethiopia. This photograph, by photojournalist James Nachtwey, was published on the cover of the 4 October 2004 issue of Time magazine. It can be viewed here: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,1101041004,00.html (accessed 1 February 2011). For greater elaboration of the perils of an uncritical, unproblematized notion of transposition and of appropriation of victims’ experiences of suffering in the global South by Euro-American publics, see Kurasawa 2009.

References American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). 1921. “Do You Know the Reality of the Russian Famine?” Bulletin 44. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee. Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H. 1963. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Beitz, C.R. 1999. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boissier, P. 1978. Histoire du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge: De Solférino à Tsoushima. Geneva: Institut Henry-Dunant. Boltanski, L. 1993. La Souffrance à Distance: Morale Humanitaire, Médias et Politique. Paris: Editions Métailié. Brauman, R. 2005. “Indigènes et Indigents: De la “Mission Civilisatrice” Coloniale à L’action Humanitaire.” In P. Blanchard, N. Bancel, and S. Lemaire (eds.), La Fracture Coloniale: La Société Française au Prisme de l’Héritage Colonial. Paris: La Découverte, pp. 169–176.

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Campbell, D. 2003. “Salgado and the Sahel: Documentary Photography and the Imaging of Famine.” In F. Debrix and C. Weber (eds.), Rituals of Mediation: International Politics and Social Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 69–96. Cohen, S. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity. Cosandey, R. 1998. “Eloquence du Visible: La Famine en Russie 1921–1923, Une Filmographie Documentée.” Archives (Institut Jean Vigo) 75/76. Destexhe, A. 1993. L’Humanitaire Impossible, ou, Deux Siècles d’Ambiguïté. Paris: Armand Colin. Dunant, J.H. 1862. Un Souvenir de Solferino. Geneva: Imprimerie Jules-Guillaume Fick. Durkheim, E. (1912) 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Festa, L. 2006. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Friends of Soviet Russia (FSR). 1921. The Russian Famine: Pictures, Appeals. Russian Famine Pamphlet No. 1. New York: Friends of Soviet Russia. Haller, F. 2003. “Secours en Temps de Paix: La Famine en Russie.” Le Temps, August 12. https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/article/other/5rfh jy.htm accessed March 2, 2015 Hochschild, A. 1998. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 2005. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Huber, M. 1945. The Good Samaritan: Reflections on the Gospel and Work in the Red Cross. London: Victor Gollancz. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). 2005. Humanitaire et Cinéma: Films CICR des Années 1920. Switzerland: International Committee of the Red Cross and Memoriav. Ignatieff, M. 2001. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kurasawa, F. 2009. “Humanitarianism and the Representation of Alterity: The Aporias and Prospects of Cosmopolitan Visuality.” In S. Gaon (ed.), Democracy in Crisis: Violence, Alterity, Community. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 133–154. ———. 2013. “The Making of Humanitarian Visual Icons: On the 1921–1923 Russian Famine as Foundational Event.” In J.C. Alexander, D.M. Bartmanski, and B. Giesen (eds.), Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. 67–84. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Laqueur, T.W. 2001. “The Moral Imagination and Human Rights.” In A. Gutman (ed.), Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 127–139. Lossier J.-G. 1958. Les Civilisations et le Service du Prochain. Paris: Fayard.

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Moyn, S. 2008. “Spectacular Wrongs.” The Nation, October 13, pp. 168–227. http:// www.thenation.com/doc/20081013/moyn accessed 25 February, 2010. Natale, E. 2004. “Quand l’humanitaire Commençait à Faire son Cinéma: Les films du CICR des Années 20.” Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge 86(854): 415–38. Parekh, B. 1999. “Non-Ethnocentric Universalism.” In T. Dunne and N. J. Wheeler (eds.), Human Rights in Global Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 128–169. Pictet, J. 1979. “The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross: Commentary.” http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/EA08067453343B76C125 6D2600383BC4?OpenDocument&Style=Custo_Final.3&View=defaultBody accessed 5 February 2010. Pogge, T.W. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Cambridge: Polity. Rai, A.S. 2002. Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850. London: Palgrave. Rorty, R. 1998. “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” In Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 167–185. Rousseau, J.-J. (1755) 1983. Discours sur l’origine et les Fondements de l’inégalité Parmi les Hommes. Paris: Éditions Sociales. Salgado, S. 1990. An Uncertain Grace. New York: Aperture. Slim, H. and P. Sellick, (eds.). 2002. Western Aid and the Global Economy: Archives of Major Aid Agencies, Series One: The Save the Children Fund Archive, London. London: Gale/Primary Source Microfilm. Sliwinski, S. 2006. “The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo.” Journal of Visual Culture 5(3): 333–63. Smith, A. (1759) 2002. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, G.C. 2002. “Righting Wrongs.” In N. Owen (ed.), Human Rights, Human Wrongs: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 168–227. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Twain, M. 1905. King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defence of His Congo Rule. Boston: P. R. Warren. Wallerstein, I. 2006. European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. New York: New Press. Wood, M. 2000. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865. New York: Routledge. Young, I.M. 1997. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” Constellations 3(3): 340–63.

CHAPTER 6

Parochial Altruism and Christian Universalism On the Deep Difficulties to Create Solidarity without Outside Enemies Wolfgang Palaver

Recent anthropological research has shown how much, throughout history human, solidarity has relied most often on enmity against outside groups. Altruism inside human groups almost always seems to go along with a parochial preference for insiders over outsiders. Enmity against outside groups is one of humanity’s strongest forces to foster solidarity. These new insights go together with mythic patterns of solidarity as they were discovered by Emile Durkheim ([1920]2008), René Girard (1977), and implied in Henri Bergson’s (1935) description of closed societies or in Carl Schmitt’s ([1932]2006) characterization of the political as depending on the distinction between friend and enemies. But parochial altruism is not the only way of human solidarity. Christianity has most profoundly challenged this type of solidarity. Jesus’s recommendation to love our enemies in his Sermon on the Mount and his parable of the Good Samaritan show how deeply Christianity undermines traditional forms of closed societies that depend on enmity. Slowly, Christianity—as well as other mystic traditions—has transformed the world by replacing closed societies with an open society that is becoming more and more visible in our age of globalization. It would, however, be quite naïve to think that the emergence of the open society is an easy way out of closed societies. We are still in the middle of a deep cultural struggle that goes together with this replacement of closed societies. It is not by chance, for instance, that the term parochial refers to Christian parishes that resembled closed societies much more than forms of universalism. Our world today is character-

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ized by the ongoing weakening of parochial altruism as it goes back to the beginnings of human culture without, however, being really able to develop strong forms of universal solidarity. René Girard (2010) interprets this current state of our world as an apocalyptic age. Without the traditional forms of solidarity, we risk destroying our world, which is no longer able to sustain enhanced competition. This, however, does not mean that we have to wait fatalistically for the end of the world. Living in an apocalyptic world may also help us to more profoundly understand those mystic traditions that can enable us to live in solidarity with each other without the need of outside enemies.

Parochial Altruism: How Enmity Between Groups Fosters Solidarity Inside Groups Samuel Bowles, an economist heading the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute, concluded recently in an article in Nature that “generosity and solidarity towards one’s own may have emerged only in combination with hostility towards outsiders” (2008: 326). In the article’s subtitle, Bowles refers to conflict as “Altruism’s Midwife.” He and his collaborators studied the synergy between “parochialism,” meaning “favouring ethnic, racial or other insiders over outsiders,” and “altruism,” that is, “conferring benefits on others at a cost to oneself.” (326) With the help of computer simulations creating artificial histories of early human development, Bowles and his team found that parochialism and altruism tend to join hands: “In millions of simulated evolutionary histories, the populations emerging after thousands of generations of selection tend to be either tolerant and selfish, with little warfare, or parochial and altruistic, with frequent and lethal encounters with other groups. Occasional transitions occur between the selfish peaceful states and the warring altruistic states. But neither altruism nor parochialism ever proliferates singly; they share a common fate with war, the elixir of their success” (326). Bowles also refers, of course, to examples from the early period of human history to illustrate his thesis, not forgetting, however, that parochial altruism is not just something that explains the past of humanity but is a pattern that is still with us: “Thus, in ancestral humans, evolutionary pressures favored cooperative institutions among group members as well as conflict with other groups. These were complemented by individual dispositions of solidarity and generosity towards one’s own, and suspicion and hostility towards others. This potent combination of

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group and individual attributes is as characteristic of the contemporary welfare state in a system of heavily armed and competing nations—in short, modern nationalism—as it was among our ancestors” (327). Bowles’ research shows strong parallels to anthropological insights gained with the help of René Girard’s (1977) mimetic theory. According to this theory, a first form of human solidarity inside a group holding down internal rivalries and competition emerged from the scapegoat mechanism, which solved a mimetic crisis inside this group by killing or expelling one of its members, who was afterwards turned into a god. Émile Durkheim’s (1984: 31–67) “mechanical solidarity” comes very close to Girard’s understanding of the violent sacred stemming from the scapegoat mechanism (see also Simonse 1992: 19–21; Yoder 2011, 153–238). This type of solidarity is religious by nature and consists in a repressive law punishing every transgression of social order. Durkheim (1984: 29, 66) refers to Hesiod’s description of divine vengeance as an example of mechanical solidarity. Hesiod’s poem Work and Days describes Zeus’s justice by retelling the myth of Oedipus, who was punished for his hubris: “Often even a whole city suffers because of an evil man who sins and devises wicked deeds. Upon them, Cronus’ son brings forth woe from the sky, famine together with pestilence, and the people die away; the women do not give birth, and the households are diminished by the plans of Olympian Zeus” (2006: vv. 240–45). Hesiod’s indirect reference to Oedipus is an example of Girard’s archetypal case of a mythic scapegoat (Girard 1977: 68–88; 2001: 107–15). Mechanical solidarity, however, is not the typical political form of solidarity that we can find throughout human history and that is still with us today. This type can be called “antagonistic solidarity” and is connected to political friend-enemy patterns fostering internal solidarity (Höffe 2002: 91). Antagonistic solidarity is at least as old as Aeschylus’s tragedy The Eumenides. In this tragedy, Aeschylus describes the overcoming of civil war by the establishment of a political order. The revengeful and violent Erinyes are transformed into the gentle and fruitful Eumenides. It seems that violence has fully disappeared from the city. This, however, is only superficially true. Open violence, in the sense of revenge, has been transformed into a form of structural violence that helps to create peace inside the city, but can be used against foreign enemies and internal troublemakers at any time. The pacified Eumenides promise that common love and unanimous hatred will overcome civil war: “I pray that discord, greedy for evil, may never clamor in this city, and may the dust not drink the black blood of its people and through passion cause ruinous murder for vengeance to the destruction of the

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state. But may they return joy for joy in a spirit of common love, and may they hate with one mind; for this is the cure of many an evil in the world” (vv. 977–87). Civil war was prevented by enmity to the outside world. Wars against foreign enemies helped to create peace inside the city. Athena recommends political friend-enemy relations as an antidote to internal bloodshed. According to Girard, Aeschylus’s tragedy The Eumenides represents the political as an offspring of the scapegoat mechanism (Girard 1987a: 146–53; Palaver 1998: 38–45). What was originally laid upon the scapegoat is now channeled outside the city. In rituals we can find the necessary link between the political and the scapegoat mechanism. The political builds upon the ritual channeling of internal violence toward the external world, whereas in the scapegoat mechanism, a member of the group itself is killed. Rituals already tended to sacrifice foreigners. The political prolongs the ritual focus on the foreigner and takes a friend-enemy relationship between two different groups as an always already-given starting point. Antagonistic solidarity—the friend-enemy pattern uniting against an outside third party that we discovered in The Eumenides—has been one of the most important political containments of competition until today. It characterizes Rousseau’s patriotism—“a common emulation in all to live and die for their country” ([1762] 1990: 150; Palaver 1999: 96–97) always directed towards a common national enemy—at the beginning of the modern nation, as well as Carl Schmitt’s ([1932] 2007) Concept of the Political with its emphasis on the distinction between friend and enemy, Huntington’s (1996) Clash of Civilizations, or recent European emergences of right-wing populist parties to strengthen a national “we” against an outside “they” (Mouffe 2005: 64–72; Palaver 1998). Antagonistic solidarity is a type of parochial altruism that has powerfully been described in Henri Bergson’s (1935) book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. In this book Bergson wrote about closed societies at the beginning of human civilization that were characterized by a closed morality and a static religion. These early forms of social life are characterized by an antagonistic solidarity or a parochial altruism: “Who can help seeing that social cohesion is largely due to the necessity for a community to protect itself against others, and that it is primarily as against all other men that we love the men with whom we live? Such is the primitive instinct. It is still there, though fortunately hidden under the accretions of civilization; but even today we still love naturally and directly our parents and our fellow countrymen, whereas love of mankind is indirect and acquired” (22). According to Bergson, the natural pattern of early human communities “required that the group be closely

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united, but that between group and group there should be virtual hostility” (44). Closed societies are characterized by an internal solidarity that is strengthened by enmity to the outside. These closed societies are fostered by a static religion emerging as a form of “natural religion” at the beginning of human civilization: “What binds together the members of a given society is tradition, the need and the determination to defend the group against other groups and to set it above everything. To preserve, to tighten this bond is incontestably one aim of the religion we have found to be natural; it is common to the members of a group, it associates them intimately with each other in rites and ceremonies, it distinguishes the group from other groups, it guarantees the success of the common enterprise and is an assurance against the common danger” (175–76). Seen from the perspective of mimetic theory, it seems to be clear that static religion as an essential dimension of these early forms of parochial altruism stems from the scapegoat mechanism. Static religion is identical with the violent sacred enveloping closed societies in the beginning of humanity. The closure of tribal communities “is achieved through constant recourse to the expulsion of the Other” (Girard 2004: 89), be it an internal scapegoat or an outside enemy.

Parochial Altruism Is Not Humanity’s Fate: How the Biblical Revolution Opens Up Towards Universalism Samuel Bowles does not think that we are forever doomed to parochial altruism. He ends his article with a clear rejection of a fatalistic attitude that does not recognize possibilities to overcome parochialisms: Humans are uniquely receptive to socialization and learning, with tolerant altruistic behavior a frequent result. Ethnic hostility can be redirected, attenuated and even eliminated in a matter of decades or years. This has been shown by the intellectual, political and even military collaboration of Muslims, Christians and Jews that occurred in parts of Islamic Spain a millennium ago, even as the First Crusade pitted Christian against Muslim in the eastern Mediterranean; the widespread support in many countries for aid to the people of poor nations; and the recent transformation of racial attitudes among US voters. Those who joined Martin Luther King in “We Shall Overcome” were not only buoying their spirits; they were also making a reasonable assessment of human possibilities. Thus, even if I am right that a parochial form of altruism is part of the human legacy, it need not be our fate. (2008: 327)

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Bowles does not refer directly to religion in this concluding part of his article but some religious overtones are nevertheless immediately recognizable. Human beings can transcend the natural pattern of parochial altruism because they are essentially characterized by their freedom and own a spiritual stature. Especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition to which I will confine myself in this chapter—not excluding therefore the possibility of similar potentials in Islam or the traditions of the East—it is humanity’s openness towards a transcendent God that allows it to transgress patterns of closed societies towards an open society. According to Bergson (1935: 61), “there seems to be no doubt that . . . the passage from the closed to the open, is due to Christianity.” He clearly distinguishes, in this regard, Christianity from mere philosophy, which was not able to go that far.1 In the eyes of Bergson, it is a “dynamic religion” as it can be discovered in mysticism that overcomes parochialism: “In our eyes, the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a contact, consequently of a partial coincidence, with the creative effort of which life is the manifestation. This effort is of God, if not God himself. The great mystic is to be conceived as an individual being, capable of transcending the limitations imposed on the species by its material nature, thus continuing and extending the divine action” (188). Bergson recognized the prophets of Israel as an important although limited source of Christian mysticism which reached its completion in those great Christian mystics that imitated the Christ of the Gospels (61, 205–6). Reinhold Niebuhr (1996: I 37), an American theologian influenced by Bergson, elaborated the Jewish roots of universalism more carefully by pointing towards the prophetic tradition and its overcoming of collective pride typical of closed societies: “Prophetic religion had its very inception in a conflict with national self-deification. Beginning with Amos, all the great Hebrew prophets challenged the simple identification between God and the nation, or the naive confidence of the nation in its exclusive relation to God. The prophets prophesied in the name of a holy God who spoke judgment upon the nation; and the basic sin against which this judgment was directed was the sin of claiming that Israel and God were one or that God was the exclusive possession of Israel” (I 214).2 According to Niebuhr (1986: 4), it was faith in a “transcendent God which made it possible for Hebraic religion to escape . . . the parochial identification of God and the nation.” Niebuhr also emphasized that “the process of divorcing God from the nation was a matter of both spiritual insight and actual experience (5).” He refers to Amos 9:7 (“Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the LORD”)3 to conclude that it was this type of faith that helped the people

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of Israel to remain faithful to their God during their time in captivity (1960a: 155, 1960b: 66, 1986: 5). The exile enabled them to bring the process of divorcing God from the nation to its completion: “A second Isaiah could build on the spiritual insights of an Amos, and could declare a God who gave meaning to existence quite independent of the vicissitudes of a nation, which had been the chief source of all meaning to the pious Jew” (Niebuhr 1986: 5). A similar insight can be found in the work of the British historian Herbert Butterfield (1954: 77), who also recognized a special experience in history that enabled Israel to overcome parochial patterns: “Precisely because they had been broken and had ceased even to be an organic people in the older political sense, those of them who had been scattered and found themselves now strangers in an alien land learned to picture their situation differently. They came to see more vividly that God was not merely interested in them as a nation in a single piece, a corporate community, but was concerned with them as individuals scattered in an alien country, concerned moreover with the other individuals around them, even though these belonged to different nations altogether. They gained a firmer apprehension of Him as the God of all the peoples of the earth, but not merely of peoples—He was God for individuals as such.” The dynamic religion with its orientation towards the open society goes decisively beyond the traditional boundaries of friend-enemy patterns. In the New Testament, we can find in the demand to love our enemies the clearest expression of this type of religion that turns closed societies towards the open society: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:43–45 [New Revised Standard Version]). Often this passage was read in order to prove that Christianity broke completely with its Jewish past, a parochialism that had to give way to universalism. Such an anti-Semitic reading, however, does not do justice to the biblical text. Universalism did not begin with Christianity but with the Jewish prophets. The saying against which Jesus puts the exhortation to love our enemies can only partly be found in the Old Testament. In Leviticus 19:18 we can find the commandment to love your neighbor, but there is no explicit Old Testament command to hate your enemy. What Jesus quotes has to be understood in a much broader way. It is a saying that refers to humanity’s affinity to parochial altruism and general folk wisdom going along with it. Jesus’s antithesis poses a “new standard for obedience to God, not in opposition to

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the Torah but over against conventional attitudes and interpretations of the Torah” (Hays 1997: 327). From the perspective of mimetic theory, the exhortation to love our enemies means a decisive break with the closed societies emerging from the scapegoat mechanism. Whereas the scapegoat mechanism leads to a “closed kingdom,” Jesus’s command to love the enemy belongs to a “Kingdom of love,” explaining “all that people must do in order to break with the circularity of closed societies, whether they be tribal, national, philosophical or religious” (Girard 1987b: 197–98). The parable of the Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke (Lk 10:25–37) is also a clear example of how Jesus challenged traditional friendenemy patterns when he referred to a political enemy of his people as a positive example to show what it means to love one’s neighbor. Today we do not immediately understand this parable properly because we quickly equate a “Samaritan” with “a charitable or helpful person” (Waldron 2003: 336). But in Jesus’s days, a Samaritan was to ordinary Jews an enemy, belonging to the group of a despised other: “For centuries Judeans had treated the Samaritans as a despised out-group and subjected them to the processes of negative stereotypification” (Esler 2000: 329). Jesus severely challenged this traditional pattern of identifying with one’s own group against an outside other by telling this parable; “In the body of the parable Jesus has refused to engage in the processes of group differentiation and stereotypification, indeed he has positively subverted them. Rather than accept an invitation to add to the way in which the Israelite in-group maintains and develops its social identity in the face of negatively regarded out-groups by formulating more tightly a critical indicator of membership, Jesus exposes this discussion as completely inadequate and morally inferior in the face of the particular human need he has set out” (Esler 2000: 344). Instead of maintaining traditional friend-enemy patterns, Jesus’s parable represents a universal moral attitude that includes all human beings as possible neighbors in need of our help. The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (2001: 50) clearly emphasized the universal attitude of Jesus’s illustration of his commandment to love our neighbor: “The neighbor is a being of whom nothing is known, lying naked, bleeding, and unconscious on the road. It is a question of completely anonymous, and for that reason, completely universal love.” But this universalism has nothing to do with those abstract types of universalism that are completely occupied by claiming to love all of humanity, easily overlooking the needy nearby. Again, Weil justly claimed that “love is not real unless it is directed toward a particular object; it becomes universal without ceasing

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to be real only as a result of analogy and transference” (119). Jesus’s universal attitude cares for the neighbor close by, undermining, however, all those traditional cultural or religious patterns that often prevent people from caring for those who are in need. According to Amartya Sen (2009: 171), Jesus’s parable is a “reasoned rejection of the idea of a fixed neighborhood” (see also. Waldron 2003). It does not depend on an ethnic or a communal solidarity but “transcends all such boundaries” (Waldron 2003: 350). From an age-old political perspective, the parable of the Samaritan is dangerously subversive. It was “utterly destructive of ordinary decency, of what had, until then, been understood as ethical behavior” (Illich and Cayley 2005: 51). Elijah Benamozegh (1823–1900), the Orthodox rabbi of Leghorn (Livomo) for over half a century and a Kabbalist philosopher, is a perfect example to illustrate the challenge that this parable meant to traditional political thinking. Benamozegh, who had—quite similar to Carl Schmitt—some affinities to pagan thinking and a high estimation of political enmity, accused Jesus of destroying patriotism with this parable. According to Benamozegh (1873: 73), Judaism surpasses Christianity regarding its attitude towards one’s country: “Without a political enemy, there can be no country.” In his eyes, Jesus chose the example of the Samaritan in order to destroy political life because asking the Jew to love the Samaritan would have been, in Benamozegh’s nineteenth century, to ask “the Pole to love the Cossack, or the Italian, the Austrian soldier” (84): “We see but one motive in this choice of the Samaritan, viz: to personify in him the political enemy, and him only. And truly, if there ever sprang from the bosom of Judaism an implacable political enemy it was the Samaritan. No more fit emblem of this could Jesus have selected. For why does he not choose the idolater, the faithless Israelite, the Roman, at once a religious and political enemy? He wishes to confine himself to the pure political enemy, monotheistic in his creed, no less than the Israelite. Can we doubt the political object Jesus had in view?—the suppression of the spirit of nationality, of the interests and needs of patriotism” (73–74). According to Ivan Illich, a Catholic priest and social critic, the only way to understand this parable today is “to imagine the Samaritan as a Palestinian ministering to a wounded Jew” (in Cayley 2005: 50) or, to even sharpen this point, we might imagine a Hamas fighter helping an Israeli soldier. This story marks a significant break with all forms of ethics that are based on a special care of one’s own family, group, or race. “This deeply threatens the traditional basis for ethics, which was always an ethnos, a historically given ‘we’ which precedes any pronunciation

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of the word ‘I’” (in Cayley 2005: 47). Jesus brings a new form of love into the world that undermines and exceeds all traditional understandings of it. Illich comes, in such insights, close to mimetic theory and its insight into the Biblical overcoming of the scapegoat mechanism. The ethnos of a group gives way to individuality and universalism as soon as the scapegoat mechanism is uncovered.

Globalization: On the Need to Foster Universalism in Particular Traditions Illich’s book (Cayley 2005), in which we find his reflection on the parable of the Samaritan, is a deeply apocalyptic book in which topics like the Antichrist or the “mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess 2:7) play a central role (Palaver 2007b). According to Illich, we are not living in a “post-Christian” but in an “apocalyptic world” (in Cayley 2005: 177, 179). What Illich says about our modern world in general is particularly true in regard to the ongoing weakening of those traditional patterns that helped to contain internal rivalries and competition by parochial altruism depending on a common enemy. Biblical revelation is slowly undermining parochial politics, leading to a planetary mimetic crisis in which competition runs hot. Global terrorism and the global war against terror are very visible signs of this dangerous crisis. Several conservative political thinkers were partly aware of how the Biblical revelation contributed to this crisis and tried to slow it down by strengthening political forms of parochial altruism as far as possible. Carl Schmitt ([1932] 2007: 29), a German law scholar, who was closer to Christendom than to the message of the Bible, struggled hard to reconcile his political emphasis on the friend-enemy distinction with the perspective of the Gospel. According to him, the demand in the Sermon on the Mount to love our enemies is not related to the political enemy at all but only to our private enemies. Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, too, understood, that the biblical message threatens closed societies, leading step by step to the modern crisis we today call globalization. Both these thinkers identified themselves at least partly with Celsus, a pagan philosopher who criticized Christianity in the second century for trying to bring the entire world under one law, possibly causing a global civil war (Palaver 2007a: 80, 82, 92–93). According to Leo Strauss (1971: 130–64), natural law without the assistance of divine revelation views closed societies and not a universal society as in accordance with nature. He clearly favors this unassisted type of natural law: “Classical political philosophy opposes to the

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universal and homogeneous state a substantive principle. It asserts that the society natural to man is the city, that is, a closed society” (1995: x). Girard’s (2001) mimetic theory is capable of explaining why the biblical revelation contributed to the development of our globalized world with its positive potentials as well as its new threats. According to Girard, the biblical revelation slowly turned all closed societies emerging from the scapegoat mechanism into our globalizing world of today: “The gradual loosening of various centers of cultural isolation began in the Middle Ages and has now led into what we call ‘globalization . . . The true engine of progress is the slow decomposition of the closed worlds rooted in victim mechanisms. This is the force that destroyed archaic societies and henceforth dismantles the ones replacing them, the nations we call ‘modern’” (165–66). According to Girard (2010: 199), the truth of Christianity is “destroying everything by depriving us of our enemies.” Before I focus on the answer that is needed in this critical situation of our contemporary world, I first have to come back to Christianity’s role in this ongoing process towards globalization. It is important to note that Christianity was not only positively contributing to this process but caused also some backslides. Historical Christianity is not a completely dynamic religion without any remnants of static religion but a “mixed religion” in which pagan patterns still play a role, although they have been slowly transformed by mysticism (Bergson 1935: 183). We can first realize this fact in the term “parochialism” itself, which stems from the Latin term for parish and which is therefore not alien to historical Christianity at all. Simone Weil (2001: 49–51), who identified deeply with the universal attitude of the parable of the Samaritan and who pleaded for a “new saintliness” that has to be universal in a very broad understanding of being “catholic,” was very critical of a church to which many of its members attached themselves “as to an earthly country.” She writes, “Less vast things than the universe, among them the Church, impose obligations which can be extremely far-reaching. They do not, however, include the obligation to love. . . . Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light” (49–50). Historical Christianity often failed to emulate its divine model. A striking example for how much historical Christianity was still based on friend-enemy patterns delivers a quick view on the development of European identity. The first political usage of the term “Europe” in the eighth and ninth centuries, for instance, was linked to the conflict

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with the Islamic world (Lewis 2008: 172–73). The same is true for the time of the Crusades. In the Middle Ages, there were three clearly recognized enemies contributing to Europe’s identity: “Insolentia Saracenorum, schisma Graecorum et sevitia Tartarorum”—the arrogant Saracens, the schismatic Greeks in Byzantium, and the terrible Tartars (Geremek 1996: 92). Later, in the sixteenth century, the Turks appeared as a new enemy, helping to foster European identity. Denis de Rougemont (1968: 88–91) summarized this period in European history in a chapter titled “The Turk as Bogeyman.” The British historian Timothy Garton Ash (2001) summarized the constitution of European identity against a Muslim other: “‘Europe’ was originally defined as a conscious entity in the conflict with the Islamic world. The first political usage of the term comes in the eighth and ninth centuries, as the descendants of the Prophet—the ‘infidels,’ in Christian parlance—are thrusting, by force of arms linked to a faith that we would now call fanatical, into the underbelly of Europe. ‘Europe’ begins its continuous history as a political concept in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first as synonym for, then as successor to, the Crusaders’ notion of Christendom—and once again, its Other is plainly the Arab-Islamic world” (see also Geremek 1996; Harle 2000: 67f). Bowles (2008: 327) too, refers to Europe’s birth in the fight against the Muslim world by presenting to us the view of an Islamic soldier in the time of the Crusades: “The making of Europe as we know it thus paradoxically owes something to the exploits of ‘animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else’ in the words of a twelfth-century Islamic soldier-scholar who lost his home and family to the Crusaders.” Carl Schmitt ([1932] 2007: 29) pointed to the long enduring enmity between Christianity and Islam to reject a political interpretation of Jesus’s command to love the enemy: “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary.” This pattern is still with us in contemporary Europe. In 2001, Ash described Europe as being in search of a new other against which it could identify itself. The United States and the Islamic world were possible candidates at that time. Ash himself expressed his hope that Europe would be able to create a positive identity without an outside other: “The task for those who believe, as I do, in a project called ‘Europe’ is to build a strong, positive European identity, one that binds people emotionally to a set of institutions, without the help of a clear and present Other.” Taking parochial altruism seriously,

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however, means understanding that it is very difficult and often nearly impossible to create a political identity without a common enemy. In 1944, Reinhold Niebuhr saw in the lack of a common enemy one of the deeper reasons preventing the creation of a world community (Niebuhr 1960a: 166, 169, 172). So far he has not been proven wrong. In countries such as Austria, we can observe today how Muslim migrants have become a common enemy for those who claim a strong Austrian identity. Populist xenophobia often combined with Islamophobia has become one of the concepts of the enemy in post-Cold War Europe (Niethammer 2000: 531; Casanova 2009: 61–62; Taylor 2010). All these examples show us that the Biblical revelation has not yet wiped out humanity’s reliance on parochial altruism. This age-old pattern is still with us even though it has been weakened and is no longer really able to create a stable political order. Regarding historical Christianity we cannot only observe its mixed character because of an intermingling of static and dynamic religion, but we have to be aware of an even more complex problem. The Constantinian shift resulted in a Christian universalism that only seemingly resembles dynamic religion and its outreach towards an open society. This type of universalism is a form of imperialism that looks like mysticism but remains bound to static religion and the closed societies (Bergson 1935: 268–69). Bergson was very well aware that a merely gradual enlargement of a social entity does not lead to an open society. The expansion of closed societies does not change their nature: “It is not by widening the bounds of the city that you reach humanity; between a social morality and a human morality the difference is not one of degree but of kind.” (25; see also. 22–33; Niebuhr 1960a: 168) Similarly, Girard makes clear that the empire remains close to the scapegoat mechanism because it wants “peace” by “domination” and is “based on exclusion” (Girard 2010: 200; see also Girard 1991: 200–209). Imperialistic universalism only seemingly leads towards an open society. In reality it remains a closed society even if it would comprise the whole world governed by a world state. The temptation of imperialistic universalism forces us to go back to the Biblical revelation in order to find out if it is a legitimate offspring of the Bible or only its perversion. Michael Walzer (2007) distinguishes two kinds of universalism in the Jewish tradition.4 He first mentions a “covering-law universalism” that knows only a single way for all because there is “one law, one justice, one correct understanding of the good life or the good society or the good regime, one salvation, one messiah, one millennium for all humanity” (184). Biblical passages representing this rather imperialistic

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type of universalism are Isaiah 2:3; 42:6; and 49:6. Contrary to this kind of universalism, Walzer discovers a true alternative doctrine in Jewish history that he calls “reiterative universalism.” This kind of universalism expresses the fact that God has not only liberated Israel from Egypt but other people from their tyrants, too (186): “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the LORD. Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Am 9:7; see also Isa 19:20–25; Mic 4:4–5) This reiterative universalism understands that God undertook a plurality of liberations with particular people and not just a single one. Whereas covering-law universalism represents a form of social pride or at least of social confidence preventing a pluralistic attitude towards other traditions, reiterative universalism stems from God’s rebuke of pride giving way to a “particularist focus” and a “pluralizing tendency” (Walzer 2007: 185–87). Walzer’s option for a reiterative universalism that neither relies on social pride nor leads into imperialism comes close to Niebuhr’s understanding of the prophetic religion in the Old Testament. It is not by chance that both these authors emphasize the overcoming of Israel’s pride in the message of the prophet Amos (Niebuhr 1996: I 214–15, II 23–26). According to Niebuhr, prophetic religion stands against “collective pride,” which is the “very essence of human sin” (Niebuhr 1996: I 213). If Christianity wants to contribute to an open society and a globalized solidarity without the need of outside enemies, it has to overcome its own temptation towards collective pride. It has to detach itself from Constantinianism and its inherent imperialism.5 John Howard Yoder (1984: 135–47), a Mennonite theologian who taught until his death in 1997 at Notre Dame University, was very much aware of the Constantinian danger. He recommended repentance from Constantinianism in a lecture he gave in Jerusalem in 1976: “The Disavowal of Constantine: An Alternative Perspective on Interfaith Dialogue” (1994: 242–61; cf. Hauerwas 2007: 66–72). This kind of repentance means a new concern for the Jewish heritage and the meekness, humility, and nonviolence of Jesus Christ. Instead of imperial pride, Yoder refers us to the particular Jewish tradition of the Suffering Servant in Second Isaiah and the particularity of the example of Jesus. In Yoder’s eyes, particularity and universalism are not alternatives in the Bible. Christians are first of all asked to love their local neighbors and live with them in solidarity by following the particularity of the way of Jesus. As we have seen in the above discussion of the parable of the Samaritan, Jesus did not recommend an abstract and cosmopolitan universalism neglecting the needy

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nearby but showed a universal concern for all the different people in his proximity. Such an approach will contribute much more to peace in our pluralistic world than all attempts to find a common denominator on a global level, rejecting all particular traditions. We are in need of the spirit of humility flowing from different religious traditions to overcome collective pride governing closed societies as well as all forms of universal imperialism (cf. Niebuhr 1960a: 135, 151). According to the mystic philosopher Simone Weil (1998), it is the supernatural that enables us to love our neighbors in a universal manner as it was exemplified by Jesus. Only by reaching out to a “reality outside the world” are we really enabled to love and to act justly in this world (132; cf. Doering 2010: 191). This emphasis on the supernatural has, of course, to be understood broadly because it includes Buddhism as well as other traditions that do not explicitly believe in a personal God. It may even include certain humanistic traditions. But all these traditions are only true as far as they enable us to overcome our pride and our natural inclinations towards worldly power by leading us on a path of renunciation, enabling creative love. Weil (2001: 89) understood very well that all true religions emulate God’s restraint and renunciation by which he creates, contradicting by this all much-too-human imaginations of divine power: “The religions which have a conception of this renunciation, this voluntary distance, this voluntary effacement of God, his apparent absence and his secret presence here below, these religions are true religion, the translation into different languages of the great Revelation. The religions which represent divinity as commanding wherever it has the power to do so seem false. Even though they are monotheistic they are idolatrous.” I will conclude this chapter with a quick look on the task of the Catholic Church as one important particular tradition contributing to the development of an open society. The most decisive step of the Catholic Church in our modern world was its overcoming of Constantinianism in the Second Vatican Council. The declaration on religious freedom Dignitatis humanae, in which coercion in matters of religion is clearly rejected, is the most important document of the Council in this regard. According to this document, religious freedom finds its justification in the Biblical revelation. Dignitatis humanae openly declares that the Church has to reject all means that “are incompatible with the spirit of the Gospel” (Second Vatican Council 1965: No. 14). The example of Jesus Christ—his nonviolence, patience, and rejection of force—have to become also the way of the Church: “Christ is at once our Master and our Lord and also meek and humble of heart. In attracting and inviting His disciples He used patience. . . . He refused to be a political messiah,

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ruling by force. . . . He acknowledged the power of government and its rights, when He commanded that tribute be given to Caesar: but He gave clear warning that the higher rights of God are to be kept inviolate: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’ (Matt. 22:21)” (Second Vatican Council 1965: No. 11). This Biblical turn of the Council has become the starting point of the Catholic social ethics as it was later developed by Pope John Paul II. This pope brought the legacy of the Council to its blossoming. He really was the first non-Constantinian or post-Constantinian pope (Weigel 1999: 295– 99; Hauerwas 2001: 226–30). It is not by chance that it was John Paul II, who repented at Yad Vashem and called the Church to repentance in the year 2000. He repented from Constantinianism by “expelling all imperial ideas” (Girard 2010: 201; see also 178, 200). This pope also understood how important it is to overcome patterns of enmity in order to create solidarity that does not need outside enemies. In his encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis from 1987, John Paul II suggested understanding solidarity as a Christian virtue that has to overcome antagonistic solidarity. He was very much aware of this type of solidarity because he wrote this text in the time of the Cold War and did not hesitate to call it a “structure of sin”: “In the light of faith, solidarity seeks to go beyond itself, to take on the specifically Christian dimension of total gratuity, forgiveness and reconciliation. One’s neighbor is then not only a human being with his or her own rights and a fundamental equality with everyone else, but becomes the living image of God the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and placed under the permanent action of the Holy Spirit. One’s neighbor must therefore be loved, even if an enemy, with the same love with which the Lord loves him or her; and for that person’s sake one must be ready for sacrifice, even the ultimate one: to lay down one’s life for the brethren (see also 1 Jn 3:16)” (John Paul II 1987: No. 40). This radical ethical approach—calling to give one’s life even for one’s enemies—is, of course not an attitude that can be recommended as a political recipe for the world as such. It is first of all a call for the church itself to become a sacrament of peace for the world. Catholic liturgy fosters an attitude that leads to this type of Christian solidarity. It is especially the Eucharist which enables us to go beyond ordinary political friend-enemy patterns. Whereas friend-enemy distinctions stem from the scapegoat mechanism, the Eucharist is a reversal of the pagan pattern fostering a theological politics that helps to overcome political enmity (Schwager 1999: 223–29). John Paul II clearly underlined the political importance of the Eucharist regarding our work for peace and justice: “The Lord unites us with himself through the Eucharist Sacrament

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and Sacrifice and he unites us with himself and with one another by a bond stronger than any natural union; and thus united, he sends us into the whole world to bear witness, through faith and works, to God’s love, preparing the coming of his Kingdom and anticipating it, though in the obscurity of the present time. All of us who take part in the Eucharist are called to discover, through this sacrament, the profound meaning of our actions in the world in favor of development and peace” (John Paul II 1987: No. 48). In the liturgical practice of the Eucharist, (Catholic) Christians are strengthened to contribute to an open society beyond patterns of enmity. From every local community celebrating the Eucharist flows a spirit that makes a “globalization in solidarity, a globalization without marginalization” possible (John Paul II 1998: No. 3). It is in the local world that this spirit has first to be realized by contributing to a community in which the love of neighbors becomes visible and concrete. But this Catholic contribution to a globalization in solidarity is, of course, not the only way towards an open society. According to Michael Walzer (2007: 188–89, 210), it was the prophet Micah who was very well aware that universal peace may be the outcome if different people walk their own way without forcing others to follow exactly their single path: “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; . . . For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever and ever (Mic 4:4–5).” Wolfgang Palaver is professor of Catholic social thought and dean of the School of Catholic Theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. From 2007 to 2011, he was president of the “Colloquium on Violence and Religion.” He has published books and articles on religion and violence, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and René Girard. His most recent book is René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (Michigan State University Press, 2013).

Notes 1. Also Niebuhr (1996: I 215) maintains a clear distinction between the prophetic religion in the Old Testament and Greek philosophy, which did not reach the same level of universalism. 2. Niebuhr refers to the following Biblical passages: Am 7:16–17; Isa 47; Jer 25,15; Ezek 24–39. 3. The Ethiopians or the people of Kush were usually seen as those despised black people living south of Egypt (Wolff 1981: 43). Israel, who was used to

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seeing itself as the “first of the nations” (Am 6:1), is compared to one of the lowliest nations living at the very far end of the world. 4. Benamozegh’s affinity to paganism and his distance from Christianity is also due to a rejection of imperialism. “His conception of human unity precluded a violent approach to uniting humanity. This is why he denounced Roman imperialism and Christian forms of cultural domination brought about by the Christianization of the Roman Empire, despite the fact that Christianity spread monotheism. Using force to establish the synthesis that he seeks is completely unacceptable to him. Even a culturally imperialistic approach is unacceptable, namely, a rigid monotheism that vigilantly denounces the idolatry of the rest of the world. Benamozegh sought a higher unity through synthesis, through recovering the pure doctrines embedded in all religions. This unity could not be achieved through violence, physical or cultural” (Gopin 2002: 97–105, quote from 102). 5. “Beginning with Constantine, Christianity triumphed at the level of the state and soon began to cloak with its authority persecutions similar to those in which the early Christians were victims. Like so many subsequent religious, ideological, and political enterprises, Christianity suffered persecution while it was weak and became the persecutor as soon as it gained strength” (Girard 1986: 204 [Translation corrected]).

References Aeschylus. (n.d.) 1983. Aeschylus in Two Volumes. Volume II: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments. Translated by H.W. Smyth. Edited by H. Lloyd-Jones. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ash, T.G. 2001. “Europe at War.” New York Review of Books 48 (20): 66–68. Benamozegh, E. 1873. Jewish and Christian Ethics with a Criticism on Mahomedism. San Francisco: Emanuel Blochman. Bergson, H. 1935. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R.A. Audra, C. Brereton, and W.H. Carter. London: Macmillan & Co. Bowles, S. 2008. “Being Human: Conflict: Altruism’s Midwife.” Nature 456 (7220): 326–27. Butterfield, H. 1954. Christianity and History. London: Bell. Casanova, J. 2009. Europas Angst vor der Religion. Translated by R. Schieder. Berlin: Berlin University Press. Cayley, D. 2005. The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich. Toronto: Anansi. De Rougemont, D. 1968. The Idea of Europe. Translated by N. Guterman. New York: Meridian Books. Doering, E. J. 2010. Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Durkheim, E. 1984. The Division of Labour in Society. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: Free Press.

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Esler, P. 2000. “Jesus and the Reduction of Intergroup Conflict: The Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Light of Social Identity Theory.” Biblical Interpretation 8(4): 325–57. Geremek, B. 1996. The Common Roots of Europe. Translated by J. Aleksandrowicz. Cambridge: Polity Press. Girard, R. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by P. Gregory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1986. The Scapegoat. Translated by Y. Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1987a. Job: The Victim of His People. Translated by Y. Freccero. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1987b. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort. Translated by B. Stephen and M. Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1991. A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by J.G. Williams. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. ———. 2004. Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire. Edited by M.R. Anspach. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2010. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by M. Baker. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Gopin, M. 2002. Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harle, V. 2000. The Enemy with a Thousand Faces: The Tradition of the Other in Western Political Thought and History. Westport: Praeger. Hauerwas, S. 2001. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology: Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St. Andrews in 2001. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. ———. 2007. The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God. Oxford: Blackwell. Hays, R.B. 1997. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Hesiod. 2006. Theogony; Works and Days; Testimonia. Edited and translated by G.W. Most. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Höffe, O. 2002. Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. München: Verlag C.H. Beck. Huntington, S.P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. John Paul II. 1987. Sollicitudo Rei Socialis: To the Bishops, Priests, Religious Families, Sons and Daughters of the Church and All People of Good Will for the Twentieth Anniversary of Populorum Progressio. http://w2.vatican.va/con tent/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollici tudo-rei-socialis.html, accessed 2 April 2015.

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———. 1998. From the Justice of Each Comes Peace for All: Message of his Holiness Pope John Paul II for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace 1 January 1998. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/messages/peace/ documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_08121997_xxxi-world-day-for-peace_en.html, accessed 2 April 2015. Lewis, D. L. 2008. God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215. New York: W.W. Norton. Mouffe, C. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. Niebuhr, R. 1960a. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1960b. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1986. The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses. Edited by R.M. Brown. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1996. The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation. 2 vols. Library of Theological Ethics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Niethammer, L. 2000. Kollektive Identität: Heimliche Quellen einer Unheimlichen Konjunktur. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. Palaver, W. 1998. Die Mythischen Quellen des Politischen: Carl Schmitts FreundFeind-Theorie, Beiträge zur Friedensethik vol.27. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer. ———. 1999. “Mimesis and Nemesis: The Economy as a Theological Problem.” Telos 1999 (117): 79–112. ———. 2007a. “Carl Schmitt’s ‘Apocalyptic’ Resistance against Global Civil War.” In R.G. Hamerton-Kelly (ed.), Politics & Apocalypse. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. ———. 2007b. “Review of The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told by David Cayley, by Ivan Illich and David Cayley.” The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (30): 13–15. Rousseau, J.-J. (1762) 1990. The Social Contract and Discourses. Translated by G.D.H. Cole, J.H. Brumfitt, and J.C. Hall. London: J.M. Dent. Schmitt, C. (1932) 2007. The Concept of the Political. Translated by G. Schwab. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schwager, R. 1999. Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption. Translated by J G. Williams and P. Haddon. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Second Vatican Council. 1965. Declaration on Religious Freedom Dignitatis Humanae: On the Right of the Person and of Communities to Social and Civil Freedom in Matters Religious. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_ en.html, accessed 2 April 2015. Sen, A. 2009. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Simonse, S. 1992. Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in the Southeastern Sudan. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Strauss, L. (1953) 1971. Natural Right and History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. (1968) 1995. Liberalism Ancient and Modern. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Taylor, C. 2010. “Solidarity in a Pluralist Age.” IWMpost (104): 8. Waldron, J. 2003. “Who Is My Neighbor? Humanity and Proximity.” The Monist 86 (3): 333–54. Walzer, M. 2007. Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Weigel, G. 1999. Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II. New York: Cliff Street Books. Weil, S. 1998. Writings Selected with an Introduction by Eric O. Springsted. Edited by R. Ellsberg. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. ———. (1951) 2001. Waiting for God. Translated by E. Craufurd. New York: Perennial Classics. Wolff, H.W. 1981. Die Stunde des Amos. Prophetie und Protest. 5 ed. München: CHR. Kaiser. Yoder, J.H. 1984. The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 1994. The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. ———. 2011. The End of Sacrifice: The Capital Punishment Writings of John Howard Yoder. Edited by John C. Nugent. Harrisonburg, Va.: Herald Press.

CHAPTER 7

Partial Commitments and Universal Obligations Paul Dumouchel

In virtually all liberal theories, however, a subtle but profound shift takes place in terminology. What begins as a theory about the moral equality of persons typically ends up as a theory of the moral equality of citizens. —Will Kymlicka, Territorial Boundaries: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective

The “compatriot priority principle,” or “partial commitment” as it is sometimes also referred to, constitutes an interesting and important example of the relation between bonds and boundaries—an illustration of the way in which moral bonds can erect boundaries that exclude others, of the way in which moral engagement towards some reduces our ability to be morally responsible towards all. The problem here is not simply that we cannot do everything—that we must choose and prioritize; rather it is that more limited duties—partial commitments—often conflict with universal obligations. This is potentially a problem for any universal ethical theory, and it has generally been construed in terms of the dichotomy between the universal and the particular. However, the analysis of the “compatriot priority principle” controversy within liberalism in the context of global cosmopolitan justice suggests that, in this case at least, the problem is different and cannot be reduced to the question of the relationship between the parts and the whole, between individual rights and group rights, or between the total domain to which a rule applies and some chosen individuals within that domain.1 The compatriot priority principle is the idea that we morally owe to our compatriots special duties that trump our universal obligations. Our obligations towards conationals, argues the compatriot priority principle, generally overrule (or have precedence over) at least some of the obligations that we have towards others qua human beings. This is

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particularly a problem for liberal cosmopolitanism and for any universal theory that endorses egalitarian moral individualism and considers that “the ultimate units of concern are human beings or persons” and that every person counts equally (Pogge 2002: 169).2 Given that the foundational place of this egalitarian premise is in liberal moral and political theory, the compatriot priority principle seems difficult to reconcile with liberalism. Not surprisingly, it has given rise to an extended discussion between its proponents—liberal nationalists, such as Yael Tamir (1993) or David Miller (1995), and full-blooded cosmopolitans, such as Charles Beitz (1983) and Thomas Pogge (2002). Interestingly, the compatriot priority principle has recently been embraced by some cosmopolitans who consider it self-evident and so fundamental that they argue cosmopolitanism is only acceptable to the extent that it can accommodate it. For example, Kok-Chor Tan (2005: 164) claims that any “theory of global justice that does not accommodate and account for the special ties and obligations of shared nationality would not be theory of justice suited for humanity.” Whether that grand claim is valid or not is an open question; however it does suggest that the mood has changed since the beginning of this discussion a few years ago. The burden of the proof has now shifted. It is not nationalists who are asked to prove that the compatriot priority principle is morally valid and compatible with universal obligations, to the opposite, it is now cosmopolitans who must show that their universal theory gives sufficient place and importance to this local principle of justice, which is deemed undeniable and obviously founded. Where, however, does the evidence for the compatriot priority principle come from? Why does it impose itself with such force, especially in view of the fact that there has been a long tradition of moral universalism in philosophy and in so many religions? The usual answer to this question is psychological and empirical. Preference towards conationals, it is claimed, derives from the way human beings are made. Local attachments are a fundamental part of our life, of what people consider to be a good life. Moral theory must take them and the special duties that come with them into account and recognize their importance. These attachments cannot simply be dismissed in the name of universalism. It may be that local attachments and special duties are a fundamental part of the good life, but, in order for the above argument to succeed, it must be the case that the moral priority that we spontaneously assign to conationals constitutes a special obligation similar to associative duties and local attachments, similar to the greater concern we feel towards friends, family, and close associates. I will argue that

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the compatriot priority principle, to the contrary, constitutes a clear example of universal obligation. Therefore, the question is not that of the relation between the universal and the particular, between associative duties and universal commitments, but of the extension of the domain of universality. It follows that an alternative argument must be made to sustain, if possible, the validity of that moral principle. If the compatriot priority principle is not a particularist attachment in the sense in which associative duties are, how can we justify reducing universal obligations to the narrow domain of our cocitizens? In “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern,” Richard Miller (1998) suggests an ingenious answer to this difficulty. He argues that at least one form of the compatriot priority principle directly derives from universal obligations. Miller claims that in the case of welfare obligations, the moral priority that we grant to conationals is not a special duty that conflicts with universal obligations, but the expression of the universal equal respect that we owe to all. Contrary to Miller, who limits his claim to welfare rights, I will argue that, because it rests on a classical concept of the social contract—similar to that of Hobbes or Locke—his argument applies even more to basic rights and freedom, to the socalled “negative rights,” which many authors consider to be the only strictly universal rights. The above analysis, if correct, entails two important consequences. First, if the compatriot priority principle applies to freedom rights as well as to social rights, it follows that the domain of universality of the former, which is usually viewed as properly universal, i.e., human rights, is in fact just as limited as that of the latter. Second, the origin of the tension between the compatriot priority principle and liberal moral universalism is then not located outside of liberal moral and political theory in particular local attachments, but in the way liberalism conceives that political obligations arise, through the social contract, and especially in the need for a monopoly on the legitimate use of force as a condition of freedom, equality, and of universal obligations. In the next section, I show that the compatriot priority principle is not a special duty in the sense in which associative duties are, but a universal obligation of lesser scope. The second section presents and analyzes Richard Miller’s (2001) argument about the priority due to cocitizens in relation to welfare rights. In the third section, I argue that this argument applies better (more directly) to basic freedoms—to negative rights—than to positive welfare rights. In the conclusion, I inquire into the consequences for liberal global justice of this analysis, which grounds the compatriot priority principle on the need for coercion in the establishment of rights and universal obligations.

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One last introductory remark is necessary. Debates surrounding the compatriot priority principle generally focus on the legitimacy of partial commitments. Cosmopolitans like Pogge (2002) or Brian Barry (2000) deny that partial commitment towards conationals has any moral legitimacy, while others, such as Kok-Chor Tan (2005) and David Miller (1995), consider it to be a fundamental moral principle. The focus of this paper is different. I adopt a naturalist or anthropological attitude towards the question of legitimacy. Just as some populations in the past believed that human sacrifices were morally justified and required, some people today believe that we have greater moral obligations towards conationals than towards other human beings. I am interested in the origin of this strange moral belief. Of course, there are many sociological and cultural reasons that explain why there is a widespread bias in favor of compatriots in the contemporary world. These, however, do not explain why this preference is construed in moral terms rather than simply as a question of efficiency or personal advantage. Which aspect of our moral life grounds this moral principle? The answer that I propose to this question rests on an analysis of a central aspect of our shared moral life. But if what is analyzed is normative—it is, after all, an aspect of our moral life—the analysis itself is nonnormative. This analysis nonetheless raises important normative issues, which will be addressed in the conclusion, but, for the most part, this chapter constitutes an exercise in moral phenomenology rather than in ethics.

Special Duties and Partial Commitments Daniel Philpott (2001: 338) remarks that, even if liberals are generally uncomfortable with borders, many “nonetheless allow some partial commitment towards the state.” Even if liberals, in principle, are universalists who uphold the idea of the moral equality of all individuals, many of them—including numerous professed cosmopolitans—defend the value of borders and recognize some form of moral privilege to conationals. Notwithstanding the fact that borders create arbitrary distinctions between individuals in terms of wealth, life prospects, and opportunities (i.e., being born north or south of the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula), most liberals believe that reserving many important privileges to a limited group of individuals from which outsiders are excluded can be morally justified. This belief is frequent not only among liberals, but is also central for communitarians and nationalists, who further argue that without such local commitments, a healthy moral life is impossible.

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However, in the case of liberals, the belief is somewhat more surprising. There is at least a tension between their defense of moral universalism and their adhesion to these partial commitments. Since Herder and Hegel, this conflict between universal obligations and partial commitments has generally been analyzed in terms of the relation between universality and particularity. For example, in Boundaries and Allegiances, Samuel Scheffler (2001) proposes such an analysis of the difficulty that many liberals have with borders and partial commitments. Liberalism, he argues, is sensitive to different values that are sometimes difficult to accommodate to one another, and this leads to tensions and unresolved conflicts between goals that cannot be satisfied simultaneously. In particular, there is, according to him, a “tension between a commitment to moral egalitarianism and a commitment to particularism about political responsibility” (79–80). When Scheffler comes to reflect more specifically upon this tension, he presents it as accommodating the equal worth of all persons with “associative duties.” More specifically, the difficulty illustrates, he argues, how to accommodate equal universal obligations with special duties and responsibilities. Scheffler defines “associative duties” as duties that we have toward particular persons “with whom we have had certain significant sorts of interactions or to whom we stand in certain significant sorts of relations” (49). These relations and interactions can either be the result of a voluntary choice, as between husband and wife, or given to agents independently of their will, such as the relation between parents and children. The duties to which significant relations and interactions give rise are, according to Scheffler (70–72), special duties in at least three senses. First, unlike egalitarian duties they are not universal, but only due to certain persons by reason of the relation that attaches us. Second, associative duties are unequal. We owe different things to different people in view of the different relations we have with them. My responsibility to my children is greater than and different from my responsibility to my university colleagues. Third, associative duties are, at least in many circumstances, asymmetrical—for example, a PhD student does not owe her supervisor what her supervisor owes her. Universal obligations are, in contrast, by definition symmetrical and equal. In spite of the fact that special duties and universal equal obligations are many times opposed to each other, Scheffler argues that they are not irreconcilable. Special duties do not make universal obligations meaningless, nor do universal obligations render special duties impossible. Rather, universal obligations can be viewed as limiting the circumstances in which special duties apply and vice versa. For example,

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universal obligations determine the domains where conferring unequal advantages to members of our family or to our close associates is legitimate and where it becomes nepotism or corruption. Special duties, for their part, allow us to break ties when distributing limited resources between many individuals. Not only it is not unfair to give priority to a close friend over a stranger when both need help, it can moreover be argued that life only makes sense to the extent that we are not always held, no matter what or who is concerned, to an abstract universal impartiality that is impossible to satisfy. Thus, according to Scheffler, special duties and universal obligations are not absolute opposites, and in our moral life we generally succeed at reconciling the ones with the others. However, tensions remain, and we cannot always find a satisfactory form of accommodation. This, he claims, is precisely what happens when we are torn between our commitment to equal justice for all and the claims of nationalism or of minority cultures. Scheffler does not propose to resolve the problem; his goal is simply to analyze the difficulty in order to make it clearer. However, when looked at more closely, the conclusion that he reaches concerning our “commitment to particularism about political responsibility” is rather unconvincing, precisely in view of his analysis of the difference between universal obligations and special duties. When explaining special duties, Scheffler says that they result from having had some “significant sorts of interactions” or from standing in some “significant sorts of relations” with other people. Clearly, “significant sorts” of interactions or relations are not just any kind of interactions or relations, and though Scheffler does not provide a complete analysis of what “significant sorts” means, he does give some examples. Most of these refer to what can be described as close, intimate, or meaningful interactions, i.e., relations and interactions between friends and lovers, parents and children, codependents, or relations with people we have helped or who have helped us in an important way, and so on. However, relations and interactions between most conationals— that is to say, between most of those who through the accident of birth happen to share the same territory and citizenship—cannot be defined as “significant” in any of those ways. At the level of nationality or of cultural particularism, relations among individuals are abstract universal relations, similar to those we associate with equal universal obligations. Just as we owe equal respect to all human beings in view of the fact that they are human beings, independently of any other relation we may or may not have with them, according to the compatriot priority principle we owe loyalty to conationals by virtue of the simple fact that they are

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conationals, independently of any other relation we may or may not have with them. Relations between members of the same ethnic group, speakers of the same language, or adherents to the same faith are of a different significant sort than the significant sorts of relations that exists between parents and children, close friends, or longtime partners. It may be the case that individuals stand in a significant sort of relation to their faith, ethnic origin, or language, but, for the most part, they have no such relation with other individuals who share the same faith, ethnic origin, or language. The relation between one randomly chosen Catholic and another, or one Frenchman and another, or one woman and another, is of the same abstract universal type as the relation between one human being and another. Only the domain of universality is more limited in these three examples, but in all cases the relation simply associates each element to every other in a given universal class. Furthermore, even when all of humanity is included, the domain over which the abstract relation applies remains limited. Most importantly, in all cases, relations of this type extend to persons that we do not and cannot know personally, persons with whom we have or have had no “significant sorts of relation,” persons with whom the only relation we have is that they belong to the domain of universality defined by being French, a woman, a Catholic, or a human being. This is a different way of saying that a nation, an ethnic group, a religion, or all of humanity constitute imagined rather than concrete communities. Therefore, if it is the case that we have special responsibilities towards conationals, members of our ethnic group, coreligionists, or others who are of the same gender or sexual orientation than us, then these duties are similar in form to universal obligations, not to associative duties. They are universal: they extend to all members of the group; they are equal: they are the same for everyone; and they are symmetrical. The moral privilege that we are tempted to give to conationals, to members of the same gender, religion, or ethnic group, clearly is not grounded in the same type of significant sorts of relations as special or associative duties are. The only way in which such a privilege can be distinguished from a (strictly) universal obligation, such as equal respect for all human beings, is by its scope—its domain of universality. Contrary to what Scheffler and to what communitarians, liberal nationalists, and many others believe, obligations towards conationals are not of a different nature, but only of a different extension, from obligations that extend to all humankind. They, also, are abstract obligations that satisfy the three classical conditions of anonymity, equality, and

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universality. Therefore, the moral ground of compatriot priority principle cannot be the same as that of the moral preference that we give to friends, family, or close associates. In a modern society, the bonds of concrete communities whose members closely interact with each other never coincide with the limits of the nation or the state.3 The modern nation-state is an imagined community that is mostly composed of distant strangers, of persons one has never met and will never meet.

The Patriotic Bias If the compatriot priority principle cannot be grounded on particular or communal attachments or on associative duties, where does it derive its legitimacy from? In “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern,” Richard Miller (1998) provides an interesting answer to this question. His goal, he says, is to respond to the “particularist challenge.” Most people who consider themselves proponents of universal moral egalitarianism, says Miller, also favor a patriotic bias in tax-financed aid—that is to say, they greatly prefer to see their tax money used to help needy conationals, rather than needy distant foreigners. Furthermore, they do not think that this bias is simply a question of efficiency or feasibility, but that it is morally justified. The particularist challenge is that, while communitarians and liberal nationalists appear to be able to account for this bias rather straightforwardly, universal liberal egalitarianism apparently cannot. Therefore, claims the particularist, if liberal egalitarians were consistent, they should either abandon universalism or reject the patriotic bias in tax-financed aid. Miller sets out to respond to this challenge by providing a justification of the patriotic bias that is based on a universal principle rather than on a particular attachment.4 Miller’s starting point is universal equal respect, which does not, he argues, entail equal concern for all. Take, for example “the girl who lives across the street”: her life, says Miller, is as valuable to him as that of his own daughter and deserves equal respect. However, he is not equally concerned for her. The fact is that concern for specially chosen goals (i.e., the wellbeing of his daughter) can provide a legitimate excuse for neglecting to help others, without thereby showing them any disrespect. Being less ready to forward the life objectives of his neighbor’s child than those of his daughter does not constitute on the part of Miller a failure in his obligation to show equal respect towards the former. Equal respect is, therefore, in a sense less demanding than equal concern, but, as we will now see, at times it can be even more demanding.

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According to Miller (1998: 132), “rules expressing equal respect for all are rules that could be the joint, self-imposed, fully autonomous legislation of all.” In other words, any rule that could not be accepted by those who are subjected to it shows disrespect for those on whom it is imposed. It is from this Kantian conception of equal respect that he will derive the patriotic bias. Such an understanding of equal respect, he argues, implies a duty of prior attention to compatriots, because less well-off conationals would not accept a rule that takes away from them resources that they need in order to give them to needy foreigners. By transferring to foreigners help that we could give to less well-off conationals, we—the better-off citizens—show unequal respect towards less well-off members of the nation. No matter how much more than our conationals the foreigners may be in need, helping them is unjustified whenever it takes away resources that could be used to help less welloff conationals, or at least, it is unjustified to the extent that it takes away from the less advantaged more resources than they would agree to dedicate to the needs of noncompatriots. Yet, adds Miller, the greater concern that we have for the needs of conationals over those of foreigners does not imply any lack of respect towards the latter. But why should we assume that needy foreigners would agree to such a rule? Is it simply that they have not been asked? If better-off citizens decided to distribute aid in a way that did not first cater to the needs of conationals, they would show disrespect to their less well-off compatriots. They would, argues Miller (2005: 135), be telling those who are less advantaged that they are not asked to participate in a common scheme of cooperation on the basis of rationally pursued shared goals, but simply because they are coerced to do so by the state, which is in the hands of those who are better off. Transferring to distant foreigners resources that less well-off compatriots need is equivalent to telling them that their agreement to the laws that govern them is not required. It takes away from them, argues Miller, “adequate incentives to obey the law one helps to create” (134). At the heart of his argument is the fact that conationals support the coercive imposition of laws upon each other (136–37). No group or individual should appear to be using this coercion to the particular disadvantage (or advantage) of some conationals because those who are disadvantaged by such an arrangement cannot be expected to rationally agree to the law to which they are subject. Richard Miller’s derivation of the patriotic bias on the basis of his Kantian understanding of equal respect rehearses a classical social con-

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tract argument. As in the theories of Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, a specific structure of interaction among contracting parties is derived from the fact that all must be able to rationally agree to the rule to which they are subjected.5 For example, in Hobbes ([1651] 1994: 97), all parties in the social contract should be considered equal, whether or not they are in fact equal, because otherwise they will not willfully enter into the pact of association. The requirement of equality is thus imposed by the necessity for them to agree to the power to which they are subjected. Likewise, according to Miller, those who are less well-off will not rationally acquiesce to a rule that deprives them of help which they need, in order to give it to foreigners. What motivates and justifies the patriotic bias is that individuals, in this case less well-off conationals, should be able to accept the rule to which they are subjected. However, it is mutual coercion, as in the social contract, that is really at stake in this argument. This is made clear by Miller’s insistence that the patriotic bias only applies in the case of tax-financed foreign aid and not to private charity. Anyone, rich or poor, is free to privately help foreigners; what is unacceptable is to forcefully deprive conationals of resources to which they are entitled in order to transfer them to distant strangers. Beyond the moral obligation of showing equal respect to all, what is involved is also the need to avoid the loss of mutual trust and social conflicts that could endanger the stability of the social pact. The priority given to (needy) compatriots discharges this requirement of stability while simultaneously indicating that coercion that does not rest on the consent of those who are coerced is illegitimate. The need to avoid conflicts invoked by Miller heightens the resemblance with classical social contract theories. They seek to obtain, through the joint agreement of all parties to the rules they impose upon each other, both an end to the state of nature—which is conceived as a situation of reciprocal violence—and the institution of a legitimate power. There is nonetheless an important difference between Miller’s derivation and classical social contract theories. Such theories try to derive the legitimacy of the state and of the distinctions between conationals and foreigners, as well as between well-off and less well-off conationals, from the pact of association itself. In Hobbes and Locke, it is the contract that grounds and gives legitimacy to the distinction between compatriots and others, and it is from the social contract that Rawls derives the legitimacy of social inequalities. Miller assumes from the start the legitimacy of the state, of social inequalities between citizens, and of the moral distance that separates compatriots from foreigners. He takes for

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granted that conationals have towards each other special moral responsibilities that are grounded in the social contract, which gives legitimacy to the laws that we coercively impose upon each other. As far as the legitimization of the patriotic bias is concerned, the reasoning is circular, for it presupposes precisely what is at stake—the moral privilege of conationals. Notwithstanding this circularity, Miller has succeeded in deriving the patriotic bias from universal obligations— those that attach together the parties to the social contract. The compatriot priority principle is therefore legitimate to the extent that the limitation of universal obligations to conationals on which it rests is itself morally justified and legitimate. A legitimate state is thus condemned to a form of the compatriot priority principle in the sense that it has duties towards its nationals that it does not have towards others. The patriotic bias in tax-funded aid declares that this aid should be directed towards less well-off compatriots, rather than to help needy foreigners. However, Miller does not tell us how much bias is justified or if there is a point at which too much bias becomes illegitimate. Given that he says that the bias remains justified no matter how much more than conationals foreigners may be in need and require help, it seems that the patriotic bias would condone—more, that it morally justifies— even absolute national egoism. Furthermore, given the structure of Miller’s argument, it is hard to see why this privilege should be limited to social rights and tax-funded aid for those who are less advantaged, and hard to see why it does not and should not extend to all other rights, including basic human rights, that liberal nationalist and communitarians tend to consider as strictly universal. Miller’s derivation thus poses a greater challenge to universal moral egalitarianism than arguments from particular attachment do, for it potentially justifies exorbitant moral privileges to conationals.

Rights and Coercion One possible answer to this difficulty may perhaps be found in the well-known distinction between positive and negative rights. Positive rights, like social or welfare rights, it is claimed, are not really universal, because they depend on the state or on other institutions in order to become effective. These rights, like the right to a basic income or to subsistence, are defined as “positive” because, in order for them to exist or to be fulfilled, someone has to engage in a positive action, such as providing food to those who are in need or redistributing income.

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Positive rights are rights to positive actions on the part of others. In the absence of institutions to specify the required action, there is a sense in which these rights do not exist. Negative rights, in contrast, are thought to be really universal, because all that is necessary in order for them to exist, it is claimed, is for others to abstain from certain actions. For example, all that is required for my freedom of expression or of movement to be secured is that others refrain from actions that prevent me from expressing my opinion or from going where I wish to go. Similarly, the right to bodily integrity only requires that others abstain from various actions—for example, violence, torture, or rape. These rights are negative in the sense that they impose limits on the range of action open to others. The obligations they give rise to impose negative actions—not doing certain things. In consequence, negative rights are also sometimes called “freedom rights” because to have a right in that sense is to have the freedom, but not the obligation, to do something, to express one’s opinion or to go where one desires. Negative rights are also characterized by the fact that they give rise to “perfect obligations.” One person’s right to freedom of expression, for example, entails a corresponding obligation, which is that everyone should refrain from actions that prevent him or her from expressing his or her opinion. This obligation is “perfect” in these ways: first, that it is clear who has the obligation—everyone; second, that it is also clear what the obligation entails for others—that they refrain from preventing her expressing her opinion; and finally, if this negative obligation is fulfilled, the right is secured—nothing else is needed. The main reasons why negative rights are often interpreted as the only really universal rights are, first, because their corresponding obligations extend to everyone, in all circumstances and at all time, and, second, because what is required for their satisfaction is clear and accessible to anyone. Finally, they are also universal because they exist independently of the state or of any other institution; they are neither culturally nor socially relative. In consequence, negative rights are frequently considered the only basic human rights—the only rights that belong to everyone in virtue of the simple fact that he or she is a human being. Positive rights, in contrast, are understood as giving rise to “imperfect obligations.” These obligations are not “imperfect” in the sense that they do not constitute real and binding duties, but in the sense that it is not immediately clear who has the obligation and what the obligation entails. If I have a right to health care, for example, others have an obligation to help me when I am sick. However, this obligation itself does not specify who has the obligation to provide the needed health services and

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to what extent. Is it close relatives, the state, a specific institution such as a hospital or clinic, members of my clan or ethnic group, everyone? Furthermore, what the obligation implies is not clear either. Does the right to health care include only provisions in the case of serious illness or does it also include preventive medicine, compensation for disabilities, access to a healthy and safe environment, etc.? Yet such questions must be answered and responsibilities must be determined in order for the obligation to be fulfilled and for the right to really exist. It seems to follow, therefore, that, unlike negative rights, positive rights can only exist if there are institutions that specify who has the duty to do what. Since these institutions will vary depending on time and place, positive rights cannot be truly universal. They will always be culturally and historically relative, the changing result of ongoing political negotiations. Could this distinction limit the compatriot priority principle? Can we, for example, think that this priority is circumscribed to positive rights and imperfect obligations? Implicitly, this seems to be Miller’s position. He argues that patriotic bias in tax-funded aid is consistent with universal equal respect—in other words, that the patriotic bias does not extend to or influence every “universal obligation.” The way in which he understands equal respect, however, is not entirely clear. On the one hand, in the case of less well-off conationals, equal respect requires them to be able to agree to the laws to which they are subjected. On the other hand, in the case of foreigners, this does not seem to be the case. Miller claims that adopting a patriotic bias in tax-funded aid does not show any disrespect towards needy foreigners. However, if their agreement was sought, as is that of needy conationals, it is not clear that foreigners would approve of a rule that prioritizes small advantages for others over their pressing needs. It seems that the only reason why this bias does not show them disrespect is because their agreement is neither asked nor necessary. Why?

The Patriotic Bias and the Social Contract The dichotomy between negative and positive rights, between perfect and imperfect obligations, has sometimes been forcefully criticized. Henry Shue (1996) for example, argues that supposed negative rights, such as freedom of expression or of movement, also demand the existence of institutions and of positive actions on the part of others. They require, among other things, the existence of a police force that ensures security and protects speakers from others who may feel offended by

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their opinion. Freedom of movement supposes the existence of adequate roads and the means to circulate, etc. These examples imply that determined persons must engage in specific tasks, in positive actions, in order for these negative rights to become effective. Therefore the difference between positive and negative rights, he says, is certainly not as consequential as it is usually assumed to be (see especially 35–40). Onora O’Neill (1996: 132), in contrast, claims that the distinction between negative and positive rights captures something important: “The supposed disanalogy between universal liberty and welfare rights is not then bogus: the two are genuinely asymmetric. For example, when a liberty right is violated, then, whether or not specific institutions have been established, there are determinate others to whom the violation might be imputed . . . . But when supposed universal rights to goods, services or welfare are not met and no institutions for distributing or allocating special obligations have (yet) been established, there is systematic unclarity whether one can speak of violators.”6 According to O’Neill, in the absence of an institutional structure that defines who has which obligation to whom, it is not possible to determine if rights to goods and services have been violated or not. That is why, she argues, such rights need to be institutionalized and why they are, unlike what is the case of universal liberty rights (negative rights), only “supposed universal rights.” Can the distinction between negative and positive rights, so to speak, contain Miller’s demonstration? That is to say, can it prevent the moral privilege granted to conationals in the case of tax-funded aid from spreading to all the obligations citizens have towards each other, finally endangering the very idea of universal equal rights? The distinguishing characteristic of negative rights, which, according to O’Neill, explains that they exist in the absence of any specific institution, is that whenever such a right is violated there are “determinate others to whom the violation might be imputed.” However, early social contract theorists, such as Hobbes and Locke, considered that very characteristic as the main reason why such rights could not properly be said to exist in the absence of specific institutions to enforce them. Failure to fulfill the obligation corresponding to a negative right because it is evident and can be attributed to a specific other immediately constitutes a transgression or an offence. This offence, which arises independently of any institution to which it may be referred, constitutes an occasion of conflict precisely because the agent who has (or feels he or she has) been wronged knows the “determinate other to whom the violation may be imputed.” Early social contract theorists thought that events of this type—the (true or supposed) violation of negative

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rights—were what brings people to seek redress, something which in the absence of an appropriate institutional structure sets into motion a dynamic of actions that rapidly leads to the “war of everyone against everyone.” According to them, it was precisely because negative rights can be violated in the absence of any institutional structure that they need to be institutionalized in order to become effective.7 In the absence of an adequate institutional structure, the efforts which all make to enforce their rights prevent everyone from having those rights. In order for that difficulty to be resolved, they argued, negative rights have to be institutionalized in a manner that takes away from individuals the ability to enforce them. Such rights can only exist if there is a particular institution through which coercion can apply equally to all. The social contract was the means of the creation and justification of such an institution that made freedom rights effective. Negative rights, therefore, just like positive rights, cannot exist in the absence of institutions. They require the sovereignty of the state, the existence of a central power that monopolizes the legitimate use of force. According to social contract theorists, the necessary condition for negative rights to really exist is a power able to deprive every one of the authority and ability to defend his or her negative rights. Richard Miller’s moral justification of the patriotic bias rests on the fact that citizens reciprocally impose coercive laws on each other. It is this reciprocal coercion that grounds the moral privilege of conationals relative to other individuals and sets limits to our equal obligations. Why is it that those who impose coercive laws on each other have towards each other obligations that they do not have towards others? Is it because the power to coerce all equally is the necessary condition for our rights and freedoms to be real and effective? Is it because the coercive power that protects individuals’ basic rights by depriving them of the power of doing so individually is grounded in a moral agreement? In any case, if Miller is right, there seems to be little reason to think that this bias—the moral privilege granted to conationals—is restricted to social or to positive rights. It extends to all equal rights and obligations of which it bounds the universality.

Revisiting Liberalism The compatriot priority principle, then, is not foreign or external to liberal egalitarianism. It is not the expression of a particularist claim but grounded in one of its central institutions: the coercive power of a legit-

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imate state that renders effective universal rights and obligations. Without this power, such rights and obligations would be void, ineffective. In consequence, it is not surprising that, for those of us who live under such a power, the boundaries of justice tend to coincide with the borders of the state. The ground on which this moral prejudice rests is neither shaky nor peripheral, but, to the contrary, quite central to our moral and political thinking and institutions. The compatriot priority principle is neither an accident, nor a mistake of misguided nationalists and communitarians, but a consequence of the way in which historically we have institutionalized universal rights. It is not the expression of localism or of the particular duties that we owe to those who are dear to us, but a consequence of the political institution that makes universal equal rights and obligations effective: the modern state characterized by the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. In spite of its centrality in egalitarian moral thinking, this principle nonetheless constitutes a moral prejudice in the two senses of the word prejudice. First, it is a prejudice in the sense that it is a widely shared, preconceived idea. That we owe special moral obligations to compatriots is an unexamined spontaneous belief that most people have, most of the time. My claim is not that this belief is false, but that the ground on which it rests has usually remained hidden, and that it should give us pause once we realize what it is: the coercive power of the state, which determines those to whom we owe universal equal obligations, by taking away their ability to enforce their rights, and sets them apart from those to whom we do not owe such obligations. Those to whom we do not owe such obligations are not without any rights at all, but must uphold by themselves (or through the power of a different state) the obligations they are owed. In consequence, it is often the case that the moral advantage that we grant to conationals, to the extent that it limits the rights and the obligations we have towards others, also constitutes a prejudice in the sense that it produces harm and injury. Moral universalism—liberal egalitarianism—is the belief that individuals are the ultimate source of moral concern and that all individuals count equally. The patriotic bias contradicts this belief, but this contradiction is internal to political liberalism, not external to it. What we need, therefore, is not to accommodate this inconsistency, as if it were the case of delicately balancing contradictory moral values, but to invent new ways of institutionalizing universal principles that will avoid this contradiction. What we need is to reconsider some of the basic presuppositions of liberalism, not in order to reject its fundamental principles of universality and equality, but in order to make them more consistent.

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Paul Dumouchel is professor of philosophy at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He coauthored with Jean-Pierre Dupuy L’Enfer des choses, René Girard et la logique de l’économie (Paris: Seuil, 1979) and authored Emotions essai sur le corps et le social (Paris: Seuil Les Empêcheurs de Penser en rond, 1999). With Reiko Gotoh, he coedited Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His latest books are Le sacrifice inutile essai sur la violence politique (Paris: Flammarion, 2011) and The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays (Michigan State University Press, 2014).

Notes 1. For an overview of this controversy, see Philpott 2001; Couture and Nielson 2005. 2. For an extensive statement of this difficulty, see Kymlicka 2001. 3. Remember that for Rousseau, who was a communitarian before the term was ever coined and a proponent of direct democracy, this was a fundamental issue. He thought that democracy could only exist in small communities where every citizen personally knew every other citizen. For him, democracy was impossible in imagined communities ([1762] 2004: ch. 15). 4. Note that if the argument of the previous section is correct, there is no “particularist challenge.” Communitarians, liberal nationalists, or other “particularists” also fail to justify their patriotic bias—the moral privilege they claim for members of their preferred group. 5. This is not surprising since Kantian moral obligations, as has often been noted, have the structure of the social contract. See, for example, Dérathé 1979. 6. Note in passing that this “systematic unclarity” only exists in certain types of societies; in most “early” or “simple” societies, there are determinate others to whom violations of welfare rights can be attributed, which suggests that, paradoxically, it might be mainly in modern and complex societies that “institutions for distributing or allocating special obligations have . . . been established.” 7. This is particularly clear not only in Hobbes, but also in Locke ([1689] 1963). See in particular chapters 2 and 3 of the Second Treatise.

References Beitz, C.R. 1983. “Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment.” Journal of Philosophy 80(10): 591–600.

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Couture, J. and K. Nielson. 2005. “Cosmopolitanism and the Compatriot Priority Principle.” In G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.), 180–95. The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dérathé, R. 1979. Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la pensée politique de son temps. Paris: Vrin. Hobbes, T. (1651) 1994. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668. Edited by E. Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Kymlicka, W. 2001. “Territorial Boundaries: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective.” In D. Miller and H.S. Hashmi (eds.), Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Locke, J. (1689) 1963. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by P. Laslett. London: Cambridge University Press. Miller, D. 1995. On Nationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Miller, R.W. 1998. “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern.” In G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. 127–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neil, O. 1996. Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Philpott, D. 2001. “The Ethics of Boundaries: A Question of Partial Commitments.” In D. Miller and S.H. Hashni (eds.), Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pogge, T.W. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Cambridge: Polity. Rousseau, J.-J (1762) 2004. The Social Contract, book III. London: Penguin. Shue, H. 1996. Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scheffler, S. 2001. Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tamir, Y. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tan, K.-C. 2005. “The Demands of Justice and National Allegiances.” In G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. 164– 79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 8

A Reluctant Cosmopolitan Anne Phillips

As other papers in this collection testify, the opposition between universalism and particularity has a long history. One current incarnation is the opposition between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. Cosmopolitanism derives its name from notions of world citizenship. Though contemporary exponents mostly disavow fantasies of world government, they retain the force of that original ideal in their insistence on a shared humanity that transcends local difference and crosses national borders. In doing so, they mark a contrast between their own unbounded vision of rights and obligations, and the more culturally centered world of the typical multiculturalist. Consider the way Thomas Pogge (2002: 169) characterizes the three elements that, to his mind, constitute the cosmopolitan position: “First, individualism: the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons—rather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural, or religious communities, nations, or states. The latter may be units of concern only indirectly, in virtue of their individual members or citizens. Second, universality: the status of ultimate unit of concern attaches to every living human being equally—not merely to some subset, such as men, aristocrats, Aryans, whites, or Muslims. Third, generality: this special status has global force. Persons are ultimate units of concern—not only for their compatriots, fellow religionists, or suchlike.” Or take Seyla Benhabib’s (2006: 17–18) summary: “For some, cosmopolitanism signifies an attitude of enlightened morality that does not place ‘love of country’ above ‘love of mankind’ (Martha Nussbaum); for others, cosmopolitanism signifies hybridity, fluidity, and recognizing the fractured and internally riven character of human selves and citizens, whose complex aspirations cannot be circumscribed by national fantasies and primordial communities (Jeremy Waldron). For a third group of thinker, whose lineages are those of Critical Theory, cosmopolitanism is a normative philosophy for carrying the universalistic norms of discourse ethics beyond the confines of the nation-state (Jurgen Haber-

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mas, David Held, and James Bohman).” With the partial exception of Benhabib’s characterization of the hybridity position, both accounts convey an opposition between particularistic and universalistic ways of thinking that seems fundamental to cosmopolitan politics. Multiculturalism starts from the opposite direction, stressing the centrality of particular loyalties and identities in our formation as human beings and the injury that is done to us when these more local attachments and sources of meaning are denied status in our society. The direct enemy, mostly, is not cosmopolitanism: the other of multicultural politics is a narrow nationalism that thinks it both normal and desirable for nations to be formed around a single, unified, “national” culture, and is unwilling to accommodate cultural diversity in its public practices or laws. But while the main object of critique has been assimilationist nationalism, multiculturalists have identified the power of cultural majorities in what appear, at first sight, neutral universalisms, and it is in this that the main tension with cosmopolitanism lies. From a multicultural perspective, universalistic reference to the needs of “human beings” or “people” often serves to conceal more culturally or nationally specific versions of “human” interest or need. When this unacknowledged parochialism combines with disparagement of the supposedly narrow claims of community or tribe, it reveals itself as a false universalism, operating to sustain the authority of majority or dominant groups. Daniele Archibugi (2005: 543), a self-declared cosmopolitan, draws the following contrast between multicultural and cosmopolitan approaches to linguistic diversity: “Multiculturalists are keen to stress that the nationbuilding process leads to winners and losers and that the majority language group retains all gains. Cosmopolitans are less inclined to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the various groups because they implicitly assume that establishing a common language provides advantages to all communities, and they tend to put aside the fact that some communities get a larger share of them.” That implicit assumption of relatively untroubled mutual advantage is precisely what multiculturalists challenge. All this suggests a pretty unbridgeable gap, but there have been considerable efforts over recent years to narrow it. Many cosmopolitans contest what they see as a misrepresentation of their position as hostile to local loyalties or indifferent to cultural context, and they “distinguish themselves from old-fashioned moral universalists by claiming to be respectful of cultural diversity, interested in dialogue across cultures, and committed to forms of cultural hybridization” (Mehta 2000: 620). Martha Nussbaum (1996: 4) once defined the cosmopolitan as “the person

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whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings.” Yet Nussbaum also insists on “a form of universalism that is sensitive to pluralism and cultural difference” (2000: 8), and in developing her account of the capabilities necessary to (any) human flourishing, she talks of the importance of remaining “open-ended and humble” (77). The literature is now full of “rooted” cosmopolitans, “thick” cosmopolitans, and cosmopolitan patriots, to the point where it no longer seems appropriate to charge cosmopolitanism with insensitivity to local or cultural bonds (Ackerman 1994; Dobson 2006; Appiah 1997). Multiculturalists, meanwhile, have stressed the moral universalism that underpins arguments for cultural accommodation—the emphasis on equal respect, the significance attached to individual autonomy (Kymlicka 1995), or the insistence that majorities and minorities alike are entitled to the supportive environment of their culture—and the self-evident egalitarianism that drives such claims. Many also distance themselves from what cosmopolitans (and feminists) have criticized as a cultural rigidity, the way some versions of “culture” lend themselves to a discourse of authenticity and a policing of cultural boundaries, encouraging cultural leaders to think they have the right to dictate the terms of their culture to those they regard as their members (Waldron 1992; Appiah 2005; Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 1993; Okin 1999). Most selfdefined multiculturalists now go to considerable lengths to criticize cultural essentialism, stressing the continuous traffic between cultures, the diversity of opinions within cultures, and the incoherence of representing any one culture as if it were hermetically sealed (e.g., Modood 2007). In my own version of multiculturalism, I have been particularly critical of holistic understandings that attribute to “culture” an almost determinist force, seeing this as simultaneously understating individual variety and agency and overstating differences between cultures (Phillips 2007, 2010). I stress—in what then appears a more cosmopolitan mode—the underlying similarities of the human condition. I have been influenced in this by what I would describe as a phenomenology of everyday life, captured in Lila Abu-Lughod’s (1991: 158) comment that when we examine the particulars of people’s lives, we see others “not as robots programmed with ‘cultural’ rules, but as people going through life agonizing over decisions, making mistakes, trying to make themselves look good, enduring tragedies and personal losses, enjoying others, and finding moments of happiness.” Paul Gilroy’s (2000: 29) main target has been racial rather than cultural generalization, but he talks in similar vein of the “crushingly obvious, almost banal human sameness” of our social relationships, and the “tragic pre-

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dicaments” of our common-species life. Our ways of being in the world involve universal needs and emotions (food, love, fear, and so on), and even when our ways of interpreting and expressing these are culturally specific (as of course they are), crucial similarities remain. Talking of the mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar that faces a visitor to Kumasi, where he grew up, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006: 94) puts it like this: “There’s just a great deal of everyday life that is utterly, humanly familiar. People in Ghana, people everywhere, buy and sell, eat, read the papers, watch movies, sleep, go to church or mosque, laugh, marry, make love, commit adultery, go to funerals, die. Most of the time, once someone has translated the language you don’t know, or explained some little unfamiliar symbol or custom, you’ll have no more (and, of course, no less) trouble understanding why they do what they do than you do making sense of your neighbors back home.” The “no less” serves as an important reminder that the behavior of those who would, on most accounts, be regarded as sharing “our” culture, can also be bewilderingly incomprehensible. Faced with such formulations, there no longer seems much to choose between a multiculturalism that dispenses with reified or essentialized understandings of culture and a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the bonds that tie us. But it is, of course, standard academic practice to set up two positions as fundamentally opposed, then move them into closer alignment, and the conciliatory resolution often derives its success only from misdescribing the initial positions. Can we really see in this rapprochement between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism a model for rethinking the relationship between justice and culture, or reframing the relationship between universal and particular? Can multiculturalists now describe themselves as cosmopolitans and cosmopolitans as multiculturalists, or is this a premature conclusion? I approach this issue as someone who has previously resisted the cosmopolitan label, feeling that something important is lost if one abandons multiculturalism. Many of the criticisms of multiculturalism are richly deserved, and I particularly share the feminist concern about the policing of cultural boundaries and the authority vested in self-appointed cultural leaders who may then deploy it to block gender equality. But some of the criticisms involve a coded return to narrower and more exclusionary understandings of national identity: what Saskia Sassen has described as a renationalisation in the very movement of denationalisation. For political reasons, if no other, I have therefore continued to describe myself as defending a version of multiculturalism, rather than evacuating that terrain in favor of a more transcendent, and less

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politically engaged, cosmopolitanism. At a more theoretical level, I am influenced by various strands of antihumanism that began with Louis Althusser’s work in the 1960s (see Althusser 1969), and have remained skeptical about the capacity of cosmopolitanism to free itself from all vestiges of its presumed superiority or false universalism (Sypnowich 2005: 55–74; Mehta 2000). But my political reasons are arguably specific to contemporary Europe, where anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment is often articulated via denunciations of multiculturalism, and where assimilationist nationalisms are increasing in strength. In this chapter, I try to set the political concerns to one side to focus on the philosophical issues. I consider first whether the narrowing of the gap between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, and redescription of each project in terms borrowed from the other, is enough to resolve the tensions. Do the moves towards a more culturally sensitive cosmopolitanism and more universally grounded multiculturalism satisfactorily settle the matter, or do they reintroduce the points of contention in new— but then more deceptive—guise? In this section, I address Linda Zerilli’s (2009) analysis of what she describes as the “new universalism” of Martha Nussbaum and Seyla Benhabib, and her argument that their critique of cultural essentialism works to cloak a continuing ethnocentrism. Zerilli’s arguments encourage us to look critically at rapprochement and resist the easy conclusion that the problems have now been solved. With this warning in mind, I turn to three standard objections to humanism/cosmopolitanism: one that has struck me in the past as particularly compelling; one that is widely employed in both academic and commonsense arguments; and a third that I have been struggling to pin down. The first is that cosmopolitanism commits us to an abstract understanding of humanity that ignores specificity and difference; the second, that it allows insufficient weight to the bonds of attachment that make us care more about those more closely linked to us; the third, that it fails to see that all inclusions are simultaneously exclusions, and in this failure, is insufficiently critical of its own exclusionary force. These are by no means the only possible objections, but so far as these three are concerned, I conclude that the philosophical objections are not overwhelming. The political ones remain, and the implication I take from this is not that we should abandon multiculturalism. I am increasingly inclined, however, to view the traditions as compatible, though as I note in my closing remarks, I remain somewhat reluctant as regards this conclusion.

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Rapprochement and Its Pitfalls: The “New Universalism” In a recent discussion of feminist judgment, Linda Zerilli (2009) addresses what she sees as a failed attempt to bridge the gap between universalism and particularity, represented by Seyla Benhabib (2002) and Martha Nussbaum (2000). Both Benhabib and Nussbaum are sensitive to the argument that universalism can serve as a covert form of cultural particularism. More specifically, they are sensitive to the suggestion that the value attached to autonomy, equality, bodily integrity, or human rights reflects Western rather than universal ideals. Nussbaum, as I have noted, deals with this partly by an insistence on remaining “open-ended and humble”—that is, she recognizes that any formulation of what she considers a universal value or norm may have been subject to cultural contamination and that she must be willing to consider future revision even of the values she holds most dear. This is sensible advice, but hardly radical enough to constitute an answer: it would be extreme behavior to refuse to countenance any future change of mind, and there are not many people writing today who claim infallibility. Willingness to change one’s mind is a pretty minimum condition of any intellectual or political engagement. The other part to Nussbaum’s answer (this is the one Zerilli is most interested in) is that the values cannot anyway be claimed as Western, either because many of them originated elsewhere, and/or because we live in such a globally interconnected world that it no longer makes sense to describe any value as Western. Seyla Benhabib has, in my reading, a more complex understanding of the cross-cultural dialogue needed to tackle ethnocentrism than is suggested by Nussbaum’s open-ended humility, but she too sees the global traffic in ideas and people as undercutting some of the worries about values being Western or externally imposed. She challenges the notion of cultures as hermetically sealed from one another, rejects arguments about the incommensurability or untranslatability of values, and stresses the “planetary interdependence” that creates “a situation of worldwide reciprocal exchange, influence and interaction” (2002: 36).” In Zerilli’s (2009: 302) reading, this resolves the tension between universalism and particularity through redescription—in effect, it pretends the problem away: By attributing, rather than exporting, these ideas or norms to non-Western cultures, both Benhabib and Nussbaum seek to evade, be it intentionally or not, the established criticisms of ethnocentrism brought by

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feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial theorists. The upshot of this attributive act—which represents itself in the otherwise appealing form of a feminist antiessentialist view of culture—is that Nussbaum and Benhabib, albeit in different ways, smuggle in as universal their own judgments based on their own (Western) normative criteria; occluded is the very act of judgment itself. If the old universalism simply identified the universal with a form of progress that is Western, this new universalism denies its origins in the West all the better to evade the criticisms that were made of its classic form.

I am far from convinced by Zerilli’s account, and in particular, by her reading of Benhabib. It seems to me that it makes a difference whether one offers a substantive account of the capabilities necessary to human flourishing (as does Nussbaum) or a more procedural account of the normative principles necessary to sustain cross-cultural dialogue (as does Benhabib), and that the second claim is significantly less vulnerable to Zerilli’s objections than the first. Simply noting that Benhabib’s account of the dialogic principles—including the right to participate as equals in the dialogue, and the equal right to challenge both topics and rules of conversation—draws heavily on Habermas does not of itself invalidate them. But the general point Zerilli makes is clearly pertinent to my concerns, for she encourages us to consider whether the softening of the universalism, on the one side, and the more nuanced understanding of culture, on the other, isn’t, in the end, a trick. So the same or similar values appear in many different localities; so ideas travel; so cultures are not as local and particular as they have been made out to be: does any of this mean we can stop worrying about the ethnocentrism implicit in so many proclaimed universalisms? Or does multiculturalism remain open to criticism for an overenthusiastic endorsement of the particular, and cosmopolitanism for an empty humanitarianism? Despite the rapprochement, questions remain.

Specificity and the Body From my perspective, the most serious objection to cosmopolitanism is the one that resonates with a longstanding feminist critique of theoretical approaches that encourage us to ignore, deny, or imaginatively transcend specificity and bodily difference. In Western liberalism, in particular, there has been a tradition of thinking that we arrive at universal principles of equality, justice, and human rights through a process of abstracting from the particularities of context—thus, that we arrive

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at the essential human by discarding all the rest. In this tradition, the universal is considered at odds with the particular. This understanding of their relationship is often additionally associated with a mind/body dualism. We are typically expected to detach equality claims from the so-called “accidents” of bodily difference, such as whether we are male or female, white-skinned or black, tall or short, strong or weak. Like most contemporary feminists, I am skeptical of such approaches. I do not endorse ways of thinking that ground equality in abstract, disembodied capacities, such as the capacity for rational thought, and I do not regard the particular bodies we inhabit as irrelevant. History tells us that the abstractions were nearly always false and that the supposedly universal rational capacities of the so-called “human” were modelled on particular kinds of humans and particular kinds of bodies: male, for example, rather than female, or white-skinned rather than black. But even with a different history and no such bias, the abstraction is still problematic. Sartre (1946: 55–56) puts the objection eloquently in his comment on the liberal humanist, who “has no eyes for the concrete syntheses with which history confronts him. He recognizes neither Jew, nor Arab, nor Negro, nor bourgeois, nor worker, but only man—man always the same in all times and places . . . to him the individual is only an ensemble of universal traits. It follows that his defense of the Jew saves the latter as man and annihilates him as Jew . . . he wants to separate the Jew from his religion, his family, his ethnic community, in order to plunge him into the democratic crucible whence he will emerge naked and alone, an individual and solitary particle like all the other particles” (cited in Kruks 2001: 94). Feminists have added to this insight in various works that stress the salience of embodiment and difference, and challenge the suggestion that equality means treating us as if we are all the same (Pateman 1988, 1989; Young 1990; Phillips 1993; Puwar 2004). Denying the body—proclaiming us all the same “under the skin”—has been seen as a particularly deceptive move: yet another way in which privileged bodies retain their authority and power. As Nirmal Puwar puts it, “when a body is emptied of its gender or race, this is a mark of how its position is the privileged norm. Its power emanates from its ability to be seen as just normal, to be without corporeality. Its own gender or race remains invisible: a non-issue” (Puwar 2004: 57) . I do not rehearse these arguments further here, but merely state that I regard them as providing a compelling case against theoretical approaches that seek to expunge specificity and difference. The question, then, is whether the objections fairly apply to cosmopolitanism. Is

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it fair to say that cosmopolitanism sees only the abstract human being, not the concrete synthesis, or, as Andrew Dobson (2006: 176)—himself a cosmopolitan—has suggested, that it “regards human beings as primordially thinking creatures”? We know that many cosmopolitans now deny this representation of their ideas, but is it, nonetheless, a fair depiction? On reflection, I am not convinced that it is. More precisely, it may be a fair depiction of what many cosmopolitans have argued, but it need not form a central plank of their position. There is at least some evidence to the contrary, evidence that the very move towards universal and generally applicable principles of equality depended on connections with bodily experience, and that it was not abstraction that enabled us to think in universal terms, but very often, the attention to context. This claim plays a key part, for example, in Lynn Hunt’s (2007) argument in Inventing Human Rights. Hunt argues that the capacity to think in terms of universal human rights was associated (at least for theorists of the European enlightenment) with the recognition that we can all feel pain. Human rights became thinkable through a new preoccupation with bodily integrity and the development of an empathetic selfhood that alerted people to the universal experience of pain. What made human beings equal might have been expressed or justified by reference to their common capacity for reason. But even being able to think that they had this common capacity depended, Hunt argues, on the cultivation—itself embodied—of empathy with the other. Her argument is that thinking of people as having equal rights depended on being able to think of people who were not linked to you in any significant way as nonetheless akin to you in their vulnerability to physical and emotional pain. In eighteenth century Europe, she claims, the possibility of thinking like this was enhanced by the rise of the novel, particularly those like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Rousseau’s Eloise, which used the device of letters to heighten the illusion of the characters’ reality and provide what seemed a window into their innermost feelings. As reading became more and more an appeal to the sentiments, evoking feelings of dread, horror, and pity, readers were encouraged to identify with the plight of the hero or heroine, and to recognize a commonality with people who would otherwise never enter their world. In Hunt’s argument, the remarkable explosion of human rights talk in mid- to late-eighteenth-century Europe is best understood in the context of this growing body of imaginative literature that awakened the reader’s sensitivity to the tribulations of its fictional characters. Ideas about bodily integrity were, she argues, a crucial part of this. The use of torture to extract confessions, and of brutal forms of punish-

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ment in the event of conviction, was widespread across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it was mainly from the 1760s that the condemnation of torture and inhumane punishment became a defining feature of enlightened thought. Hunt (2007: 82) argues that campaigns against state-sanctioned torture developed out of a growing empathy with even justly accused criminals, and a new concern for the human body: “Bodies gained a more positive value as they became more separate, more self-possessed, and more individualized over the course of the eighteenth century, while violations of them increasingly aroused negative reactions.” She claims that “torture ended because the traditional framework of pain and personhood fell apart, to be replaced, bit by bit, by a new framework, in which individuals owned their bodies, had rights to their separateness and to bodily inviolability, and recognized in other people the same passions, sentiments, and sympathies as in themselves” (112). The body figures here, not as something we must ignore in order to recognize what we more fundamentally share, but as part of what leads us to this recognition. I have a number of reservations about the argument. I do not, for example, share Hunt’s uncritical endorsement of notions of self-ownership; and her insouciance as regards the worries that troubled Benhabib or Nussbuam means she has no qualms about telling a story of human rights that locates its origins squarely in America and Europe. Without, I hope, becoming one of Linda Zerilli’s “new universalists,” I would take issue with this last, which I see as understating the multiple sources for thinking about rights and entitlements and their multiple locations. What interests me in the account is not, therefore, the specifics of the history, which has been critically described by Samuel Moyn (2007) as “like a creation myth.” I find illuminating, however, the emphasis on shared bodily vulnerability as the underpinning for contemporary universalism. I would argue, moreover, that a shared vulnerability to pain can provide a more compelling argument for universal principles of equality and justice than a shared capacity for rational thought, if only because the latter lends itself to finer discriminations that then become a basis for exclusion. People have different pain thresholds, and seemingly differ not only in the ability to withstand pain but in how much they feel it, but even allowing for this, there is limited scope for claiming a hierarchy of bodily vulnerability. By contrast, when our common humanity is grounded in a shared capacity for rational thought, supposed variations in intelligence or rationality are all too often used to justify unequal treatment. Most of us do not care sufficiently about the sufferings of unknown people in distant lands—as Judith Butler (2009) puts it, it seems

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that only some lives are “grievable”—but to the extent that we do, it is more often because we can recognize experiences of hunger, fear, pain, or loss across our self-evidently different bodies than because of what we have come to believe about the underlying capacity for reason. In arguing this, I am not claiming a basic nature that all humans— but only humans—share. We clearly share our vulnerability to pain with other animals, and, anyway, like Hannah Arendt, I prefer to talk of the human condition rather than human nature. I am also not saying that literature does a better job of extending our sympathies beyond the known and familiar than abstract claims about common humanity or that we need the extra motivation derived from aroused sensibilities to spur us to action. I do think this, but consider it a lesser point. Richard Rorty (1989: 192) has made this kind of contrast between philosophy and literature, arguing that it is the latter that best develops our skills in imaginative identification, helping us “extend our sense of ‘we’ to people whom we have previously thought of us ‘they’” (see also Rorty 1993). As an empirical observation, this has considerable plausibility, though I suspect people vary, with some more readily won over by powerful abstractions and others by imaginative reconstruction. But my point is not just about what works best in persuading people to change their minds. The point is that being able even to conceive of people as sharing the same entitlements (a key feature of cosmopolitan thought) is facilitated by the recognition of a shared vulnerability to pain, rather than (or possibly as well as) a shared capacity for rational thought. To the extent that humanism and/or cosmopolitanism deny this—to the extent that they insist on disembodied abstractions, such as the capacity for moral agency—they remain open to criticism. But I do not think the commitment to cosmopolitanism requires this or is in principle antithetical to embodied particularity. It seems more plausible to claim that the commitment to humanist or cosmopolitan principles could not even have arisen without that more embodied recognition.

Bonds of Attachment A second frequently voiced objection is that cosmopolitanism is insufficiently alert to particular bonds of attachment, and thereby fails to do justice to the relationships that make us who we are. In Political Justice ([1793] 1985: 169), William Godwin argued that “pure, unadulterated justice” requires us to discount personal attachments when deciding which of two people to save from a burning building. Faced with such

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dilemmas, he argued, we should choose the person of greater objective worth, the one whose work can contribute most to the welfare of humanity, even if, in the process, we have to leave our own mother to die. Godwin later changed the example—mothers are too emotive a topic—to suggest a choice between the illustrious Bishop Fenelon and his valet. The valet, however, might still be our brother. Most people would regard this privileging of humanity in general over human beings in particular as verging on the inhuman. More recently, Peter Singer (1972) conjures up the example of the well-shod passerby and drowning child to convey the moral obligation to help unknown others, regardless of boundaries or bonds.1 If we are walking past a shallow pond, and see a child drowning, we should (and almost certainly will) wade in to pull the child out. We are not going to wait around saying we do not know this child and had no part in encouraging him to play dangerously close to the water. We may momentarily notice that saving the child is going to damage beyond repair a newly purchased and much admired pair of shoes, but it is entirely unlikely that this would stop us acting. Nor will we refuse to intervene just because there are plenty of others around who could equally well wade in. The question Singer asks is why we act so readily in that situation but not for the nearly ten million children under the age of five who die each year from poverty-related causes. The principle that guides us in the shallow pond case—that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (Singer 1972: 231)—should, in his view, be equally compelling when it comes to donating significant parts of our income to save the lives of unseen children. The moral obligation to do what we can to prevent hunger, disease, or premature death has no boundaries and should be just as compelling when there are no obvious bonds. Singer’s argument is less stark than Godwin’s: our mother or brother would presumably qualify as of “comparable moral importance,” and Singer is not calling on us to sacrifice the lives of loved ones in order to save unknown others. But while many will agree with him that moral obligations do not end at the national border, resting this on the fact that we are all human beings is widely perceived as inadequate. Iris Young (2006: 161), for example, thinks “it flies in the face of moral intuition to suggest that all moral agents have exactly the same duties to all other agents and no special obligations to some subset of persons with whom an agent has special relationships. . . . obligations of justice require more and are based on more than common humanity.” She uses

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this, however, not to limit our obligations, but to make the case that we are under “special” obligations to those producers and consumers with whom we are linked across the globe. Thomas Pogge (2004), too, thinks it inadequate to ground global obligations in the fact that something bad is happening, though, again, the object of his criticism is to widen the scope of obligation and draw attention to the complicity of the wealthier nations in bringing about this state of affairs. Samuel Scheffler (1995) stresses that commonsense understandings of responsibility do recognize special obligations, citing those to people in our family, community, and country. But he also observes that the idea of special obligations could be a particular cultural product “that has its deepest roots in those relatively affluent societies that have the most to gain from the widespread internalization of a doctrine that limits their responsibility to assist the members of less fortunate societies” (41). There are two points to note here. First, it seems clear that one can derive broadly cosmopolitan conclusions about the scope of global justice either from an account of global interdependence or from a claim about us as human beings.2 Both Pogge and Young argue for a high level of global responsibility while rejecting the notion that this is just a general obligation grounded in a shared humanity. They stress either the historical or the structural connections that bind us to one another, connections that exist independently, whether we are aware of them or not. Bonds, in this sense, need not be bonds of emotional attachment— though there is a suggestion in Young’s argument that it is through coming to recognize these connections and interdependencies that we will come to feel our global commitments. The second point draws on Scheffler’s (1995: 39) reference to a commonsense model of responsibility supported by “a widespread though largely implicit conception of human social relations as consisting primarily in small-scale interactions, with clearly demarcated lines of causation, among independent individual agents.” Writing in 1995, Scheffler explored how open this common sense model might be to future modification, and concluded—somewhat gloomily—doubting whether an “entirely nonrestrictive conception of responsibility could ever fully dislodge such notions” (46). Yet however strong its hold on our understandings of responsibility, that triad of family, community, and country, with its suggestion of concentric circles of connection that get weaker as they spread further away, is at odds with the current experience of social bonds. First, we can be connected without even feeling it: this is one of the points made by Pogge and Young. But even if we focus on more conscious interconnection, we can be linked by shared

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experience, location, interests, or ideas, and, within each of these, can be linked through face-to-face contact, direct and indirect communication, or merely by the sense of others who matter to us but whom we never expect to meet. The spatial bias of the concentric circles model encourages us to assume that bonds must weaken as they spread further away. It then becomes almost a matter of definition that attachments to people in other countries must prove less compelling than those who are closer to home. This is implausible, and not only because of obvious features of the contemporary world, like global remittances or transcontinental marriages that connect people more intimately to those who live many thousands of miles away than to neighbors next door. Quite apart from these examples, there is a disjuncture between emotional and geographical proximity, and we are not necessarily bound more closely to those with whom we enjoy face-to-face contact. It is sometimes said, as part of the critique of cosmopolitanism, that people are willing to support the redistributive measures associated with welfare states because they see these as redistributing, in some sense, among their “own” people, and that we cannot expect such a level of commitment beyond the national border.3 If the concentric circles model were correct, however, it would suggest not only a greater willingness to redistribute among conationals than across the globe. It would further suggest that people are most strongly committed, first to redistribution within the family, then to redistribution within their more immediate locality or community, and only after these among conationals. This may describe the way some people behave, but is certainly not universal. In societies where the family has narrowed down to a parent-child nucleus, for example, people do not normally feel obliged to support brothers or sisters who have fared less well in their careers, and are more willing to contribute through taxes to redistribution to unknown others than to transfer money to family members. When assessing priorities for public expenditure, moreover, we do not necessarily attach higher priority to the needs of those living in our immediate neighborhood than the needs of those living in towns far away. Again, some may, but that kind of localism is neither universal nor widely praised. Bonds matter, but they link us in diverse ways to differently constituted and located communities, and neither their intensity nor their moral significance can be reduced to a matter of proximity. On the concentric circles model, there is a necessary tension between cosmopolitanism and bonds of attachment: it becomes true, almost by definition, that bonds weaken as distances grow, and we are

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then forced to choose between recognizing the moral and political significance of bonds or disregarding them in pursuit of a detached cosmopolitanism: either bonds or the abstractions of global justice. Yet this is an unnecessarily stark opposition. I do not mean by this that the difficulties in motivating global obligations will disappear once we reject the concentric circles model (this would indeed be a case of pretending the problems away), but at least they become more clearly part of a general problem of motivating obligations. We are perhaps too willing to see in the widespread reluctance to share resources with people in distant lands a refutation of cosmopolitan fantasies. We should perhaps look more closely at the widespread reluctance to share resources with anyone before reaching this conclusion. The problems of cosmopolitan solidarity are real, but they are not so different, in my view, from the problems of national or local solidarity.

Inclusions as Simultaneous Exclusions The final issue I address is the suggestion that all inclusions are also exclusions, such that any claim about “human” rights, needs, or interests simultaneously embraces those regarded as falling within the category while erecting barriers against those left outside. Human, in this argument, is always an exclusionary notion. When we employ it as the basis for allocating rights or responsibilities, we necessarily give it content, for it is only by having some content that it can do its work. That content, however, will be both inclusionary and exclusionary. We might say that humans are the beings who can stand on two legs; or (following Marx’s distinction between the worst architect and best bee) that they are the ones who can first raise a structure in their imagination before erecting it in reality; or (following Martha Nussbaum’s (2000) highly specific list of the central human capabilities) that they are the ones who can form a conception of the good and engage in critical reflection about the planning of their lives. Each of these is a hostage to fortune, keeping out as well as including within. It is easy enough to demonstrate that “human” has operated in this exclusionary way. Lynn Hunt is generally an optimist about the potential of human rights, but even she stresses that “human” contains within it the exclusionary contrast with the non- or subhuman, and she draws attention to the many exclusions by gender, race, and religion that marked the first European formulations of the “rights of man.” But in her reading, the language of human rights pushes towards ever fewer ex-

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clusions, and (if I read her rightly) ultimately towards a conception of the human that knows no boundaries. Even at the time of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man provided the grounds for successful arguments in favor of extending rights to Protestants, Jews, and freed slaves, as well as unsuccessful arguments for extending them to women. For Hunt, the exclusions represent historical failures of imagination, but the language unleashed an unstoppable dynamic in the direction of a genuinely universal world. “The notion of the ‘rights of man,’ like revolution itself, opened up an unpredictable space for discussion, conflict and change. The promise of those rights can be denied, suppressed, or just remain unfulfilled, but it does not die” (Hunt 2007: 175). There are three main worries with this way of formulating of cosmopolitan principles. The first is the teleology: the suggestion of what Bonnie Honig (2006) has termed a “linear and progressive temporality” that may allow for the possibility of setbacks, but basically anticipates the promise of human rights spreading outwards to encompass all those initially excluded.4 Many, including myself, doubt that progressivist optimism. The second worry is that such formulations do not sufficiently recognize the transformations that occur when a previously exclusionary universal—like “the rights of man”—is extended to include new candidates. Indeed, “extended” is the wrong word, for it suggests that nothing changes in the content of the ideal, only in who gets included. That formulation offers us an already complete universal, perfectly formed but as yet imperfectly applied, and imagines the future as simply a process of including more and more people within its remit. Yet while struggles to include previously denied groups (slaves, women, homosexuals, and so on) typically deploy the language of the initial universal, they normally do so in ways that then change its meaning. Judith Butler (2000: 39) gives the example of calls for “lesbian and gay human rights” or “women’s human rights,” and the way these unexpected pairings of the universal (human) with the particular (gay, lesbian, women) challenge us to think differently about what is meant by “human.” In somewhat similar vein, Seyla Benhabib (2006: 160) describes “practices of democratic iteration which resignify and transform the claims to universality of French and German citizenship,” as when iconic symbols of national citizenship are refashioned and claimed by those previously deemed outside the nation. The mistake, according to these arguments, is to present cosmopolitan norms as some kind of originary or foundational “truth” that only needs better application. Both the first and second reservations are well taken, though neither looks entirely insurmountable, and it may be possible to reframe

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the understanding of cosmopolitanism, universalism, and human rights so as to accommodate them. The more daunting third claim is that every inclusion is simultaneously an exclusion, or, as Judith Butler (2009: 6) puts it, that the norms that enable us to recognize a life as a human life “operate to produce certain subjects as ‘recognizable’ persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize.” Claims about the mutual dependence of inclusion on exclusion are compelling: consider the European Union, which simultaneously includes all European citizens regardless of national borders while erecting still higher barriers against those left outside.5 More generally, the claim works as a permanent and important reminder that any content given to the category “human” will be inflected by social context, and that any claim about human rights or responsibilities must leave open the possibility of future challenges to conceptions of the human/nonhuman divide. But as already noted, it would be pretty extreme behavior to refuse to countenance any future revision, so just how important is this point? If, as Seyla Benhabib (2006: 162) puts it, it is “an ontological truism” that every universality is afflicted by a particularity that it must repress, “how does its repeated deployment really help?” Interestingly, those most associated with this criticism (Butler, for example, or Honig) do not employ it to dismiss universalism or cosmopolitanism out of hand, but rather to fashion alternative understandings of what these imply. And this, broadly, seems to be the outcome of my investigation: that there are good and bad versions of cosmopolitanism, just as there are good and bad versions of multiculturalism, and that deciding which version to pursue is more important than deciding between the “isms.” There are transcendent versions of cosmopolitanism that set themselves above local specificity and bodily existence; like their mirror image multiculturalisms that insist on the solidity and authority of “culture,” these are best avoided. There are almost inhumanly rational versions of cosmopolitanism that attach minimal significance to the bonds that give meaning to our lives; like the mirror image localisms and nationalisms that cannot credit a combination of affective significance and geographic distance, these are best avoided. There are historically ill-informed versions that fail to notice the exclusions that attended their much vaunted inclusions, or too readily dismiss these as past history, refusing to acknowledge any implications that remain for today. But just as one can use criticisms of multiculturalism to fashion a better version, so, too, one can build on criticisms of cosmopolitanism to develop more robust and defensible forms. The label, in the end, seems beside the point. Why resist any longer?

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Conclusion And yet I still feel some reluctance, which leads me to suspect that I have not articulated fully enough—to myself, let alone the reader—where my residual resistance to cosmopolitanism lies. Clearly, political reasons remain. In a Europe that, at the time of writing, is banning the public wearing of hijab, niqab, and burqa, and regards being a self-proclaimed multiculturalist almost as passé as being a self-proclaimed communist, there are still good reasons not to join the retreat from multiculturalism. To the extent that cosmopolitanism is perceived as the opposite of multiculturalism, there may then be good reasons not to declare oneself in the cosmopolitan camp. But these are contingent explanations. At the back of my mind are other reservations, and I have not entirely laid to rest the ghost that, for me, haunts cosmopolitanism. Perhaps, in the end, it is no more than that lurking trace of a hierarchy of traditional and modern, or lurking self-congratulation on having such wide sympathies and vision. At the end of the arguments, I am still not entirely convinced. I have long been a skeptical multiculturalist. I remain a reluctant cosmopolitan.

Anne Phillips is the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Sciences at the London School of Economics. She is a leading feminist theorist, best known for her work on representation, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism. Her recent publications include The Politics of the Human (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which further develops some of the ideas in this essay, and Our Bodies, Whose Property? (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Notes 1. In earlier versions, the problem for the passerby was that he might get his clothes muddy. In the most recent version, Singer pits the life of the child against an expensive pair of shoes (Singer 1972, 2009). 2. Caney (2005) makes this distinction. He favors the humanity-centered account. 3. David Miller has, on occasion, argued this, but the distinction he now makes between the (redistributive) obligations of social justice and the (poverty alleviating) obligations of global justice follows a different route. See Miller 2007. 4. Honig (2006: 111) attributes this view (unfairly, in my reading) to Benhabib; she would be on stronger ground in attributing it to Hunt. 5. As in Honig’s (2006) critique of Benhabib.

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References Abu-Lughod, L. 1991. “Writing Against Culture.” In R.G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Ackerman, B. 1994. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism.” Ethics 104(3): 516–35. Althusser, L. 1969. For Marx. London: Penguin Press. Appiah, K.A. 1997. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Critical Inquiry 23(3): 617–39. ———. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin. Archibugi, D. 2005. “The Language of Democracy: Vernacular or Esperanto? A Comparison Between the Multiculturalist and Cosmopolitan Perspectives.” Political Studies 53(3): 537–55. Benhabib, S. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Another Cosmopolitanism. New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, J. 2000. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” In J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. Zizek (eds.), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Caney, S. 2005. Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dobson, A. 2006. “Thick Cosmopolitanism.” Political Studies 54(1): 165–84. Gilroy, P. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Godwin, W. (1793) 1985. Political Justice. London: Penguin Books. Honig, B. 2006. “Another Cosmopolitanism? Law and Politics in the New Europe.” In S. Benhabib (ed.), Another Cosmopolitanism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunt, L. 2007. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Kruks, S. 2001. Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kymlicka, W. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mehta, P.B. 2000. “Cosmopolitanism and the Circle of Reason.” Political Theory 28(5): 619–39. Miller, D. 2007. National Responsibility and Global Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Modood, T. 2007. Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. Cambridge: Polity Press. Moyn, S. 2007. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” The Nation, 16 April. Nussbaum, M.C. 1996. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” In J. Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Martha C Nussbaum with Respondents. Boston: Beacon Press.

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———. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Okin, S.M. 1999. “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” in J. Cohen, M. Howard, and M.C. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pateman, C. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1989. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Phillips, A. 1993. Democracy and Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2007. Multiculturalism without Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2010. Gender and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pogge, T. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2004. “‘Assisting’ the Global Poor.” In D.K. Chatterjee (ed.), The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Puwar, N. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic. Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” In H. Shute and S.L. Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights. New York: Basic Books. Sahgal, G. and Yuval-Davis, N. (eds.). 1993. Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain. London: Virago Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1946. Anti-Semite and Jew. Paris Editions Paul Morihien. Scheffler, S. 1995. “Individual Responsibility in a Global Age.” Social Philosophy and Policy. 12(1): 219–36. Reprinted in Boundaries and Allegiances. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001: 32–46. Singer, P. 1972. “Famine, Affluence and Morality.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(3): 229–43. ———. 2009. The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. New York: Random House. Sypnowich, C. 2005 “Cosmopolitans, Cosmopolitanism and Human Flourishing.” In G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Waldron, J. 1992. “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative.” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25(3): 751–93. Young, I.M. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination and Responsibility. Cambridge: Polity Press Zerilli, L.M.G. 2009. “Towards a Feminist Theory of Judgment.” Signs 34(2): 295–317.

PART III

Towards a Reconceptualization of Liberalism

CHAPTER 9

Liberal Autonomy and Minority Accommodation A New Approach Geoffrey Brahm Levey

Introduction For many liberals, the value of individual autonomy is the foundation of liberal political morality; it underwrites individuals’ rights and liberties and liberal notions of justice, marks the limits of liberal toleration, and sets the terms on which a liberal society can also be a multicultural society (e.g., Raz 1986; Kymlicka 1989, 1995; Rawls 1993; Tamir 1993; Habermas 1994). Yet, for many multiculturalists, the liberal value of individual autonomy is an obstacle to building a multicultural democracy; it is seen as too sectarian, demanding, or intolerant a value on which to base political morality for a culturally diverse society (e.g., Margalit and Halbertal 1994; Parekh 2000; Galston 2002; Kukathas 2003; Modood 2007). In this chapter, I want to argue that autonomy is a much more open, democratic, and accommodating value than both these liberal and multiculturalist accounts suggest. Of course, one might reasonably ask why persevere with liberal autonomy at all. As the multiculturalism literature now abundantly attests, there are, after all, other theoretical and even liberal approaches available that promise to be far more accommodating of cultural difference than any autonomy-based approach is likely to be. If autonomy commands attention, it is because of its pervasive place as a governing value in liberal democracies today. Part of the new thinking associated with the Enlightenment, autonomy’s influence as a public value largely emerged in the twentieth century. That influence has only continued to grow. While never reaching the ubiquity prescribed by so-called “comprehensive liberals,” the valorization of autonomy has increasingly come to inform—or be reflected in—the law, public policy, and even in-

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terpersonal relations in liberal democracies (Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Indeed, it is fair to say that the rise of autonomy as a governing value constitutes something of a world historical transformation. But this is also why it is important to scrutinize what is claimed in the name of respecting autonomy. As we will see, though often deployed as a blunt instrument and argument-stopper, the liberal value of autonomy in fact offers a platform for democratic contestation and intercultural dialogue about the permissible limits of liberal toleration. My point of departure, then, is that autonomy also speaks to the interests of cultural minorities negotiating life today in liberal societies, and that they would do well also to speak the language of autonomy. I will begin by canvassing the concept of autonomy relevant to this discussion. Autonomy is a notoriously slippery concept to pin down, so it is essential to clarify the dimensions of the concept that are implicitly appealed to in law and public policy. I will suggest a framework for operationalizing autonomy as a multidimensional political value that allows mainstream and minority practices to be assessed and compared on their “autonomy credentials.” Thereafter, I will consider, in turn, three areas where the value of autonomy lends itself to considerable interpretive and practical latitude. The first concerns the applicability of autonomy; that is, whether specific practices can be said to satisfy or violate the dimensions of autonomy. The second area involves the issue of prioritization. This aspect occurs implicitly inasmuch as the dimensions of autonomy have differential political force in liberal practice, and arises circumstantially where cases pit the autonomy of different parties against each other or where other compelling public interests are at stake. In each case, judgments need to be made regarding how best to honor the value of autonomy in the circumstances. The final substantive part argues that judgments concerning the applicability and prioritization of the dimensions of autonomy in relation to minority cultural practices should be informed by how a society treats mainstream practices and cases. So comparability is a third area where the principle of autonomy invites deliberation and argument by contending parties. Finally, I will conclude by considering the objection that this approach to the accommodation of cultural diversity still unduly privileges liberal values.

Individual Autonomy in Liberal Politics Literally meaning self-legislation or self-government, liberal autonomy has been variously defined. While most agree that the autonomous in-

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dividual is one who is able to plan and chart her own course through life, liberal conceptions of autonomy divide over what such a character ideal precisely involves.1 The standard or “proceduralist” account sees autonomy as mainly consisting in an intrapersonal posture or psychology involving the subjection of one’s desires and preferences to rational reflection or critical scrutiny (Frankfurt 1988). Many in this camp also insist that for such rational or reflective preferences to be authentic or legitimate they must be “procedurally independent,” which is to say, developed or exercised in conditions that serve rather than subvert the individual’s ability to assess their preferences (Dworkin 1988; Meyers 1989; Friedman 2002; Christman 2009). In contrast so-called “substantivist” accounts understand autonomy as also involving certain kinds of relationships or options. Among these are relations of equality, nuturance, love, or recognition (e.g., Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000; Anderson and Honneth 2005; Oshana 2006), options that are independently judged to be worthy or good (Raz 1986), and, more extremely, preferences that are unburdened by even self-imposed obligations (Wolff 1970). Whereas proceduralists tend to focus on how individuals have made their choices, substantivists tend to focus on individuals’ web of social relationships or what they have chosen in determining whether or not they are autonomous.2 Liberal practice evidences aspects of both the proceduralist and substantivist accounts of autonomy. For example, in the manner of proceduralism, liberal democracies today are generally loath to legislate morality, while it is a common refrain of many feminist and other critics of liberalism that it fails to notice, much less treat, forms of domination that structure social relations. And like substantivism, liberal jurisdictions typically set limits on what one can do with one’s body and on the alienation of one’s autonomy. Since our present interest is in how autonomy is inscribed in liberal institutions, we need not choose between these two philosophical approaches to autonomy. Of course, theorizing autonomy and clarifying its normative implications are important not least because they enable the critical assessment of institutions and practices. However, here our concern is what it would be for minority practices to be judged according to how autonomy is institutionalized and conventionally honored in liberal societies. For this purpose, what is needed is not a preferred theory or normative ideal of autonomy but rather an operationalization of the value of autonomy as it applies in liberal practice. I propose a five-dimensional taxonomy for thinking about the operation of autonomy in practice: critical reflection, two kinds or levels of

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procedural independence, reciprocity, and inalienability. In one or another guise, these dimensions recur both in philosophical discussions of autonomy and in specific domains such as medical ethics, education, and a host of public policy debates. Again, it is important to stress that these dimensions do not, in themselves, constitute a theory of autonomy or the autonomous person; rather, they are aspects of the complex idea of autonomy that particular theories variously emphasize and interpret. Let me briefly elaborate on each of the dimensions. Critical reflection and procedural independence refer to aspects of individual agency. Part of the complexity of the idea of autonomy is revealed by the fact that mere volition or consent does not rate very highly; it assumes importance only in conjunction with some deeper properties. One of these properties is critical reflection. While there are many and varied accounts of such reflection in the literature on autonomy, the key idea, for present purposes, is that the reasons that motivate your actions are ones that you accept, in some sense, after consideration. Thus, reaching for a third slice of chocolate cake may be completely voluntary, but it does not count as autonomous action unless it has, in the first instance, the imprimatur of one’s reflective self. And on some accounts at least, this condition is satisfied simply by questioning one’s first-order preferences—in this case, by asking do I really need this dose of refined sugar? (e.g., Dworkin 1988: 15). Critical reflection is deemed to check acting impulsively, capriciously, or on preferences driven by subverting forces internal to the individual such as obsessions and compulsions. Procedural independence supplies an additional condition for meaningful consent. This is the idea that an individual’s critical reflections are not being manipulated by corrupting influences external to the individual, and thus attention is focused on the background conditions under which one has arrived at one’s values, preferences, and understandings (Dworkin 1988; Christman 2009). It is helpful here to distinguish between direct and indirect kinds of procedural independence. Direct procedural independence occurs where there is no coercion of the will (as Locke might say), that is, where a person’s reflective preferences are not subject to threats, drug inducement, or hypnotic suggestion, and the like. Indirect procedural independence occurs where a person’s reflective preferences are not subverted by influences acting through their will, that is, subtler forms of manipulation leading individuals to endorse certain preferences, such as inadequate information or misinformation, subliminal advertising, emotional pressure, and bribes. Sorting out which social influences are legitimate—all of us, after all,

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have been socialized into various normative and behavioral patterns— and which compromise autonomous agency is naturally a difficult and controversial enterprise. At the same time, it also seems clear some such distinction needs to be made since the examples supporting this concern about indirect procedural independence are both obvious and ubiquitous. For example, the terminally ill patient who wishes to end his life because he feels he is a burden on his family and the signatory to a contract who has been misinformed about what it means may be willing and self-reflective agents, and yet we rightly worry that their decisions may have been unduly affected by subversive influences on them. The last two dimensions in the taxonomy—reciprocity and inalienability—refer to important limits of autonomy. These are often taken to be constraints on autonomy; however, insofar as they follow from the logic of the value itself and are internal to it, they properly express, rather than abridge, autonomy (Dagger 1997: 380). Such limits may be distinguished from those imposed by competing interests and values, such as equality, security, and administrative convenience. What I am calling “reciprocity” turns on the fact that most of us live in communities and not as isolated individuals. Our autonomy as individuals, then, must respect the like autonomy of others. Otherwise, as Rawls (1971: 519) puts it, a notion of autonomy as simply meaning unfettered choice would “lead to a mere collision of self-righteous wills [and an] idiosyncratic system.” This Rawlsian point about reciprocity highlights one way in which autonomy as a character ideal intersects with moral autonomy in the Kantian sense of honoring the categorical imperative of “universalizability” (though not in Kant’s more exacting sense of moral autonomy; see Gaus 2005). Ideally, individuals will take into account their social reality in forming their goals and acting on their preferences, but, realistically, laws and penalties will be devised to ensure that they do so (and penalize them when they don’t). The reciprocity dimension represents the intersection of the values of autonomy and equality: individuals are equally entitled to have their autonomy respected. Notwithstanding this intersection, the two values can and often do clash in other respects. For example, the French ban on the wearing of conspicuous religious signs at state schools was designed to respect the equality of citizens by prohibiting all such religious symbols from the school ground, but, in doing so, it hobbles the autonomy of citizens to dress in accord with their religious identity. Inalienability captures the idea that autonomy ought not to be irrevocably or seriously surrendered. It is distinct from, and not reducible to, the dimensions of critical reflection and procedural independence,

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since a person’s actions and situation may satisfy these dimensions and yet amount to the alienation of their autonomy. The classic statement of the point is J.S. Mill’s (1959: 125): “by selling himself for a slave, [a man] abdicates his liberty; he forgoes any future use of it beyond this single act. . . . It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom.” What is alienated is an individual’s future autonomous agency, her capacity to assess, pursue, and revise her ends. Of course, there are many kinds of actions that are, in some sense, self-limiting and irreversible, which do not warrant state prohibition, from spending years training for a particular occupation for which one is ill suited to suntanning and risking skin damage and cancer. However, there are also what some have called “self-abrogative” choices that are deemed to seriously impair one’s future autonomy and to justify state prohibition, such as debt bondage or the gratuitous removal of one’s limbs and organs.3 As suggested above, proceduralist and substantivist accounts of autonomy often divide over the importance of the inalienability dimension. For example, Dworkin (1988: 129), a proceduralist, contends that an individual who freely decides to sell himself into slavery is making an autonomous choice; to deny him that choice would be to embrace a form of “hard” paternalism that flouts his autonomy. Many substantivists disagree, arguing that the very condition of slavery is a violation of individual autonomy; even if the slave master is benevolent, it entails a relation of subservience. The individual’s choice should not be heeded precisely out of respect for her autonomy. Wherever one stands in regards to this debate, two points are, I think, worth making. First, arguably even proceduralists should find self-imposed slavery (and like cases) problematic, since the very conditions of autonomy that proceduralists ostensibly value in making a decision to become a slave—critical reflection and direct and indirect procedural independence—are either absent or precarious once one is a slave. These deficits may impinge on the initial choice to have become a slave, denying the individual the agency to revise that choice, but they also seriously compromise the individual’s agency in every other respect as well. Slaves are not their own persons. Second, as a matter of liberal practice, the inalienability of autonomy finds considerable protection in international protocols and state legislation. The most obvious cases are precisely the protocols and laws prohibiting slavery, servitude, debt bondage, and the like, even where these are consensual.4 Other examples include the prohibition on euthanasia (death being the most decisive cessation of an individual’s future autonomy), the prohibition on selling one’s own limbs and organs, and the blanket bans

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on female genital cutting, even for adult women in hygienic conditions. In short, inalienability needs also to be reckoned with in grappling with autonomy as a governing liberal value. Importantly, the five aforementioned dimensions of autonomy do not carry the same political implications vis-à-vis state scrutiny. Liberal states cannot, for example, compel their citizens to make critically reflective or even completely procedurally independent choices (Wall 2003: 380). Rather, they equip their citizens for autonomous agency by inculcating the critical skills necessary to process information and assess options (via a general education), protect the free flow of information (a free press, etc.), and offer a range of meaningful options (a diverse and open society). The expectation is that citizens will then lead autonomous lives. Indirect procedural independence is valorized and protected in the sense that attempts to secure people’s consent through deception— such as false advertising—are generally unlawful. However, liberal states are usually reluctant to get involved where people are simply uncritically accepting of religious, cultural, or other traditions, or allow themselves to be misled, such as believing in conspiracy theories or joining certain religious sects. That reluctance dissipates where a serious risk to a person’s future autonomy or wellbeing and security are involved. Thus, for example, the ubiquitous informed consent protocols we are now required to sign before undergoing a medical operation or taking out a bank loan to buy a property, in which we must certify that we fully understand and accept the implications of the proposed action. Plainly, the concern is not the proposed action itself but the process of contemplation behind it, given the ramifications. Indeed, even the refusal of a life-saving medical intervention, such as a blood transfusion, is commonly permitted where the informed consent of the individual concerned is clear (e.g., see Re “T.” 1992). In contrast, direct procedural independence, reciprocity, and inalienability tend to command state protection as a matter of course. Coercive or nonconsensual action is unlawful almost across the board, from involuntary servitude to marriage and sexual relations. Reciprocity is central both to our moral and legal codes; no one is entitled to exercise a liberty that entails denying a like liberty of others. And inalienability, as noted earlier, sees states step in where self-abrogative choices—such as debt bondage, euthanasia, female genital cutting, and organ trade—are involved. Yet, because inalienability is self-regarding rather than other-regarding and often conflicts with the agency dimensions of autonomy, it tends to incite controversy in a way that the di-

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rect procedural independence and reciprocity conditions do not. There also is debate over the scope of inalienability. As noted above, some substantivist accounts, for example, extend its compass beyond directly alienating one’s future autonomy or capacities to include also entering into relations of inequality or otherwise forfeiting the kinds of relations deemed to be essential for autonomy to flourish. Enough has been said, I hope, to indicate the multidimensionality and complexity of the value of liberal autonomy. This complexity is implicit and often explicit in how we routinely think about and debate everyday issues of individual freedom and their regulation, as some of the examples above illustrate. For the remainder of this essay, I want to address how the complexity of autonomy relates to, and helps us assess, minority cultural practices and claims.

Applicability Much of the early literature defending forms of cultural recognition and rights on the principle of liberal autonomy did so only two or three dimensionally, defining autonomy as “rational revisability” or a “capacity to choose” with, perhaps, an implicit reciprocity, but with little attention being given to matters of procedural independence and inalienability. On this basis, a determinate set of cultural rights—such as exemptions, public subsidies, and self-government or cultural self-determination— was generally prescribed (e.g., Kymlicka 1989, 1995; Tamir 1993). In recent years, the discussion of autonomy and multiculturalism has become pleasingly more sophisticated (e.g., Reich 2002; Bader 2007; Galeotti 2007; Phillips 2007). I want to push this sophistication a bit further and more systematically. In the first place, the taxonomy of autonomy outlined above helps locate what precisely is and is not problematic about controversial practices. Table 9.1 depicts how two different types of cultural practice that often hit the headlines—marriage practices and dress codes—arguably relate to the outlined dimensions of autonomy. As with coercive marriages, sometimes a practice is overwhelmingly objectionable: it violates virtually every dimension of autonomy. More often, however, the concern centers on particular dimensions. In arranged marriages, for example, the main concern relates to the status of the acquiescence of the couple-to-be, which is to say, with whether their consent reflects their own, procedurally independent preferences. Getting at the truth of the matter in these respects is, of course, sometimes extremely difficult.

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Table 9.1 Relation of Some Minority Cultural Practices to Autonomy: Applicability

Marriage: Coercive Arranged Dress: Turban (no helmet)

Hijab

Critical Reflection

Indirect Procedural Independence

Direct Procedural Independence

X ?

? ?

X 

X 

X ?







? (risk)

?

?

?

? (risk to other social values) 

Reciprocity Inalienability

? (if domination)

Legend:  – satisfies dimension; ? – invites questions; X – violates dimension

The dress code cases serve to illustrate another point: often the particular dimensions of autonomy called into question will vary within the same category of case. In many places, for example, male Sikhs wearing the turban have sought exemption from laws requiring the wearing of protection helmets while riding motorcycles or on construction sites. In a few jurisdictions, such as Britain, they have been granted exemption (Poulter 1986: 283); in many places, however, they have not.5 In this case, there is rarely, if any, question about the reflective preferences or procedural independence of Sikhs in wearing turbans. Rather, the problem relates both to “inalienability” and to social values and interests beyond autonomy. To wit, the absence of a safety helmet in a motorcycle or construction site accident is more likely to result in death or serious injury (and thus imperil one’s future autonomy or capacities) and to impose increased burdens on the emergency services and/or health care systems.6 That these are risks associated with a helmet exemption rather than certitude, and that those exempted can pay for higher insurance coverage, helps explain why some states have been willing to entertain the exemption. The hijab case is different. It occasions much public controversy in many democracies, and yet, unlike the Sikh case, there is no question here of public health, the public purse, or harms to self. Rather, the debate—insofar as it relates to individual autonomy rather than being simply a reaction against cultural difference (which, undoubtedly, it also commonly is) or, in France, a reflection of a peculiar Republicanism—

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swirls around three concerns: first, that Muslim girls are being forced to wear it (direct procedural independence); second, that girls or women who say they want to wear the hijab have simply internalized the restrictive norms of their family, community, or religion (critical reflection/ indirect procedural independence); and third, that the practice in itself constitutes or symbolizes the subordination of women (inalienability). That the hijab occasions such a range of concerns—represented by the four question marks in Table 9.1—certainly helps explain its controversy (along with, of course, its mere difference from Western norms and those factors peculiar to the French case). Yet, as the case also well illustrates, identifying which, if any, aspects of autonomy a particular practice impinges on is only a first step. Each of the three mentioned concerns over the hijab at most invites questions; they do not clearly or self-evidently indicate the violation of autonomy. In short, where there is controversy over a given cultural practice, there is need to specify both how exactly the practice impinges on autonomy, if at all, and need for particular concerns to be substantiated. The burden of proof falls, moreover, squarely on those alleging that a particular practice violates liberal autonomy.

Priority Questions of applicability and evidence are only a part of the picture, however. There also are matters of emphasis and prioritization that enter judgments concerning the dimensions of autonomy. In the first place, the differential political force of the dimensions of autonomy noted previously has implications for thinking about minority cultural practices, as indicated in Table 9.2. For example, even if Muslim girls or women who wear the hijab do so by dint of having internalized the restrictive norms of their family or religious community, such deficits in critical reflection-cum-indirect procedural independence would not normally justify state intervention. In contrast, intervention would likely be warranted where Muslim women, if not girls, are coerced into wearing the hijab. The reality, however, is that the status of the decision by Muslim girls and women to wear the hijab varies widely across individual cases and thus calls for a targeted approach rather than a blanket policy (Bowen 2007: ch. 4; Phillips 2007: 114–18). This leaves the charge that the hijab as a social practice itself constitutes or symbolizes the subordination of women. The charge is blunted by a number of considerations. As a piece of clothing, the hijab does not alienate a person’s

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Table 9.2 Relation of Some Minority Cultural Practices to Autonomy: Priority Indirect Direct Critical Procedural Procedural Reflection Independence Independence Reciprocity Inalienability

Dress: Hijab Burqa before Burqa now Kirpan Bodily Integrity: Infant male at time Circumcision later life

{?} {?}  

{?} {?}  

? ?  

  X (alleged) ?

{?} {?}  

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

X

X

X

X

 (others’ health)

 (own health)

Legend:  – satisfies dimension; ? – invites questions; X – violates dimension; { } – insufficient for state intervention; N/A – not applicable;   – beneficial side effect

autonomy or imperil their health or wellbeing, and so does not impinge on the narrow conception of inalienablity. Even on a broad conception of inalienability that includes relations of inequality, the claim that the hijab constitutes or symbolizes domination faces the testimony of a great many Muslim girls and women, from all social and educational backgrounds, who insist that, for them, it does not. Finally, even if the hijab were to be shown to be a symbol of domination, it remains that, insofar as women consent to wearing it, such relations of inequality do not generally command intervention by the liberal state. While this last point may seem to be descriptive rather than normatively compelling, it gestures towards the need for comparability and fairness in how minority and mainstream cases are treated, as I discuss in the next section. Other cases highlight the force of reciprocity, such as the current controversy surrounding the burqa (or niqab) in some western countries. It goes without saying that the same public concerns expressed about girls and women who wear the hijab—regarding critical reflection, direct and indirect procedural independence, and inalienability— apply with at least as much force to the burqa. However, what has happened in recent years is that the public objection has shifted from the old concerns about agency and inalienability to the burqa’s alleged impact on social relations and reciprocity in a democracy. Nor are such concerns limited to matters of security, as, for example, when entering banks or having identity card photographs taken. Rather, the burqa is

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now presented as a general and debilitating attack on the autonomy of others. As former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw complained, it was essential to have “face-to-face” conversations with his constituents, where one could “see what the other person means, and not just hear what they say” (“Straw’s veil comments spark anger” 2006). Or, as the veteran French feminist and political campaigner, Elizabeth Badinter, put it, “[s]he who hides her face is in a position superior to mine—she sees me but she refuses to reciprocate” (“Behind France’s Islamic Veil” 2010). The argument that the burqa is an affront to the autonomy of those not wearing it trades on the decisive political implications of the reciprocity dimension. Those defending the liberty of women to wear the burqa have yet to respond to this shift in the public debate over the practice (an exception is Nussbaum 2010). The differential political force of the dimensions of autonomy is not the only way in which prioritization enters the assessment of cultural practices in relation to this value. Cases that present a clash between the autonomy of two or more parties also call for prioritization or balancing. An example is the kirpan, the ceremonial knife or dagger that Sikhs are enjoined to wear by their faith. Knives in public places and in schoolyards tend to unnerve many people and affect their sense of security, if not their actual security. Accordingly, the carrying of knives in public places is generally not permitted in many jurisdictions. Yet, wearing the kirpan also allows many Sikhs to go out and function in public where otherwise they would be constrained. So the case seems to pit the autonomy of different parties against each other. It could be resolved by insisting that Sikhs learn to live without this tradition (as in France and Denmark) or that others get used to the kirpan (as in the USA, Canada, and Australia). In Britain, where a kirpan is not unlawful if worn by a baptized Sikh, the matter has been devolved to schools and other individual governing bodies to decide policy, with some recommending compromises such as welding the knife to its sheath (Tanega 2010). Just which solution optimizes respect for autonomy in this case is far from clear. However, efforts to accommodate the Sikh tradition, with or without conditions, at least involve an implicit judgment about how best to make multicultural democracies work. And that ambition, too, is a setting of priorities. Finally, prioritization also arises where other, albeit related, factors are deemed to override the apparent dicta of autonomy. Ritual infant male circumcision is an especially interesting case here because its status appears inherently ambiguous from an autonomy perspective. On the one hand, infants obviously are not critically reflective or procedur-

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ally independent agents. There is no question of them consenting (as there is for young boys and girls), let alone deliberating on the matter. Indeed, the role of a parent or guardian is to make decisions on behalf and in the best interests of one’s children. On the other hand, several aspects of neonatal male circumcision are problematic and raise the question whether the practice should be considered in the child’s best interest (see Table 9.2). For a start, it involves the removal of bodily tissue for no therapeutic reason. It thus violates bodily integrity. Moreover, there is now some evidence suggesting that circumcision decreases the sensitivity of the glans and thus sexual pleasure (see the discussion in Johnson 2010: 184–88). Though some men circumcised as infants manage to restore their foreskins through weights and tape, in general, the operation is irrevocable. So a decision is being made that alters the bodies of some people for no medical reason, which alienates, in some sense, their autonomy in relation to their own bodies. The question of consent is also implicated in that circumcised men’s solidarity and protest groups now abound. As one medical practitioner and anticircumcision campaigner put it, “many men feel emotionally and physically scarred by the procedure. They feel betrayed by their parents. . . . We don’t believe parents have a right to alter children’s normal genitalia” (Dr. George Williams, quoted in Sweet 1996). In its controversial decision of 26 June 2012, a Cologne regional court reached a similar conclusion, ruling that circumcisions performed on boys for religious reasons at their parents’ request breached Germany’s protection of bodily integrity and autonomy (Landesgericht Köln 2012). And yet for all its controversial aspects, routine infant male circumcision is widely sanctioned in liberal democracies. In some places, such as Australia and the Netherlands, it even enjoys state subsidization through medical benefits schemes. There are doubtless a number of cultural, social, and political factors that help to explain why this particular practice continues to find favor in liberal democracies (Levey 2013). But from an autonomy perspective, the key factor seems to be its reputed health benefits. These benefits include reducing the risk of urinary tract infection, enhanced hygiene and the elimination of infections under the foreskin, elimination of the risk of penile cancer in later life, a lower incidence of cervical cancer among women whose partners are circumcised, and a lower risk of sexually transmitted diseases (Haberfield 1997: 379–80). The fortunes of neonatal male circumcision wax and wane according to the latest medical research. The 1980s witnessed increasing reports of local infection, bleeding, and damage to the penis in a botched operation (Richards 1996).

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Professional medical bodies responded to these and ethical concerns by advising increased caution. The American Academy of Pediatrics (1999), for example, issued a nuanced statement noting that the reported health benefits are “not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision,” and concluded that the decision was one best left to the parents to decide in the best interests of the child. More recently, dramatic benefits of neonatal circumcision in limiting the transmission of AIDS have been reported. As Daniel Halperin, an H.I.V. specialist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development, put it, “I have no doubt that as word of this gets around, millions of African men will want to get circumcised, and that will save many lives” (McNeil 2006). Furthermore, a comprehensive study has found that the risk from botched operations is extremely low (Weiss et al. 2010). Were it not for an extensive scientific literature supporting the health benefits of neonatal male circumcision, it is doubtful it would still be lawful. In saying that the health benefits are insufficient to recommend the procedure, the American Academy of Pediatrics was also saying the health benefits were key in their not recommending against it. It was appropriate to refer the matter for parental decision where “there are potential benefits and risks” involved (AAP 1999: 691). If there were only risks, or neither risks nor benefits, then presumably it would be hard to defend the practice in light of its ethical status. Though it is problematic in that it violates bodily integrity and circumscribes the options of (some) men in later life, it continues to be judged acceptable in virtue of its associated health dividends. The variation and shifts in what is publicly emphasized in relation to the autonomy complex may be viewed negatively, as arbitrary, hypocritical, or expedient. But to view matters this way is, I think, a mistake. Liberal autonomy is little different in its dynamic respect from any other “universal” political value, or indeed, from many, if not most, religious and cultural values. Most values are subject to differing emphases and interpretations across circumstances, place, and time. What would be alarming is if the value of autonomy were to be two-dimensional, static, and inflexible, which is often how it is understood and applied in multicultural debates. Even where there is agreement on autonomy as the relevant decision principle, its status as a political value means that, in practice, it is less demanding than the ideal of personal autonomy, particularly in relation to questions of critical reflection, indirect procedural independence, and expansive accounts of inalienability. At the same time, the fact that autonomy is a complex, multidimensional value and the circumstantial need to consider it alongside other interests mean

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that there is always need for argument, judgment, and prioritization in delineating its normative political import in specific cases.

Comparability The variability in autonomy’s practical political import is, as I have just argued, to be expected. However, where autonomy is differentially applied to like cases in the same context, there is a prima facie problem. It is called discrimination. Prevailing understandings of ostensibly “universal” values, such as autonomy, are often culturally inflected. To dominant cultural majorities, freedom just appears to be how they have conventionally lived, dressed, and played. While such cultural blinkers, too, are to be expected, they are also to be guarded against. By the same token, even where the legal treatment of a practice is determined to be sound, scrutinizing minority and majority cases against the desiderata of autonomy can increase confidence in, and the acceptance of, the law. A few cases will serve to illustrate these points, as summarized in Table 9.3. Measure for measure across the dimensions of autonomy, the wearing of high heels is at least as problematic as the wearing of the hijab. The critical reflection and procedural independence involved in girls’ decisions to wear high heels are no more assured than they are in their decision to wear the hijab. While some question whether Muslim girls (and women) wearing the hijab do so even voluntarily, the prolonged wearing of high heels carries the more certain and dubious distinction of jeopardizing the posture and health of the wearer. Such health repercussions are likely to be too limited to impair an individual’s autonomy as such (though harms to health alone might be judged to provide sufficient warrant for certain kinds of state intervention). Still, if infant male circumcision is to trump autonomy concerns in virtue of its health benefits, what is to be said for focusing on some girls’ headwear instead of other girls’ footwear? Turning to matters of bodily integrity, many people argue that the law should treat male and female circumcision alike (e.g., Johnson 2010). To my knowledge, there is no known health benefit associated with any of the practices falling under the rubric of female circumcision, let alone the range of beneficial findings for infant male circumcision, as noted above. As Galeotti (2007) points out, this still leaves unanswered why even symbolic female circumcision, involving a nick to the skin and the slightest drawing of blood, is typically banned along with the most

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Table 9.3 Relation of Some Minority and Mainstream Cases to Autonomy: Comparability Indirect Direct Critical Procedural Procedural Reflection Independence Independence Reciprocity Inalienability

Dress: Hijab (worst case) High heels (girls)

{?}

{?}

?



{?}

{?}

{?}





 (but potential harms to heath)









X

Symbolic female circumcision (nick)

{?}

{?}





{?} (if domination)

Cosmetic surgery/ breast implants









{?}

Sex change









X (claim)  (actual)

Sterilization









X

Bodily Integrity: FGM (adult woman, medical conditions)

Legend:  – satisfies dimension; ? – invites questions; X – violates dimension; { } – insufficient for state intervention

severe forms of female circumcision, such as clitoridectomy and infibulation. Executed hygienically, the nick carries no health risks and does not alter the body in any way, unlike male circumcision. While some object to the practice for nevertheless symbolizing the domination of women, such symbolism is contested by the women seeking it and, in any case, relations of domination alone are not generally deemed sufficient warrant for state prohibition; consider the slavish housewife who insists she wants to wash, clean, cook and otherwise devote herself entirely to her husband and children. So banning symbolic female circumcision seems plainly anomalous and discriminatory, especially where, as Galeotti observes, it is a procedure that has been developed and requested as a way of honoring cultural norms that avoids the main

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objections presented by the traditional practice. Yet efforts by medical professionals in Italy, the United States, and Australia to accommodate the practice of symbolic female circumcision have been met by public outrage (see Galeotti 2007: 91–93; Ali 2010; Murphy and Sikora 2010). So far I have compared forms of circumcision with each other. It is also important to compare these with “mainstream” practices. Many people, for instance, point to “our” easy acceptance of cosmetic surgery and breast implants and ask why female circumcision should not be an option available to adult women when practiced in medicalized conditions. Putting aside that female circumcision typically is exercised on girls, it is certainly true that in none of these cases is the procedure medically indicated. And the argument that in female circumcision the body is damaged, whereas in cosmetic surgery it is enhanced, should be considered alongside the complications, limited longevity, and dubious results of much implant and cosmetic surgery. Yet the case against even medicalized clitoridectomy and infibulation seems compelling. Clitoridectomy or Pharaonic excision impairs a woman’s sexual experience; it is the equivalent of removing the entire penis rather than merely the foreskin. Infibulation involves partially sealing the vagina by stitching the labia majora together, leaving an opening large enough only for the release of menstrual blood. Both practices irreparably harm a woman’s sexual life and reproductive capacity, and cause a range of gynecological complications. Unlike, say, the increasingly common (and lawful) practice in Western democracies of vaginoplasty or female genital cosmetic surgery, clitoridectomy and infibulation impair and are designed to control female sexuality. Thus, imagining the practice as medicalized and as taking place among educated, fully informed, adult women members of minorities in liberal societies would likely rob it of its traditional rationale. It would beg the question of what possible motivation such women would have in freely choosing the operation. This case against female genital cutting is a substantivist argument captured by my dimension of inalienability. But can it be sustained in light of yet other practices, such as sex changes, that liberal societies now allow? Sex changes also involve wholesale damage to the reproductive organs and can also result in chronic discomfort. Like me, Galeotti thinks that female genital cutting is contrary to liberal autonomy in virtue of the nature of the practice itself. She believes, however, that female genital cutting can be distinguished from sex changes on the grounds that the former is likely to be the product of communal and peer pressure, whereas the latter is typically born of a lone individual grappling with a wrenching inner conflict. The decision to change one’s

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sex is, then, she argues, far more likely to be the product of autonomous choice (Galeotti 2007: 103–4). But this is a curious argument, as her initial substantivist objection based on the practice switches to a proceduralist objection having to do with the independence of the decision-making. It would commit her to allowing genital cutting for women who could demonstrate that their decision was an independent one, perhaps contrary to the wishes of their family and peers. The better argument, I think, is to note that while a sex change involves reassigning an individual’s sex organs, it aims, in a very real sense, to free the sexual identity of that individual. It neither harms nor aims to control female sexuality, as do clitoridectomy and infibulation. The two cases can thus be distinguished on substantivist grounds alone, and the initial reasoning for disallowing genital cutting is preserved. It is less clear, however, that these grounds sufficiently distinguish female genital cutting from permanent forms of sterilization, such as hysterectomies and castration. Unlike infibulation and clitoridectomy, the total and irrevocable relinquishment of reproductive capacity is the intended and actual outcome of these kinds of sterilization, yet they are lawful practices in many democracies even when not medically indicated. Perhaps hysterectomies and castration lack the element of control levelled against female genital cutting. Still, a few European democracies employ consensual surgical castration as a treatment for serial sex offenders, which would seem to involve the criminal justice system bringing at least a certain institutional pressure to bear on vulnerable individuals. Investigating the practice in the Czech Republic, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture states that “a patient should give his free and informed consent to surgical castration and that an expert commission should approve the application.” However, it also describes the practice as “invasive, irreversible and mutilating” (CPT 2009: 16). Several democracies, including the state of Louisiana, impose chemical (or temporary) castration on convicted pedophiles (Bilefsky 2009). In the end, such comparisons perhaps suggest how deeply our interpretation of liberal values is inflected with cultural sentiment. It is, of course, a truism that what constitutes harm is culturally relative; if that weren’t the case, we either would not have many of the controversial minority cultural practices that we do or else we would have to say that these minorities deliberately seek to inflict harm on their members, which is plainly false. But here the issue is liberal societies engaging in and sanctioning what appear to be comparable forms of harm though not recognizing them as such. Comparison of minority and majority

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practices is essential, then, to identifying cultural biases and achieving equitable treatment.

Conclusion Individual autonomy is a governing liberal value that needs to be reckoned with in theory and in practice. In this chapter, I have argued that the kind of autonomy that is instantiated in law and policy is a complex and multidimensional value, and one which is far more flexible, dynamic, and potentially open to minority cultural practices than many of its friends, let alone its enemies, would have us believe. Rather than prescribing a fixed set of cultural rights in advance, autonomy as a governing value invites consideration of how controversial practices relate to its five dimensions of critical reflection, direct and indirect procedural independence, reciprocity, and inalienability. This is a task that inherently lays bare the differential political force of the five dimensions, emphasizes evidence over assertion and aspersion, and puts the onus on liberal authorities to demonstrate what exactly is problematic about a minority practice. And because equality is also a governing liberal value, cultural minorities are entitled to probe whether they, in their practices, are being held to the same standards of autonomy and evaluation that majority or other minority practices are. It may be objected that this approach unduly privileges the liberal values of some citizens over the nonliberal values of other citizens, and, in this sense, remains sectarian. Clearly, an autonomy-based argument privileges liberal autonomy. Short of draining the concept of meaning, there is simply no way of squaring individual autonomy with a democratic free-for-all of practices and traditions. The concept has teeth; it would not be worth defending if it did not. That said, nothing in what has been argued suggests that the normative frameworks of minorities should not be heard and taken into consideration; indeed, doing so may sometimes be enough to alleviate the public concerns about a practice. My argument is rather an answer to the question of what the liberal approach to autonomy is in practice, and thus how this liberal value should be brought to such an exchange. All too often the import of autonomy has been construed as if it were fixed, clear, and settled; I have sought to show how, in many cases, it is none of these things. What is more, the burden of proof lies, in the first instance, with those claiming that certain practices violate liberal autonomy. As Gaus (2005: 274) observes, it is state intervention in the affairs of citizens that needs to be

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justified in a liberal order; citizens do not need to defend their choices and practices to state authorities as a matter of course. As I noted at the outset, autonomy is a pivotal governing norm in liberal societies and is not going to go away anytime soon. Even if minorities cannot accept the normative arguments in support of autonomy as a governing norm,7 it is in their own strategic interest to master liberal values and use them to their advantage. When a practice is challenged by liberal authorities on stipulated grounds, the minority concerned should seek to show how their practice does not violate the institutionalized dicta of autonomy, while holding liberals to their own stated core commitments, including the way they apply them, often variously and loosely, to themselves. Of course, nonliberal minorities might also be said to have a strategic interest in resisting the authority of liberal autonomy, for to do otherwise would be to signal their normative acceptance of it. But this tack, understandable as it is, is likely only to confirm the incompatibility of the practice with liberal autonomy and result in its restriction. In contrast, the approach presented here offers the opportunity of having initially suspect practices reinterpreted and ultimately accommodated.

Acknowledgement My thanks to audiences at seminars at the universities of Amsterdam, Bristol, Frankfurt, and Oxford, and at conferences at Ritsumeikan University, the Australian National University, Durham University, and the University of Melbourne for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. I am indebted to Ayelet Banai, Gijs van Donselaar, Rainer Forst, Fabian Freyenhagen, Axel Honneth, Takashi Kakuni, Gurpreet Mahajan, Susan Mendus, David Miller, Thomas Nys, Anne Phillips, and Miriam Ronzoni for specific points, which I have sought, doubtless inadequately, to address. This work was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery grant DP0772343, and was undertaken while I was a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Social Justice, University of Oxford, and VLAC, Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. I am grateful to these esteemed institutions. This text was first published as “Liberal Autonomy as a Pluralistic Value,” The Monist 95: 1 (January 2012) 103–26, and is reprinted here by permission. Geoffrey Brahm Levey is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and associate professor in political science at the University of New South

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Wales, Sydney. He was the Founding Director of UNSW’s Program in Jewish Studies. His recent publications include, as editor, Authenticity, Autonomy and Multiculturalism (Routledge 2015), and, as coeditor with Ayelet Shachar, The Politics of Citizenship in Immigrant Democracies: The Experience of the United States, Canada and Australia (Routledge, 2015).

Notes 1. Liberal accounts of autonomy as a character ideal are conventionally distinguished from the kindred Kantian notion of moral autonomy, according to which autonomy constitutes both an abstract property of personhood and a condition that is fully realized in subjecting oneself to the moral law. However, autonomy as a character ideal closely intersects with moral autonomy at points, as we will see (see also Gaus 2005). Even as a character ideal, there is debate not only about the meaning of autonomy, but also about its scope as a governing value (whether, for example, it should be “political” or “comprehensive” in its compass), and why or in what sense it should be considered valuable in the first place (whether it is intrinsically or only instrumentally valuable). The scope and value questions, while touched on in what follows, cannot be pursued here. 2. The distinction between procedural and substantive accounts of autonomy can blur. Formally, it turns on whether one believes autonomy is secured solely by having the “right” psychological disposition towards one’s preferences along with procedural independence. However, as many substantivists stress the importance of the social and structural context in which agency is developed and exercised, part of the dispute can be understood as turning on competing views of the scope of procedural independence. 3. On self-abrogative choices, see Galeotti (2007: 99–102). Dworkin initially defended what I am calling the inalienability dimension of autonomy, but later changed his view, arguing that one can legitimately exercise one’s autonomy even by alienating it. See Dworkin (1988: chapter 8). 4. Sometimes slavery is distinguished from servitude on the basis that it lacks any condition of voluntariness. Voluntary and involuntary servitude remains, however, a commonplace distinction in law. In any case, the modern tendency is both to blur the boundaries between slavery, servitude, debt bondage, forced labor, etc., towards a uniform condemnation, and to widen their indicia. See, for example, League of Nations (1926), and United Nations (1956). 5. Some thirty states of the United States today do not mandate the wearing of motorcycle crash helmets. Some never enacted such legislation, while other states have repealed their laws in recent years upon evidence the measure made little difference to the incidence of motorcycle road accident injuries and fatalities.

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6. Of course, at another level, autonomy also is centrally implicated in debates over distributive justice (e.g., Rawls 1971; Nozick 1975). 7. Forst (2005), for example, argues that autonomy derives its normative force in virtue of citizens being both “freedom-users” and “freedom-grantors.” However, such reasoning is likely to convince only those who already accept that the individual is the ultimate unit of moral worth and bearer of freedom.

References Ali, A.H. 2010. “Another girl’s sexual mutilation.” The Australian, 4 June. American Academy of Pediatrics, Task Force on Circumcision. 1999. “Circumcision Policy Statement.” Pediatrics 103(3): 686–93. Anderson, J. and A. Honneth. 2005. “Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition, and Justice.” In J. Christman and J. Anderson (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bader, V.M. 2007. Secularism or Democracy? Associational Governance of Religious Diversity. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. “Behind France’s Islamic Veil.” 2010. BBC News, 8 April. Accessed 9 November 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8607802.stm. Bilefsky, D. 2009. “Europeans Debate Castration of Sex Offenders.” The New York Times, 10 March. Accessed 9 November 2010. www.nytimes.com/ 2009/03/11/world/europe/11castrate.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&hp. Bowen, J.R. 2007. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Christman, J. 2009. The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Sociohistorical Selves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT). 2009. Report to the Czech Government on the Visit to the Czech Republic Carried Out by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Council of Europe, Strasbourg. Dagger, R. 1997. Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, G. 1988. The Theory and Practice of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forst, R. 2005. “Political Liberty: Integrating Five Conceptions of Autonomy.” In J. Christman and J. Anderson (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. 1988. The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, M. 2002. Autonomy, Gender, Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Galeotti, A.E. 2007. “Relativism, Universalism, and Applied Ethics: The Case of Female Circumcision.” Constellations 14(1): 91–111.

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Galston, W.A. 2002. Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaus, G.F. 2005. “The Place of Autonomy within Liberalism.” In J. Christman and J. Anderson (eds.), Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haberfield, L. 1997. “Responding to ‘Male Circumcision: Medical or Ritual?’” Journal of Law and Medicine 4(5): 379–85. Habermas, J. 1994. “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State.” Translated by S.W. Nicholsen. In A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, R. and C. Welzel 2005. Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, M. 2010. “Male Genital Mutilation: Beyond the Tolerable?” Ethnicities 10(2): 181–207. Kukathas, C. 2003. The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kymlicka, W. 1989. Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Landesgericht Köln. 2012. “Urteile des Amtsgerichts und des Landgerichts Köln zur Strafbarkeit von Beschneidungen nicht einwilligungsfähiger Jungen aus rein religiösen Gründe” [Judgments of the Local District Court and of the Cologne Regional Court on the Criminalization of Circumcision of Non-Consensual Boys for Purely Religious Reasons], Press Release, 26 June, Justiz-Online, Decision of 7 May [in German], Docket No. Az. 151 Ns 169/11. League of Nations. 1926. Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery (25 September) 60 LNTS 253, Registered No. 1414. Accessed 9 November 2010. www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6b36fb.html. Levey, G.B. 2013. “Thinking about Infant Male Circumcision after the Cologne Court Decision.” Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought 3(2): 326–31. Margalit, A. and M. Halbertal. 1994. “Liberalism and the Right to Culture.” Social Research 61(3): 491–510. Mackenzie, C. and N. Stoljar (eds.). 2000. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press. McNeil, D.G. Jr. 2006. “Circumcision Halves H.I.V. Risk, U.S. Agency Finds.” New York Times, 14 December. Meyers, D.T. 1989. Self, Society, and Personal Choice. New York: Columbia University Press. Mill, J.S. 1959. On Liberty. Edited by C.V. Shields. New York: Macmillan. Modood, T. 2007. Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Murphy, P. and K. Sikora. 2010. “Push to let Australian doctors mutilate genitals of baby girls.” The Daily Telegraph/Herald Sun, 28 May. Accessed 9 November 2010. www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/push-to-let-australiandoctors-mutilate-genitals-of-baby-girls/story-e6frf7l6-1225872274181. Nozick, R. 1975. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell. Nussbaum, M. 2010. “Veiled Threats?” The New York Times, 11 July. Accessed 9 November 2010. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/veiledthreats/. Oshana, M. 2006. Personal Autonomy in Society. Aldershot: Ashgate. Parekh, B. 2000. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. London: Macmillan. Phillips, A. 2007. Multiculturalism without Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Poulter, S. 1986. English Law and Ethnic Minority Customs. London: Butterworths. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Raz, J. 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reich, R. 2002. Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Re “T.” 1992. EWCA Civ 18 (30 July). Accessed 9 November 2010. www.bailii.org/ ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/1992/18.html. Richards, D. 1996. “Male Circumcision: Medical or Ritual?” Journal of Law and Medicine 3(4): 371–76. Sweet, M. 1996. “The unkindest cut.” Sydney Morning Herald, 16 February. “Straw’s veil comments spark anger.” 2006. BBC News, 5 October. Accessed 9 November 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5410472.stm. Tamir, Y. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tanega, P. 2010. “Sikh judge Sir Mota Singh criticises banning of Kirpan.” BBC News, 8 February. Accessed 9 November 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/8500712.stm. United Nations. 1956. Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery: Adopted by a Conference of Plenipotentiaries convened by Economic and Social Council resolution 608(XXI) of 30 April 1956 and done at Geneva on 7 September 1956. Wall, S. 2003. “Freedom as a Political Ideal.” In E.F. Paul, F.D. Miller, Jr., and J. Paul (eds.), Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weiss, H.A. N. Larke. D. Halperin I. Schenker. 2010. “Complications of Circumcision in Male Neonates, Infants and Children: A Systematic Review.” BMC Urology 10(2): 1471–2490. Wolff, R.P. 1970. In Defense of Anarchism. New York: Harper & Row.

CHAPTER 10

Cultural Boundaries and the Reasonable Accommodation of Minorities Is Secularism Enough? Gurpreet Mahajan

How should liberal societies deal with cultural diversity that exists within their societies? Should the liberal principles of equal treatment and equal liberty for all be considered as universal norms that must be applied and upheld while assessing the claims of religious and cultural minorities living within the polity? This is a question that confronts most democracies today and it remains a matter of considerable dispute and discussion. Over the last two decades theorists of multiculturalism have made us aware of the ways in which operating laws and state policies disadvantage, and at times, even discriminate, against minority populations (Kymlicka 1995; Carens 2000; Parekh 1994a and b; Taylor 1994). In an effort to counter the existing structures of disadvantage, they have also made a strong case for deviating from the principle of formal equality or identical treatment and, along with it, the ideal of universal citizenship (Young 1989). However, frameworks of accommodation that justify separate or special treatment for some pose a range of difficulties. They can at best be applied in a few instances that can justifiably claim to constitute an exception. Will Kymlicka (1995: 10–25) singles out “national” minorities, Jeff Spinner-Haylev (2001) makes a special case for the historically oppressed communities, and others take the case of previously colonized and oppressed communities with a distinct way of life, such as the indigenous populations in North America. All of them identify a few communities, and in almost all cases these communities (which are seen to merit special consideration) are not defined by their religious identity.

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In other words, special rights are intended for and justified in a few exceptional situations; they do not engage with the range of cultural and religious practices that are seeking accommodation in western liberal democracies today. Even in the select cases where special rights are justified and accorded to specific communities, they come with the risk of objectifying the cultural community and ignoring the processes through which identities are continuously constructed and differences homogenized. Special rights that are given to communities in the form of self-governance also have a tendency to empower the community vis-à-vis the individual, and have been accused of entrenching traditional leadership in society—elements that invariably affect the fate of women and other marginalized sections adversely (Mahajan 2002: 146–65). These are some of the difficulties that have compelled theorists, including theorists of multiculturalism, to look for alternative modes of accommodating differences that revolve around a distinct religious and cultural way of life. Many of them are now using the language of equality and asking not for special treatment but for treating different religious and cultural communities as equals. It is in this effort to appeal to the ideal of equal treatment, affirmed in liberal democracies, that the notion of secularism has been invoked and revisited. This chapter looks at some of these rearticulations of secularism to see if claims of religious and cultural minorities can indeed be accommodated through the framework of secularism.

Becoming Secular It is paradoxical that the liberal political vision that supports the idea of a neutral state—one that is not committed to any substantive conception of good life—is faced with challenges from religious and cultural minorities and is accused of being hostile to their ways of life. In the past, when the state endorsed a particular religion, and with it the cultural orientation of that community, members of other nonrecognized religious communities were invariably discriminated against, persecuted, and even exiled or annihilated. The principle of state neutrality, along with disestablishment of religion, was advocated with a view to eliminating the existing forms of religious and cultural discrimination. Not all democracies disestablished religion; many countries in Europe minimized discrimination and disadvantage faced by religious communities by recognizing other religions and dismantling prevailing structures of

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privilege and exclusion. These two divergent approaches to religious discrimination appealed to two fairly different notions of state neutrality. Societies that embarked on the path of disestablishment endorsed a hands-off approach, where religion was separated from the state and consigned to the private domain. By comparison, in societies where different religions received state recognition, religious liberty of different faiths was protected. Here neutrality indicated the absence of state preference or alignment. Religion continued to have some presence in the public arena, but in the changed scenario the state became more hospitable to different religious and cultural ways of life. Both modes of dealing with religious differences stressed individual autonomy. If disestablishment gave individuals the freedom to choose and observe their faith without intervention from the state, due recognition to religious diversity also gave individuals freedom to pursue a life that they consider to be desirable and valuable. It allowed religious voices to be counted and heard in some aspects of social policy, gradually giving them the same opportunities and space that was available to other civil society organizations. Both modes of dealing with religion and religion-based discrimination limited the space for state intervention in matters of religious worship and belief. States did, however, legislate to ensure equal treatment to all groups, including nonbelievers, and also intervened to protect individual liberty. Both frameworks expanded the space for the individual, enabling her to choose freely and aver her commitment to a given religion or to withdraw from it. Liberal democracies thus became secular by adopting different policies for combating religion-based discrimination. If some pushed religion to the private sphere, others allowed some space for religion in the public domain. Both frameworks, however, privileged the individual and acted to increase the space for the exercise of individual liberty. Since secularism in its different forms was able to successfully deal with issues of religion-related discrimination, the question before us today is this: can any of these frameworks of secularism help us to negotiate with the claims that are coming from religious and cultural communities for accommodation of their community practices?

Invoking the Idea of Secularism in Matters of Religious Difference In the present context, the return to secularism is driven by many considerations. Theories of multiculturalism had addressed issues of dis-

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advantage faced by cultural communities even after they had received equal political liberties and rights. But the cultural communities they were speaking of were defined by language and ethnicity rather than religion. While some cultural communities had their own distinct religion, as was the case with some indigenous populations, by and large religion was not the defining attribute. So when a case was made for extending special rights, or at least special consideration, to cultural minorities, it applied essentially to the claims of communities other than religious communities. In other words, this was not meant to be a mode of accommodating religious differences and diversities. It was assumed that matters of religious discrimination had already been raised and, to some extent, attended to, perhaps through the framework of secularism. Although the arguments made in defense of special rights for minority cultures has since been appropriated to discuss the predicament of religious minorities, most theories of multiculturalism were not primarily discussing and seeking to accommodate the claims of religious minorities.1 It is not, therefore, surprising that when we are considering claims of religious minorities today, it is the framework of secularism that is being revisited to explore its capacity to accommodate differences and religious diversity in the public sphere. Besides, in most liberal democracies there is a greater degree of consensus around the principle of secularism than there is around accommodation of minorities through special treatment. To take just one instance, in India, which has seen the resurgence of religious and cultural nationalism over the last two decades, secularism remains an accepted principle of democratic political life—so much so that political parties, across the ideological spectrum, use the language of secularism and seek to appropriate the tag of being secular by continuously redefining what it means to be secular. India is not an exception in this respect. Although the idiom of secularism is relatively less used in public life in Europe, the ideal is cherished in these societies and seen as an anchor of the liberal democratic way of life. Indeed, secularism remains the continuous point of reference when claims related to religion and religious practices are debated. So, at a time when special rights for minorities are coming under the scanner in western liberal democracies, attention is turning once again to the principle of secularism and its capacity to offer a viable way of accommodating minorities. The turn to secularism is unavoidable also because certain recognition claims have been resisted, in some states more than others, on the ground that they violate the principle of secularism, or more ap-

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propriately, the principle of separation of religion from the state/public sphere that defined secularism in America, and the notion of laicité in France. Whether it is the case of Muslim girls wearing the headscarf to school in France or teachers/public officials wearing similar forms of headgear in some states of Germany, the demand for separate prayer room in public buildings, including schools, or serving food that meets the requirements of specific communities in hospitals and other public bodies, a range of religion-backed claims have met with resistance on the ground that they violate the principle of separation that is closely associated with secularism. It is in this context that the principle of secularism is being revisited and reevaluated even by theorists of multiculturalism to argue that it allows us to accommodate many concerns and claims of religious minorities. Interestingly enough, the language in which resistance to accommodation was voiced in France and many other liberal democracies has been, in a manner of speaking, subverted to argue that the principle of secularism in fact pushes us in the direction of accommodating minority claims. This is an important but different line of argument in the discourse of multiculturalism and, as it relies on such liberal principles as equal treatment and freedom of conscience—principles that have a certain legitimacy, if not also universality, in liberal societies—it is necessary to examine the space opened up for accommodating differences in the framework of secularism. Perhaps the most systematic exploration of the notion of secularism and its potential for accommodating the claims of religious minorities can be found in the recent report prepared by Gerard Bouchard and Charles Taylor (2008) for the “reasonable accommodation” of minorities in Quebec. But they are not alone in taking this route. In England, Tariq Modood, too, points to the accommodative nature of “moderate secularism” (Modood and Kastoryano 2006; Modood 2009). Although their arguments differ in some important respect, each of them attempt to retrieve a notion of secularism that is hospitable to religion and open to negotiating with religious communities. Invariably they set aside the most prevalent conception of secularism—namely, as a theory of separation involving either a “hands-off ” policy or a policy of “no-concern” towards religion.2 In its place they explore and enunciate an alternative reading of secularism that has the capacity to accommodate the claims of religious minorities without abandoning the basic principles of liberalism or the goal of building an integrated society.

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Re-orienting Secularism for Accommodating Religious Diversity The notion of secularism that has the possibility of offering a framework for accommodating minorities is identified by Bouchard and Taylor as “open secularism” and by Tariq Modood as “moderate secularism.” In each case, it is a form of secularism that does not speak of a “wall of separation” between religion and politics. Instead of eclipsing religion from politics, it acknowledges the importance of religion in social and individual life. Accordingly it makes some room for religion in the public domain, albeit in a form that is fair and equal to all. Modood turns to the Indian understanding of secularism and Bouchard and Taylor look at the experience of some states in Europe to retrieve this alternative notion of secularism. What both these alternate formulations have in common is that they recognize the importance of religion in the life of the individual and society. Consequently they do not endorse a conception of secularism that pushes religion into the private sphere. Instead they try to ensure that the public domain is hospitable to, sensitive and accommodative of, different religions. This form of secularism, unlike “closed” or “rigid” secularism is said to be capable of attending to the demands of different religious and cultural communities for equal treatment. In unraveling the potential that secularism has for accommodating religious differences, Gerard Bouchard and Charles Taylor (2008: 134– 37) argue that secularism rests on the twin notions of “moral equality of all persons” and “freedom of conscience and religion.” Neutrality of the state and the separation of state from religion are required only to realize these purposes. If, for instance, a state was to align itself with one religion, then people of all other religions are likely to be treated as second-class citizens. State neutrality in the form of distance from religion, or at least any one religion, is needed here to ensure that all persons are treated as equal, irrespective of the religion they belong to or the beliefs they hold. The primary commitment here is to the idea of moral equality of all persons, and it is only to ensure this that the policy of separation is advocated and justified. In other words, separation is not valued in and for itself. For Bouchard and Taylor, a society may respond to claims presented by religious communities in two fairly different ways: it could respond, as has been the case in France, by prohibiting all religious signs in public institutions; alternatively, it could try to accommodate specific religious claims—for instance, allowing individuals to wear religious symbols (e.g., the turban or the hijab) in the public domain. Open secularism endorses

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the latter route. It is flexible and open to the possibility of accommodating the claims of different religious groups. It could, to take an example, allow different communities to construct their places of collective worship even when these new structures do not fit well with the rest of the landscape. In brief, open secularism tries to pursue moral equality of persons without necessarily effacing religious markers of their identity.3 It does not seek the “emancipation of the individual” in relation to religion (Bouchard and Taylor 2008: 138); nor does it aim to ensure the erosion of religious beliefs. Unlike rigid secularism, it does not relegate religion to the “private and associative life” (Bouchard and Taylor 2008: 138.). A somewhat similar argument is presented by Modood (2009)in favor of moderate secularism: it recognizes the value of organized religion and is therefore willing to accommodate different religious groups (its leadership and chosen members) in different spheres of public life, such as, education boards, and health and care services. For Modood, this form of secularism has the capacity of accommodating the demands that have come from at least the Muslim minority in England—demands involving dress codes, special representation, support for communityrun schools, etc. Modood and Kastoryano maintain that the claims made by Muslims in the UK are not significantly different from those that have been made and accepted in the case of women or various racial groups (Modood and Kastoryano 2006). Most of the claims ask for equal treatment, whether it is in the form of fair and adequate representation in decision-making bodies or accommodation of their religious needs. Even when some deviation from the norm of identical treatment is required to meet these demands, special consideration is justified on the ground that they should be treated as equal citizens. In other words, differences enter into the picture and become relevant only to the extent that they underscore the disadvantages faced by members of the Muslim community when compared with citizens belonging to other communities. In part, Modood is arguing that the concessions made for other groups and communities—women, racial minorities, and minority communities, such as the Jews—should be extended to Muslims to ensure equal treatment of them. For instance, Muslims could, like the Jews, have a Board of Deputies, which would consist of Muslims, though not necessarily clericals or religious leaders. For Modood, the constitution of such consultative community bodies could be compatible with the commitment to secularism as the latter does not require complete

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neutrality or the restriction of religion to the private sphere. Instead, secularism or, more specifically, moderate secularism could try to accommodate different groups and communities in a way that meets the commitment to equality, albeit multicultural equality, not identical treatment (Modood 2009; Modood and Kastoryano, 2006). Two background, and often unstated, conditions need to be noted here. First, whether it is open secularism that Bouchard and Taylor recommend as the principle for the reasonable accommodation of minorities in Quebec or the moderate secularism that Modood advocates for accommodating the Muslim minority in England, secularism emerges as the operative principle for the accommodation of immigrant communities and not what Kymlicka has called national minorities. In case of the latter—for example, the Francophone population in Quebec or the indigenous people in North America—Charles Taylor (1994) had, at least in the past, made a strong case for protecting distinct ways of life, something that involves more than simply freedom of conscience and religion. Protecting a given way of life, a culture, required such measures as recognizing community institutions and, even more importantly, the right to self-governance for identified minorities. In contrast to the principles endorsed while considering the claims of national minorities, secularism is being considered as the appropriate way of accommodating immigrant communities in Quebec. Effectively, this means that no special status or special rights (of the kind that were given to the Francophone population in Quebec) are to be given to religious minorities. The constitutional mandate of “reasonable accommodation” in Canada is to be met by invoking the principle of open secularism. It is not therefore a blanket protection for a given way of life; only that which is necessary to meet the requirements imposed by the principles of moral equality of all and freedom of conscience and religion are to be accommodated. Modood (2009) raises the additional issue of fair representation of minorities in decision making bodies, and this requires special measures, but unlike measures that are aimed at representing diversity, these appear, at best, temporary measures prompted by existing inequalities. Once that goal of fair representation is met they are, in principle, not necessary.4 Second—and this is the other side of this narrative—in the case of immigrant communities, it is their religious identity that is seen as the most important marker of who they are. While national minorities were identified more in terms of their linguistic and other cultural attributes, such as kinship patterns or relationship to land, the difference that marks the body of the immigrants is seen through the lens of religion.5

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In his earlier writings, Taylor (1994) identified language as the fundamental mode of self-expression, and it is to protect the world that arises around the word that he favored stronger measures involving special rights and considerations. Now while dealing with the demands that are being voiced in the state of Quebec, demands that have come from different religious communities and involve religious beliefs and social practices that are backed by the sanction of the community, the chosen framework is that of granting the same rights—namely, open secularism. While these particularities of the new discourse of accommodation are important, the shift in multicultural theorizing, from the near exclusive emphasis on difference to equal treatment through the framework of secularism, is significant. Earlier, most theorists of multiculturalism, even when they were dealing with the case of particular religious communities, such as the Amish and their demand to withdraw children from public schools at the age of fourteen, stressed the category of difference. Despite the reservations that stemmed from the concern for the rights of the children, theorists of multiculturalism made a case for respecting their difference and honoring the commitment made to the Amish that their way of life will be protected in America. This seems to be changing, particularly when we are dealing with large immigrant communities that are now living in western liberal democracies. Perhaps this is because these groups are seen as having made a choice to come and live in these societies. Whatever be the reasons for this shift, they do mark a new moment in multicultural theorizing, one that needs to be considered seriously.

Examining the Possibilities of Accommodation Through ‘Open’ or ‘Moderate’ Secularism Is open or moderate secularism the answer? Can this framework accommodate religious plurality that exists in almost all societies today? Clearly open or moderate secularism is not sufficient for accommodating all forms of differences and different kinds of minority claims. When we are dealing with, for instance, different tribal ways of life or the case of indigenous people, groups that are not simply seeking freedom of conscience or religion or adequate representation in existing institutions, secularism is not enough. Most of these communities are asking for some degree of political autonomy, often within the boundaries of the state in which they are at present living. The idea of secularism

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is just not equipped to deal with such demands as they entail some form of power sharing, such as, marking out of separate “reservations” or the creation of a separate province (regional state) within a federal structure, perhaps on the principle of asymmetrical federalism. In other words, they require special and separate consideration. Even in the case of linguistic communities, where continuing a way of life is linked to the protection of a linguistic identity, one may need something more than same treatment. The latter (same treatment) would allow communities to ask for such things as primary education in its own mother tongue or teaching of a minority language as a second language; however, it cannot accommodate demands that want a language, and with it a culture, to survive and flourish. In other words, when diversity is valued for itself and the claims are for protecting existing diversities—of language and culture—then something more than identical treatment is required. So there are certain minority demands that cannot be readily accommodated through even the most moderate form of secularism. But if we set aside such cases, what are the possibilities of accommodating the emerging demands from religious minorities through the framework of open or moderate secularism? Religious minorities living in liberal democracies by and large seek space to live a life in accordance with their religious beliefs and cultural norms. Demands for separate representation, even separate educational institutions with state support, are relatively few and infrequent. But the freedom to live in accordance with one’s religious beliefs involves more than simply the freedom of conscience, belief, and worship. It usually entails the freedom to observe a set of practices that are associated with a religious and cultural way of life, practices such as the wearing of the turban by Sikhs, covering of the head/face by Muslim women, female circumcision, and choices relating to food consumption, marriage, and other family related matters. In other words, a range of social norms and practices are linked to and seen as arising from a commitment to a religion. Religious minorities seek the freedom to continue with these varied sets of practices. Does open secularism provide a viable framework for dealing with these demands? In their report on the “Reasonable Accommodation of Minorities,” Bouchard and Taylor (2008) take up a number of claims presented by immigrant communities, often Muslim populations and orthodox Jews in Quebec—claims involving the wearing of a specific headgear, special food (halal/kosher) in hospitals and public institutions, need for separate prayer room in schools and other public institutions, exemption from

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swimming classes for Muslim schoolgirls, provision for washing feet for prayers or the use of existing wash basins for this purpose, special requests for a female doctor or a male driving instructor, to name just a few. In some of these cases, for instance, those involving the wearing of the turban by Sikhs in the police force or the iron bracelet (karah) by Sikh children in school, practices of religious communities appear to be unacceptable and often contrary to the practices of a given institution or professional body. It is evident from Bouchard and Taylor’s report that some, though not all, practices have been accommodated. The basis for accommodating some and not others, and the rationale offered in each case, needs to be considered before concluding that the framework of open secularism, as it has evolved over time in Quebec, offers a viable way of negotiating with demands of religious communities. Open secularism has the potential to accommodate the claims of religious minorities as it is willing to give some space to religion in the public domain and accept that it has some value to individual members, if not also to the society as a whole. But does it offer a viable principle for sifting between different claims and building a consensus around what is or is not permissible in a liberal society? The answer to this question is less than clear. Bouchard and Taylor’s analysis of the issues that have emerged in Canada show that while open secularism makes space for the presence of religious symbols, and with it the accommodation of religious practices in the public arena, it nevertheless holds on to the belief that some religious symbols/practices may restrict or hinder the performance of one’s professional and institutional responsibilities. It is not apparent just which practices and symbols are restrictive in this way, and given the difficulties associated with listing in advance a set of practices that are restrictive, Bouchard and Taylor (2008: 152) suggest that some key officials who come into contact with the public, such as crown prosecutors, police officers and judges, should not wear or display any visible religious symbols. The belief that they (and open secularism) share with the more rigid and closed forms of secularism is that the donning of religious symbols would compromise the neutrality and impartiality of the public officials. Once again, there is no clear identification of who the key public officials are. Are school teachers to be considered key public officials? Are public health officials to be similarly identified as key public officials? The framework of open secularism does not offer a criterion for settling such crucial questions; as such, it leaves many of the existing disputes

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about what should or should not be permitted in the public domain unresolved. To a considerable extent, open secularism fails to deliver because it approaches issues of difference with the same conception of neutrality and impartiality that informed the separation model of secularism. To take just one example: while explaining why judges should not display any religious symbols, Bouchard and Taylor (2008: 152) argue that if judges were to display their Hindu identity by wearing a tilak (or, one might add, their Jewish identity by wearing a yarmulke), Muslim plaintiffs may feel that they will not get a fair trial—something that is a matter of their right. Wearing of religious symbols would here hinder the performance of professional and institutional duties. This reasoning is not entirely unfamiliar; it has over the years been employed to keep religion out of the public arena and matters of state. The only difference is that Bouchard and Taylor invoke it only in the case of some key public officials. However, even in this limited application it remains deeply problematic. If the visible presence of an identity was to compromise neutrality, then it would be necessary to hide the name of the judge (for that too can indicate the religious identity of the person, which could then create the same anxieties as the wearing of the tilak), the color of their skin, or their gender. Indeed, if neutrality was dependent upon effacing one’s identity, then this ideal would almost never be realized. Besides, the very attempt to hide a person’s identity requires a high degree of cultural assimilation (one would have to ensure that a person’s appearance, gestures, or accents do not disclose their identity), and we would also need to keep some apparent differences outside the public domain; this itself would be a form of disadvantage and discrimination, and it would belie the commitment to equal treatment. The ideal of impartiality cannot, in other words, be realized by simply removing all symbols of identity. Under the circumstances, it is preferable to put procedures in place that compel public officials to perform their responsibilities in a just manner. If public officials do their jobs effectively, then the marks of identity that they bear on their bodies will become irrelevant. People will not approach public officials as well as others in society with their existing prejudices or stereotypes. Instead they will be open to revising images of the “other,” and this would go a long way toward ensuring equal treatment to all. This is not an entirely unreasonable expectation. Even in the case of Quebec (which is examined by Bouchard and Taylor), there are requests for a female doctor but not for a non-Hindu and non-Jew female

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doctor. If prejudgments about the other emanating from their religious identity can become irrelevant in one sphere when concerned public officials perform their jobs well, there is no reason why these prejudices would necessarily linger in other spheres. One might also add that keeping religious symbols out of some public arenas for the reason that their presence is likely to create certain impressions is eventually counterproductive. Bouchard and Taylor refer to this desire to avoid the impression of partiality to argue that a few public officials (but not all others who enter the public domain) should refrain from wearing/carrying religious symbols. However, to use their example, if the display of a religious sign by a judge is likely to make the plaintiff feel that she may not get a fair trial, then the plaintiff would also have to assume that her wearing a particular religious symbol (say, a hijab) is likely to prejudice the judge who may then return a verdict against her. Hence, both the judge and the plaintiff would have to refrain from displaying any visible signs of identity; if either of them displays a sign of their religious identity, it would compromise neutrality and impartiality. In effect, this would mean that open secularism can no longer hold onto the idea that key public officials alone should not display any religious signs in the public arena. Perhaps, like rigid secularism, it would need to remove all traces of religious identities from public institutions. Indeed, this is what Bouchard and Taylor eventually recommend. In the pursuit for neutrality, they suggest that the sign of the crucifix behind the president’s chair in the National Assembly should be removed. Instead of making the public sphere more inclusive by making existing differences visible, neutrality recommends the erasure of religious signs. Although this action is prompted by the desire to accommodate minorities and make them more comfortable, traces of past history cannot be wiped away by simply removing the crucifix. Besides, such actions are likely to be unhelpful in the long run. Even if they are able to win the goodwill of the minorities, they are likely to make the majority more resentful of minorities—something that cannot surely help in sustaining the tasks of accommodation. The gap between the majority and the minorities can be bridged more effectively by being, to use Joseph Carens’ (2000) phrase, evenhanded, rather than neutral. For this would allow different groups, often “latecomers,” to be included formally and symbolically without escalating mistrust and tensions between the majority and the minorities. Besides the problems presented by the notion of neutrality and impartiality, there is another reason why open secularism is unable to offer

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a framework for accommodating claims of religious minorities as they are surfacing in liberal democracies today. Secularism, in its different manifestations and forms, is best equipped to deal with issues of religious discrimination. However, many minority claims that liberal democracies are expected to accommodate do not simply raise questions of discrimination. They ask for the accommodation of different ways of life—the right to wear a turban or kirpan, the provision of separate prayer rooms in schools and other public institutions, the lawful practice of polygamy or female circumcision—these are not requests that the concerned minority communities be given the same rights as the majority. These claims are asking the state to recognize religious diversities and make space for them in the public domain. Often they want choices made as adherents of specific faiths to be accommodated even though the society may not give similar consideration to other freely chosen commitments and ways of life. To put it in another way, claims for the accommodation of certain religion-based choices are backed by an assumption of sincerity. It is assumed that, for the religious person, these are non-negotiable matters and, for this reason, these choices and commitments are different from other freely chosen but equally deep commitments that individuals may have. While liberals are unwilling to place the burden ensuing from the choices we make upon the state, claims backed by religion/religious way of life expect the state to intervene and change public policy to accommodate them. If a devout person requires a separate prayer room to offer prayer at the prescribed time, then the state is called upon to make the necessary changes to accommodate this commitment, though a similar consideration is not extended, at least with the same urgency, say, to accommodate the demand for tennis or squash courts, even when there is a group that is strongly committed to promoting these sports. It is this special status accorded to religion that makes the framework of secularism inadequate, and even insufficient, for dealing with the emerging claims from religious minorities in liberal democracies. Secularism, even in its open and moderate form, can enable us to see that a religious way of life is not disadvantaged compared to other ways of life. But it cannot privilege or give a special status to a religious way of life. Moderate secularism may appreciate the value of religion in society and make space for accommodating the different religious voices in specific spheres of social life, but along with other non-religious voices. In other words, even when secularism is not antireligion, it can only make space for religion/religious communities to be counted along with other groups and associations in society. It cannot justifiably ex-

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tend special consideration to a religious way of life over other ways of life. It is this commitment to equal treatment, to different religious groups as well as nonbelievers and atheists, which limits the possibility of accommodating the emerging claims of religious minorities in liberal democracies within the framework of secularism. In India, secularism has been, as Modood notes,6 more accommodative of diversity, but this is because it privileges religious liberty most of time and accords it priority over individual liberty and gender equality. While in principle the notion of “moral equality of all persons” is accepted, it has often been interpreted to imply equality of different communities—caste and religious communities—with the result that the state has intervened to see that previously excluded caste-based communities are now formally included. But, beyond that, it has accorded priority to religious liberty (see Mahajan 2008: 297–310). It is this relative privileging of religious liberty, particularly in the case of religious minorities, that has allowed secularism to accommodate religious claims and expressions of differences in the public domain, but at the cost of subordinating the individual to the community and abandoning the task of framing gender-just laws. It is perhaps recognition of these contrary tendencies that has prompted Bouchard and Taylor (2008) to define open secularism in terms of the twin principles of “moral equality of all persons” and “freedom of conscience and religion.” The problem, however, is that in plural societies these two principles push in different directions. If the principle of freedom of conscience and religion opens space for the observance of diverse religious practices, the principle of moral equality of all, which would include equal treatment for women, compels us to see if the practice meets the requirements imposed by this principle—for instance, if a certain dress code violates the principle of moral equality of all persons. The tension between these two principles is compounded as people, and often communities, understand the principle of moral equality of all persons differently. If some use the family as the unit, others speak of the individual. Yet others question a pre-understanding with which certain practices are designated as being oppressive and a sign of being unequal. Should polygamy, for instance, be designated as treating women unequally? What if the concerned parties accept this practice? Can we overlook the agent’s voice, or should we judge all religious and cultural practices from the lens of freedom of choice? In cases of this kind, we need to have a shared understanding of what violates the principle of moral equality of all persons. In the absence of this shared

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understanding, different groups are likely to assess the same practices differently. It is differences of this sort that lie at the heart of the current controversies around religious and cultural practices—differences that cannot be conclusively settled by open or rigid secularism. What open secularism does, in comparison to its more rigid version, is allow us to listen to and attend to the claims of religious communities. However, as the very principles that define secularism are understood differently by different communities, it cannot really create an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls, 1993). What we can have, and do have in the case of Quebec, are context-specific arrangements, in the form of modus vivendi rather than a shared normative principle. Schools find ways of accommodating the concerns of parents by introducing a separate swimming class for girls and/or by covering the windows; hospitals try to accommodate the requests for a male or female doctor. But wearing the headscarf by students or teachers and the wearing of a kirpan remain matters of continuous negotiation. Open secularism places the question of accommodation on the table, but it offers no principles for resolving these issues. If wearing the turban is more readily accepted than the need for a separate prayer room, it is because the former places no extra burden on others. Considerations of this kind rather than commitment to a shared principle have allowed liberal democracies to accommodate at least some claims of religious minorities over a period of time. Indeed in societies marked by deep differences one cannot expect to have a consensus on basic principles. Consensus may gradually emerge but at present open secularism only spells out what a given society would regard as non-negotiable from its own liberal standpoint. If we are, however, to take a step in the direction of building a consensus, then the stereotypes with which we approach the “other” would need to be cast away along with the dominant conceptions of the individual self. The strength of open secularism is that it does not entirely endorse the liberal notion of the “unencumbered self” and is willing, like multiculturalism, to accept that people are members of different cultural communities. However, like most other conceptions of the “embedded self,” it assumes that being situated minimizes the space for dialogue on the beliefs and practices that define the self. Whether it is open secularism or, for that matter, multiculturalism, the tendency is to assume that being embedded in different cultures means that the terms in which these practices are understood by internal members is not readily available to outsiders. This makes communication across communities diffi-

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cult and judgments unreliable, if not also biased. In a way, the presumed closure is seen as following from the notion of an embedded self. A principle is, as a result, sought to adjudicate the demands that come from different communities. It is this understanding of being situated in a community that prompts Bouchard and Taylor to disallow key public officials from displaying visible signs of religious identity. The idea that individuals are members of different communities and these community identities influence the way others perceive them and relate to them cannot be ignored. But as members of different communities, we are also aware that being a part of a community or culture is not a rule-following activity. That is, while cultures differ from each other and each can be understood in terms of certain norms and rules, individuals do not simply follow rules. They continuously negotiate and make space for their understanding of the collective rules. In this process, they interpret the rules, select a few, and modify yet others. As members of a community, they engage with others in their own community who are similarly interpreting the cultural codes. So community and cultural membership is not just marked by sameness or identity. It is simultaneously constituted by identity and difference. This throws open space for reflecting on, reconsidering, and redefining cultural codes and norms both in relation to the issues raised internally by community members as well as those raised in the course of one’s interactions with others. The donning of certain religious signs must not therefore be read in an essentialist manner; that is, through the lens of existing stereotypes. Nor should endorsing some community practices or signs of collective identity imply the absence of space for negotiation and dialogue. The available room for negotiation and interpretation can, however, be severely constrained under certain circumstances. The absence of an external other, as much as the presence of a hostile other, almost always acts as an inhibitor. Since the first condition is met in liberal democracies, it is the latter that they need to particularly guard against. The reluctance to accommodate religious and cultural practices, even those that do not violate the basic rights of others, only tend to reinforce the sense of being misunderstood, and this allows communities to turn inwards and restrict the space for the articulation of internal differences. On the other side, exposure to different ways of life (in the school, market place as well as different spheres of public life) can make a crucial difference in the life of the community and facilitate the articulation of differences within a community. Liberal democracies need therefore to devise strategies to avoid the former and encourage the latter. It is, for instance, more important to bring the young members of a community

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to school so that they are exposed to diverse ways of thinking and living, instead of mandating a specific dress or compulsory attendance of swimming classes. Accommodation is a slow and gradual process and it is perhaps naïve to believe that a principle (or a set of principles) that can resolve all dilemmas and emerging claims of minorities even within a specific society. Contexts matter and so do group histories, intercommunity interactions, and assessments. For this reason it is difficult to spell out a general theory or framework for accommodating different claims of religious minorities. But the strategies we adopt for this task will need to go beyond the available frameworks of liberal secularism and the prevalent understanding of the embedded self. Gurpreet Mahajan is professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She has published widely on issues relating to multiculturalism, minority rights, secularism, and civil society. Her recent publications include India: Political Ideas and the Making of a Democratic Discourse (London: Zed Books, 2013), Explanation and Understanding in the Human Sciences (New Delhi: OUP, 2011, Third Edition), and Accommodating Diversity: Ideas and Institutional Practices (ed.) (New Delhi: OUP, 2011).

Notes 1. There were, however, a few exceptions. In England, while discussing the disadvantages faced by immigrant populations from South Asia and elsewhere, Bhikhu Parekh (1994b) indirectly raised some of the concerns of religious communities—for instance, issues involving the compliance with certain dress codes, such as, a form of attire other than a dress/skirt in the workplace and in hospitals. In Canada, Joseph Carens and Melissa Williams (1996) drew attention to the inability of Muslim migrants to access certain social welfare-related facilities, such as housing facilities. So a few issues revolving around concerns that emanated from religious belief were discussed, but these were a few exceptions. The main focus was still the concerns of immigrant populations, often second-generation immigrants and other national minorities. 2. For a distinction between these two positions, see Jha 2002: 3175–76. 3. For Modood (2006 and 2010) it is open to accommodating those demands of religious communities that are necessary for ensuring equality. 4. There are a few unresolved elements in Modood’s (2009) argument. While discussing the claims made by the Muslim community, he emphasizes, on the one hand, the concern for equal treatment that underlies these de-

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mands and, on the other, draws a parallel with the women’s movement and its claims. In suggesting that the Muslim demands be treated in a manner similar to the feminist claims, he overlooks that the women’s demand for separate representation is not based only on the equality argument. It is often backed by the claim that the women will bring in a new and different perspective, given the difference in their experience. It is not clear whether he too is making a similar claim of difference while seeking accommodation of the claims of the Muslim minority in England. 5. The distinction between religious and linguistic communities surfaces in many different societies. In India, for instance, a similar distinction has in principle influenced decisions about the appropriate modes of accommodation of different communities. At the time of independence, particularly after the country was partitioned and witnessed the worst ever intercommunity riots and massacres, there was a general anxiety about all forms of community identities. So even as these identities were recognized and diversity protected through a range of measures, no separate political space or rights were given to any community, religious or linguistic. The Constitution, for instance, recognized, through Schedule Eight, several languages as official languages of the state in addition to recognizing Hindi, written in Devanagri script, as the official language of the Union. The list of recognized official languages has since expanded to include twenty-three languages. Similarly, religious communities got the right to establish and run their own educational institution and charitable trusts, as well as the freedom to continue with their personal laws. Thus cultural differences and diversities were recognized but no separate political rights, by way of separate group representation or self-governance rights, were given to any community. However, since the 1960s, in response to the popular protests and agitations, regional state boundaries were redrawn around linguistic identities. As a consequence, several linguistic communities that were territorially concentrated in a given region became self-governing units. Separate representation was not, however, considered for religious groups and communities then or now. In India, as also in Europe, the past experience of religious violence has left behind an anxiety about these identities in the public domain, so that even when space is made for their accommodation, it is on grounds of freedom of religion and the need to give the same rights to religious groups as are extended to other groups and associations. Once again, it is the notion of secularism that is invoked while discussing the needs and claims of religious minorities for equal treatment. 6. Modood draws upon Rajeev Bhargava’s (1999) representation of Indian secularism as “principled distance between religion and politics.” However this notion of “principled distance” would suggest that the state is willing, at least on crucial issues of equality and liberty, to set aside the policy of separation and intervene. However, this is just what has not happened on such matters as gender equality. Here, the state has refrained from intervening in the affairs of the minority communities.

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References Bhargava, R. (ed.) Secularism and its Critics; Themes in Politics, Dehli: Oxford University Press. Bouchard, G. and C. Taylor. 2008. Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, Government of Quebec. Carens, J. 2000. Culture, Citizenship and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carens. J. and M. Williams. 1996. “Muslim Minorities in Liberal Democracies: The Politics of Misrecognition” in R. Baubock, H. Heller & A. Zollberg (eds.) The Challenges of Diversity: Intergration and Pluralism in Societies of Immigration. Aldershot: Avebyry Press. Jha, S. 2002. “Secularism in the Constituent Assembly Debates, 1946–50.” Economic and Political Weekly 37(30) 27 July: 3175–80. Kymlicka, W. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Mahajan, G. 2002. The Multicultural Path: Issues of Diversity and Discrimination in Democracy, New Delhi: Sage Publications India. ———. 2008. “Religion and the Indian Constitution: Questions of Separation and Equality.” In R. Bhargava (ed.), Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Modood. T. 2010. “Moderate Secularism, Religion as Identity and Respect for Religion” in The Political Quaterly 81/1:4–14. Modood, T. 2009. “Moderate Secularism and Multiculturalism.” Politics 29(1): 71–76. Modood T. and R. Kastoryano. 2006. “Secularism and the Accommodation of Muslims in Europe.” In T. Modood, A. Triandafyllidou, and R. Zapata-Barrero (eds.), Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach. New York: Routledge. Parekh, B. 1994a. “Cultural Diversity and Liberal democracy.” In D. Beetham (ed.), Defining and Measuring Democracy. London: Sage Publications. ———. 1994b. “Equality, Fairness and the Limits of Diversity.” Innovation 7(3): 298–308. Spinner-Halev, J. 2001. “Feminism, Multiculturalism, Oppression and the State.” Ethics 112(1): 84–113. Taylor, C. 1993, Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ———. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Young, I.M. 1989. “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship.” Ethics 99(2): 250–74.

CHAPTER 11

Arrow, Rawls and Sen The Transformation of Political Economics and the Idea of Liberalism Reiko Gotoh

If there is a central question that can be seen as the motivation issue that inspires social choice theory, it is this: how can it be possible to arrive at cogent aggregative judgments about the society (for example, about “social welfare,” or “the public interest,” or “aggregate poverty”), given the diversity of preferences, concerns, and predicaments of the different individuals within the society? How can we find any rational basis for making such aggregative judgments? . . . How do we measure aggregate poverty in view of the varying predicaments and miseries of the diverse people that make up the society? How can we accommodate rights and liberties of persons while giving adequate recognition to their preferences? . . . The reach and relevance of social choice theory can be very extensive indeed. —Amartya Sen, Rationality and Freedom

Introduction For a long time after World War II, we hoped for scientists to solve the political and economic puzzles of our social world. We expected they would find powerful and definitive solutions that could repeatedly be applied at all times and everywhere. However, we have recently come to recognize that such expectations are not only false, but also dangerous. The science of our social world cannot be, and should not pretend to be, omnipotent. The purpose of this paper is to trace the continuity and discontinuity between the methodology of political economy and the idea

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of liberalism in the works of Kenneth Arrow, John Rawls, and Amartya Sen respectively specialists of political economy, political philosophy, and economic philosophy, using as reference the framework of social choice theory. The reasons why I focus on these three giants will be clear throughout the whole text, but here I would like to indicate the intention behind this project. First, Rawls shares with Arrow the idea of constructing a general theory of a well-ordered society, which is characterized by autonomous individuals and institutions. Every action or view of an individual is supposed to be her own, namely, to derive from her and be ascribed to her, given social institutions and circumstances; and every outcome or social state is supposed to be in autonomous equilibrium (“reflective equilibrium,” in the case of Rawls [1971]) among individuals. It can be helpful to relate these ideas to Friedrich Hayek’s ([1960] 2006) insights on the notion of the “constitution of liberty.” Hayek insists that individual liberty implies respect for the diversity that exists among individuals. A “constitution of liberty,” according to him, is “a constitution that would protect the individual against all arbitrary coercion” (158), which contains two types of stipulation: one is “commonly accepted principles” on rights-obligations assignments, and the other is “a regulation of the derivation of power.” (i.e.) It emerges as the result of the autonomous actions of individuals and of the mutual interactions that take place in the pursuit of their personal ends. The central research objectives of Arrow and Rawls can be viewed as explicating the logical or ethical characteristics of such a constitution, given the differences of individuals (evaluations, judgments, advantages). Second, Sen shares with Rawls substantive political ideas, such as freedom, equality, and justice; moreover, unlike what is the case for Arrow, in Sen’s work those ideas do not function as methodological assumptions, but as a theoretical research agenda.1 Yet, Sen departs from Rawls, as well as from Arrow, as I will mention below, in the methodology of the science, which proposes a general theory of well-ordered society. And this methodological departure has a deep influence on political ideas themselves. For example, Sen’s “capability approach”2 goes beyond Rawls’s conception of democratic equality3 and leads to the conception of equality that takes into account the differences and particularities of individuals, characteristics of persons that cannot be changed merely by varying the relevant social institutions, policies, or constitution. Such a perspective goes beyond what Rawls envisions, not to mention Arrow. Nonetheless, Rawls did think that his theory of justice was compatible with Sen’s capability approach. Why did he think this was the case? This

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is one of the central questions that this paper tries to answer through an essentially methodological reinterpretation of Rawls. The reader may then wonder what is the relation between Arrow and Sen, apart from the evident fact that they are both Nobel Prize winners in welfare economics and social choice theory. This is another central question that this chapter tries to answer. We will find at least as much continuity and discontinuity between Arrow and Sen as between Arrow and Rawls, or between Rawls and Sen. I will nonetheless stress the discontinuity between them for two reasons: first, because Sen himself is too modest to do so when he discusses his new approach to justice (Sen, 2009); and, second, because the insight of Sen’s new economics, which departs from traditional political economics represented by Arrow’s methodology, can provide a foundation in political economy for movements that have been critical of liberalism, but one which nonetheless retains the essential ideas of freedom and equality, both understood in a thick sense.

The Basic Framework of Social Choice Theory Before going any further, it is important to briefly explain the basic framework of social choice theory, which is perhaps not familiar to most readers. As Sen (2002: 66–67) points out in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, social choice theory is an excellent tool to analyze the “rational basis for making aggregative judgments about the society.” According to Arrow ([1951] 1963), the originator of the modern form of social choice theory, a social choice rule—originally called “social welfare function” or “constitution” by Arrow—is simply defined as a function, a procedure, that associates each n-tuples (profile) of “individual values” to a “social value” and which is characterized by normative and logical requirements that together represent a certain political idea. An “individual value” is usually expressed as a collection of ordinal pair-wise rankings identified by a person’s name over alternative social states, while “social states” represent alternative options such as a type of distribution or a social rule (principle, constitution, law, or policy).4 Individual values represent, on the one hand, evaluators’ views relative to alternative social states (for example, Ichiro prefers social state y to social state x for no special reason, or Kitty prefers a to b, because b is patently unjust but a is not). Individual values represent, on the other hand, the recipients’ advantages (or interests) relative to alternative social states (for example, a social state x is better for Ichiro than a social

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state y, where he can hold high wellbeing in both x and y, or a is better than b for Kitty, where not in b but in a she can hold wellbeing). Correspondingly, a “social value” is usually expressed as a collection of unnamed or anonymous ordinal pair-wise rankings over alternative social states. It represents an aggregated evaluation derived from ntuples of “individual values” and represents a particular consensus among different individual views or a particular rights-obligations assignment among different individual advantages. Therefore, a social choice rule functions as a “constitution” inasmuch as it represents the criteria of aggregation that adjusts conflicting individual views or conflicting individual interests.5 The original Arrovian framework can be extended so as to take into account not only individual values but also group values either as views (as evaluators) or as advantages (as recipients) of social states, to the extent that groups can be reasonably identified either through some characteristics of individuals, through their social positions, or through common conceptions of the good.6 This is possible even when these groups do not correspond to any substantive social body like a women’s group, a nation state, or the European union. Further, the concept of “society” in this context, the detail of which is introduced in section 5, can refer to a set of individuals as small as two persons or/and to sets of diversely diverse groups.7 In summary then, the framework of social choice theory can treat the individual not only as the active subject who autonomously evaluates alternative social states (say, as the author of social arrangements), but also as the passive object who is primarily concerned by the influence that alternative social states can have on her life (say, as the recipients of social arrangements). As Sen says, the perspective of social choice theory can cover many themes of political economics depending on the contents of the “individual values,” “social values” and “social choice rules” that are adopted for various research purposes.

Methodological Assumptions of Arrow and Rawls Note, however, that in Arrovian-type models, several methodological assumptions are hidden concerning the characteristics of the constitution (social choice rule). First, rationality or inner consistency: a social choice rule (constitution) should make consistent and complete orderings as individual choice does. Second, universality: “individual values” of all kinds should be taken into account—that is to say, the domain of

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the rule should be unrestricted. And finally, symmetry: the rule should treat every “individual value” symmetrically without any interpersonal comparisons, not only cardinal but also ordinal. It is important that Sen loosened these assumptions and proposed an alternative methodology that is more sensitive to the “positionality” of individuals and alternatives. The term “positionality” refers to the fact that claims, observations, or evaluations are necessarily formed from certain positions, which can be characterized by particular bundles of parameters (Sen 1997, 2002: ch15). Sen’s new methodology also conceives rationality in a way that goes beyond internal consistency and that is open to particularity-regarding universality and reasonable asymmetry. The capability approach, as is shown in section 6, is indeed grounded on such a new methodological perspective. Recalling that the methodological frameworks of Arrow’s original model, which are actually shared by Rawls, are common to our conceptions of the general market and of liberal democracy, we can say that the transition from Arrow and Rawls to Sen suggests the possibility of reconstructing the market system and liberal democracy in a way that opens them to considerations that are external to the way they were previously construed. I cannot afford to give a full-fledged discussion here, but the transition from Arrow and Rawls to Sen can also be viewed as corresponding to the historical discontinuity in the welfare state, from a Hayekian or Keynesian model to a multicultural model that is more open to pluralism and sensitive to differences between individuals or groups. I will also argue that this reconstruction allows one to respond to some of the criticisms of liberalism that were made by various social movements such as feminism, multiculturalism, or communitarianism. Beyond the analysis of continuity and discontinuity in the political ideas and methodological frameworks of Arrow, Rawls, and Sen, what this paper inquires into then is the possibility of reconceptualizing the “constitution of liberty” in a way that seriously takes into account the “positionality” of individuals as evaluators of social states, and as recipients of social states in a society that advocates equality as well as freedom.

Social Order and Market-Friendly Liberalism The ideal of autonomous individuals and automatic institutions Arrow ([1951] 1963: 2) writes that both “the methods of voting and the market” are “methods of amalgamating the tastes of many individuals

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in the making of social choice.” However, he adds that it is not sure that voting can bring about a consistent social order. “The methods of dictatorship and convention” adds Arrow, “are, or can be, rational in the sense that any individual can be rational in his choices. Can such consistency be attributed to collective modes of choice, where the wills of many people are involved?” (2). This sets up the agenda of his research, which is to inquire “if it is formally possible to construct a procedure for passing from a set of known individual tastes to a pattern of social decision making, the procedure in question being required to satisfy certain natural conditions” in analogy to the “utility analysis of the individual consumer under conditions of constant wants and variable price-income situations” (2). What should be noted is that Arrow took for granted that the market system can achieve consistency by “amalgamating the tastes of many individuals.” If so, what is the market’s secret to achieve consistency? The clear answer is provided by one of two fundamental theorems established by Arrow (1951), “the general equilibrium existence theorem.” Given several conditions, it proves the existence of a price system as general equilibrium, under which collective supplies equal collective demands for every commodity market. The conditions required for this theorem to hold include so-called well-defined (or well-behaved) individual preferences, the property rights system, and a “large economy,” where no one individual can have a sufficient influence to change the price system by herself. “[W]ell-defined individual preferences” are defined over aspects of social states which exclusively relate to “an individual as an individual,” and are supposed to satisfy the principles of monotonicity, namely, that “more consumption is better,” and of convexity, namely, that a “more balanced combination of commodities is better.” These are technical conditions that guarantee the existence of equilibrium, but it must also be noted that they allow us to interpret every outcome realized in the market as the result of the autonomous activities of individuals—that is, of their self-centered individual autonomy—to maximize their interests by exchanging their initial endowments against various commodities at marginal substitution rates equivalent to the relative prices of commodities. This interpretation, justified by the conception of “revealed preferences” (Samuelson [1947] 1983), which assumes that behind individual choices are preferences that rationalize them, is what supports Arrow’s ([1951] 1963) presumption concerning the market, i.e., that “any individual can be rational in his choices” and that a social order can be brought

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about by “amalgamating the tastes of many individuals.”8 However, it is easy to understand that “revealed preferences” are, in fact, nothing but the result of compromises that agents reach within a given system of property rights. For example: an individual who lacks a medicine that is necessary for her to live today will buy it in exchange of her endowment, even if she knows that tomorrow the price will change and be much more advantageous for her. In these conditions, can the outcome realized by the market system be said to be the result of the autonomous behaviors of individuals? Methodologically, the concept of “revealed preferences” hides all relevant information that would be needed to examine whether realized social states are just or unjust.

Voting and Market as Only “Less Unjust” Systems Let us return to the problem of social decision making. Another fundamental theorem postulated by Arrow ([1951] 1963) is “Arrow’s General Possibility Theorem,” usually referred to as the “Impossibility Theorem.” It shows that there is no social choice rule that satisfies the following four conditions—Unrestricted Domain (Universal Domain), the Pareto Principle, the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (a weak version of Neutrality) and Nondictatorship (a weak version of Anonymity)—that can associate every profile of individual values to a reflexive, transitive, and complete ordering of social values. These four conditions ensure the satisfaction of traditional components of the “constitution of liberty”: negative freedom and procedural justice, including individual autonomy and equal treatment for equals. Furthermore these are conditions which a pure competitive market mechanism does satisfy. Taken together, these theorems suggest the following conjecture. If we remove the assumption that there already is a system of property rights and a price system that substantively constrain individuals’ revealed preferences and instead make both of them part of the agenda of social choice, a liberal democratic procedure cannot guarantee the existence of a social order as an equilibrium of individual autonomy. This suggests a conclusion similar to that reached by Hayek ([1960] 2006), that the market system is a “less unjust” system, a “maximum” among existing social systems rather than the “optimum” of all conceivable ones. We cannot overlook the possibility that, in certain cases, some individuals may suffer severe disadvantages even when the market system is an order of equilibrium of individual autonomy. It is certain that individual autonomy is an important value to be respected in the

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political context, but is not the only value to be respected. If we take into account different values, such as the basic wellbeing and freedom of individuals, we must search for a different type of order. Let us examine the perspectives opened by Rawls’s theory of justice and his idea of political liberalism.

Rawls’s “Well-Ordered Society” (O)ur exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason. This is the liberal principle of legitimacy (emphasis added). —John Rawls, Political Liberalism

Ethics as an external reference to the model and its retrenchment by economics “Justice as fairness” as embodied in the device of “original position,” as well as in the first of Rawls’s two principles of justice, i.e., equal liberty of all citizens, clearly exhibits continuity with the political idea of the “constitution of liberty” of Hayek and Arrow. Moreover, Rawls shares with Arrow the methodological framework of considering individual values as the informational basis for making the constitution of a “well-ordered society.” However, “the difference principle,” the latter part of the second of Rawls’s two principles of justice, indicates a discontinuity with Hayek and Arrow in that it requires the asymmetric treatments of individual values (i.g., “the least advantaged”) based on ethical viewpoints that are external to the model.9 This is something that goes beyond the conception of procedural justice, the formal equal respect for equals, given a system of property rights and the autonomy of individuals, to which traditional liberalism as well as the free competitive market mechanism remain faithful. However, it must also be noted that the difference principle can be directly formulated in the framework of economics as an autonomous device, as a type of lexicographical Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function, which leads to complete orderings of alternatives. Take, for example, the two following types of distribution precepts: “according to needs” (the “needs precept”) and “according to contributions” (the “con-

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tributions precept”). The difference principle does not exogenously determine the optimal weight that should be given to each of these two precepts (for example, exclusively one weight to “according to needs” or half and half to each of them); rather, it functions as a higher criterion that endogenously determines the optimal so as to maximize the expectation of the least advantaged, given various factors of social circumstances,10 whereas social circumstances include the individuals’ preferences on labor time and income, which collectively determine the total amount of income to be distributed among individuals. In this model, the optimal weights of the two precepts (the needs precept and contributions precept) under the difference principle is determined as the result of the autonomous interest-maximizing behaviors of individuals within given constraints that restrict their opportunities to realize various amounts of leisure and income. These given constraints include the balance of weighting the two precepts and the preferences of other individuals. It is assumed that nothing interferes with individuals’ preferences concerning leisure and income. Thus, we cannot exclude the possibility that giving higher weight to the needs precept might result in less income for the least advantaged if the labor incentive of capable individuals is, as a consequence, reduced. This possibility gives ground to the opinion that the weight of the needs precept should be reduced.11 This operational formulation of the difference principle has the advantage of being able to guarantee the existence of “social optimums,” viz., alternatives in which the utility of the least advantaged is at least as good as in any other feasible alternatives in any given economic circumstance, independently of the profiles of individual values. It has also contributed to clarifying the structure of the outcome result of the difference principle. In maximizing the expectations of the least advantaged, the difference principle is inevitably constrained by the preferences that individuals have concerning their conceptions of the good and how much leisure increase they desire in exchange for less income. This results from the rigid structure of Rawls’s principles of justice, which prioritizes the first principle, equal liberty, over the second, or difference, principle.

The flaw of internally consistent endogenous modeling of Rawls However, this type of formulation also has serious flaws. Because the revealed preferences of all individuals are treated in a formally equal

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manner, whatever they may be, and because it leaves no room for individuals to act on the basis of other concerns than self-interest maximization (each one has exclusive concern for her own utility) in relation to different issues—for example how to distribute the total income among individuals who occupy different positions in actual society—it can lead to results that belie the ethical purpose of the difference principle, which is not only to maximize the expectation of the least advantaged, but also to realize the right to wellbeing freedom for all. As long as we remain faithful to “internal consistency” in a perfectly autonomous model, which invariably delivers optimal solutions through endogenously adjusting variables (the weight of “common precepts of justice”; Rawls 1971) according to changes in parameters (constraints on the variations of variables), including individual values, and where the ethics of individual liberty, of the formally equal treatment of individual values, and rationality are paramount values, we must be satisfied with whatever realized “social optimums” arise. However, if our interest is, for example, to secure basic wellbeing freedom for all through focusing on the position of the least advantaged, then we should pursue alternative formulations of the difference principle.12 Another difficulty with the economic modeling of the difference principle is that it presupposes that it is possible to identify the least advantaged within society taken as a whole. This may be the case if we exclusively use income as the parameter to identify the least advantaged, because in that case there is symmetry among all agents, since in principle anyone can be the person with the lowest income relative to alternative income distribution rules. Yet, given the plurality of disadvantages derived from natural, historical, or cultural contingencies, it seems difficult to assume that the positions of all individuals are symmetrically interchangeable depending on alternative social policies. Whether we want to criticize Rawls or to defend him, whether “society” is conceived as a nation state or as the world’s cosmopolitan international society, we take for granted that the difference principle leads to a complete ordering, to the extent that we can identify the least advantaged in society.13 Can we liberate Rawls from this economic modeling, which imprisons him within the framework of traditional neoclassical economics? The clue to answering this question is in passages which show just how seriously Rawls considered the problem of the indeterminacy of rules, as well as the importance which he gave to “formal constraints of right” (Rawls 1971: 130ff) that are imposed on the conceptions of justice.14 Let us examine this carefully.

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Connecting Sen to Rawls: Formal Aspects Sen’s criticism of Rawls’s conception of social primary goods First, let us reconsider the debate between Rawls’s conception of social primary goods and Sen’s conception of capabilities. As is well known, Sen criticizes Rawls’s conception of social primary goods because it is insensible to differences among individuals’ ability to utilize these goods (differences due, for example, to their physical and mental characteristics) in order to realize their wellbeing, which is composed of various types of doings or beings. Rawls accepted Sen’s criticism immediately after Sen proposed his conception of capability in 1980, and suggested the following possibility of relating the conceptions of capabilities and of primary goods: “When we attempt to deal with the problem of special medical and health needs, a different or a more comprehensive notion than that of primary goods (at least as presented in the text) will, I believe, be necessary; for example, Sen’s notion of an index which focuses on persons’ basic capabilities may prove fruitful for this problem and serve as an essential complement to the use of primary goods” (Rawls 1982: 168). But how should we complement the conception of primary goods with that of basic capabilities, without merely replacing primary goods by capabilities? Rawls’s answer is the following: “I have assumed throughout, and shall continue to assume, that while citizens do not have equal capacities, they do have, at least to the essential minimum degree, the moral, intellectual, and physical capacities that enable them to be fully cooperating members of society over a complete life. . . . I agree with Sen that basic capabilities are of first importance and that the use of primary goods is always to be assessed in the light of assumptions about those capabilities” (Rawls 1993: 183). The words “fully cooperating members of society over a complete life” suggest that, in the Rawlsian model, the positions of individuals, including the least advantaged, are fully exchangeable depending on the (re)distribution of income and wealth. Behind this is the assumption that social institutions should respect the essentially equal value of all individuals as “moral persons,” a value which, in a well-ordered society, they have independently of differences in extrinsic or intrinsic characteristics. Primary goods are necessary conditions for human beings to be “fully cooperating members of society”; without them, an individual cannot be morally accused of failing to cooperate.15 On the other hand, Rawls recognized that “citizens do not actually have equal capacities” and that there may be important differences in their intellectual, physi-

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cal, and even moral capacities. This is the reason why the use of primary goods should “be assessed in the light of capabilities,” for example, in the practical stage of policies that deal with medicine and health needs.

Can Rawls connect “capability” to his basic idea of the “constitution of liberty”? Yet, a further question arises: can we simply add the conception of capability to social primary goods while keeping Rawls’s basic idea of the “constitution of liberty” as represented by the following formal constraints of the concept of right? “A conception of right is a set of principles, general in form and universal in application, that is to be publicly recognized as a final court of appeal for ordering the conflicting claims of moral persons (Rawls 1971: 135).16 A clash with Sen seems possible in relation to Rawls’s notion of “ordering”: “It is clearly desirable that a conception of justice be complete, that is, able to order all the claims that can arise (or that are likely to in practice), and the ordering should in general be transitive: if, say, a first arrangement of the basic structure is ranked more just than a second, and the second more just than a third, then the first should be more just than the third. These formal conditions are natural enough, though not always easy to satisfy (Rawls 1971: 134). From this passage, we can first recognize that Rawls’s meaning of ordering is similar to Arrow’s. It is a requirement of completeness and consistency (“transitivity”). This is clear, for example, in Rawls’s (1971: 136) ruling out “general egoism”—each person is allowed to do whatever, in his judgment, is most likely to further his own aims—as a candidate for social rule, since, in such a case, “if everyone ought to advance his own interests, competing claims are not ranked at all.” Of course, Rawls knows that this requirement is not sufficient to ensure justice, since division rules such as, for example, “to each according to an individual threat advantage”—which are proposed as “fair” in bargaining theories— can bring about an ordering; needless to say, “force or cunning” or “resort to arms” also bring about orderings, but do not satisfy justice (Rawls 1971: 134). Second, we can see that this passage leads to a criticism of the market system because, on the one hand, the market system recommends to individuals to act in accordance with the rule of “general egoism” and, on the other hand, because the market system allows the resolution of the unavoidable conflicts which arise in consequence, through “individuals’ threat advantages,” by bargaining. Yet we must also note

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that it is not only general egoism which fails to bring about an ordering. For example, general altruism also fails. Rawls is right to point out that “(T)hese formal conditions are natural enough, though not always easy to satisfy.” The following passage on the notion of “indeterminacy” can be interpreted in this context: “It (the four-stage sequence) sets out a series of points of view from which the different problems of justice are to be settled, each point of view inheriting the constraints adopted at the preceding stages. . . . Of course, this test is often indeterminate: it is not always clear which of several constitutions, or economic and social arrangements, would be chosen. But when this is so, justice is to that extent likewise indeterminate. Institutions within the permitted range are equally just, meaning that they could be chosen; they are compatible with all the constraints of the theory” (Rawls 1971: 201). The phrase “Institutions within the permitted range are equally just” leaves room for an interpretation according to which “indeterminacy” in Rawls comes from a plurality of optimum solutions. This concept, which is familiar in traditional economic models, suggests the failure of a rule to choose a unique option among a plurality of “equally just” alternatives, a failure that simultaneously corresponds to its success in providing a complete ordering that regards “equally just” institutions as totally indifferent in their rankings. For Sen, such an interpretation is open to strong criticism because of its presumption that a social evaluation can compare all alternatives and completely order them under given principles of justice. Yet, is this the only possible interpretation of Rawls’s text? Is it even an appropriate interpretation? I suggest that it is not. We can, for example, consider “equally just” institutions not as indifferent but as incomparable to one another. The passage that immediately follows the above sentences suggests the plausibility of this alternative interpretation: “Thus on many questions of social and economic policy we must fall back upon a notion of quasi-pure procedural justice: laws and policies are just provided that they lie within the allowed range, and the legislature, in ways authorized by a just constitution, has in fact enacted them. This indeterminacy in the theory of justice is not in itself a defect. It is what we should expect. Justice as fairness will prove a worthwhile theory if it defines the range of justice more in accordance with our considered judgments than do existing theories, and if it singles out with greater sharpness, the graver wrongs a society should avoid (Rawls, 1971: 201). Readers will recognize that the last sentence is very similar to Sen’s (2009: 48) approach to justice, according to which, “in a comparative perspective, the introduction of social policies that eliminate wide-

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spread hunger (or remove rampant illiteracy) can be shown to yield an advancement of justice.” It is certain that Rawls considers the consistency of rules (transitivity) of institutions or social and economic policies important, while it is also certain that he admits that the consistency of rules—as it is “not always easy to satisfy”—cannot be required to completely cover all alternatives. This reinterpretation of Rawls pushes him in the direction of Sen’s insistency on the plurality of reasons and on “incompleteness.”

Reformulating “indeterminacy” (Rawls) | in terms of “incompleteness” (Sen) According to Sen (1993/2002), complying with the requirements of multiple external reasons leads to the internal inconsistency of (individual or social) preferences. This type of inconsistency is natural and should not be viewed as contrary to rationality. Rather, Sen criticizes the traditional conception of economic rationality, which is too narrow and limits itself to completely internal consistency by extending one reason, for example, self-interest maximization, to the whole domain of preferences. He argues that rationality should be understood more broadly as a discipline of reasoning that seriously takes into account a plurality of reasons and tries to balance them. Thus, for example, for an individual to refrain from revealing her evaluations on some pair-wise ranking so as to avoid conflicts with others for whom that pair-wise ranking is much more important in achieving basic agency freedom or wellbeing freedom is surely a form of rationality.17 The possibility of weakening Rawls’s “formal constraints of right” by reformulating “indeterminacy” (Rawls) in terms of “incompleteness” (Sen) paves a way to liberate Rawls’s theory of justice from the traditional economic methodological framework.18 Yet, in order to combine Sen and Rawls, we must now consider some more substantive issues. First, to what extent are their respective frameworks able to treat differences in individual values? Second, who are supposed to be included in the domain of individual values according to their different models? The first question is divided into the following two: (1) to what extent are their respective frameworks able to treat differences of individuals as the subjects (evaluators) of social rules? and (2) to what extent are their respective frameworks able to treat differences of individuals as the objects (recipients) of social rules? Let us examine first this last question.

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Connecting Sen to Rawls: Substantive Aspects Asymmetrical treatment of individuals as the objects of social rules As discussed earlier, Rawls’s (1971) “veil of ignorance” in the “original position” represents not only epistemological restrictions for the subjects (evaluators) of social rules but also informational restrictions concerning the objects (recipients) of social rules, to which evaluators of social rules should refer. If so, could we asymmetrically treat individuals as the objects of social rules in Rawls’s model regarding the differences that individuals might have? The answer depends on the conception of “position” in society and the nature of information which Rawls’s model assumes concerning the objects (recipients) of social rules. In Rawls’s (1971) conception of the difference principle, it is taken for granted that individuals usually take different positions in society, but those positions are fully exchangeable depending on alternative principles that determine the distribution of social primary goods. In other words, individuals as the objects (recipients) to whom principles are applied are supposed to hold positions in society that are completely free of all historical, social, cultural, or personal characteristics, in the sense that such characteristics are irrelevant for the purpose at hand. One point needs to be noted, however: differences in labor incentives, which may assign different time to labor in relation to alternative social rules, and which constitute apparently personal characteristics, are implicitly taken into account. This implies that various other personal characteristics that influence the labor incentives of individuals, and that are not easily exchangeable, are also taken into account, although Rawls himself focused on their influence on the total income to be redistributed in society. In contrast, Sen’s conception of capability explicitly focuses on positions that are not easily exchangeable relative to alternative social rules. That is, if “the veil of ignorance” can legitimately conceal particularities that are nominally or pronominally associated with individuals, from Sen’s point of view it should not hide particularities such as historical, social, cultural, or personal characteristics that cause different kinds of disadvantages, which remain disadvantageous whichever social rules are chosen. Rather, each individual, inasmuch as she will be an object (recipient) of social rules, is expected to provide information as subject (evaluator) of social rules about such particularities, being a witness or an expert of those characteristics or experiences that cause different kinds of disadvantages.

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Can we, as the earlier comments of Rawls on Sen seem to suggest, combine this idea from Sen with Rawls’s model without any serious conflict arising? One possible way of doing so rests on Rawls’s remark that “the veil of ignorance” leaves “general facts about human society” untouched, for they are crucially relevant to the evaluation of social rules. The example Rawls (1971: 93) gives is that “they [the parties in the original position] do know, I assume, that they prefer more rather than less primary goods.” The labor incentives just mentioned above might be also included in “general facts about human society.” Yet what is at stake is that this remark opens the way to include statistics or records concerning historical, social, cultural, or other characteristics relevant to individuals, that cause different kinds of disadvantages as components of “general facts about human society.” Given this information, the subjects (evaluators) of social rules can provide or accept a social rule which asymmetrically treats individual values, yet in a way that respects formal constraints of the concept of right mentioned in the previous section. For example, suppose a social rule requires distributing primary goods asymmetrically under the universal goal of “securing basic capability for all,” taking into account the characteristics that cause particular kinds of disadvantages that remain disadvantageous whichever social rules are chosen. As mentioned in the introduction, the capability of an individual represents a conception of wellbeing freedom, viz. of the substantive opportunity persons have to lead “the kind of lives they have reason to value” (Sen 1999b: 10, 18), while the freedom to choose and achieve functioning according to their conceptions of the good (agency freedom) remains in the individual’s hands. “Basic capability” (Sen [1980] 1982: 367) is interpreted as the critical point of wellbeing in the sense that a shortage of basic capability gives legitimacy to claims for social policies that transfer goods and services. Actually securing basic capability for all is taken as a kind of universal right, namely, the right to wellbeing freedom (see, for example, Article 25 of the Japanese Constitution). First, then, since the asymmetrical distribution is only done to compensate the shortage of basic capability, it does not infringe the universality of that goal. Second, the basis of the asymmetrical distribution is not the names or pronouns ascribed to particular individuals, but characteristics which one may share, so it can apply to other individuals who have such characteristics generally. Third, if this is formulated as a public rule or law, it can acquire a kind of publicity and finality. In consequence, all of the formal constraints of the concept of right that

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Rawls imposed on the conception of rights can be satisfied, except for one: ordering.

Asymmetrical treatment of individuals as the subjects of social rules The next and perhaps more serious question is this: should we also introduce the possibility of asymmetrical treatments of individuals as subjects (or evaluators) of social rules in view of the asymmetrical positions of individuals, positions that are not easily interchangeable relative to alternative social rules? As discussed earlier, Rawls’s (1971) “original position” is nonpositional and individuals as subjects (or evaluators) of social rules are indeed treated perfectly symmetrically. However, it is noted that subjects (or evaluators) of social rules can be informed of “general facts about human society” concerning historical, social, cultural, or some other characteristics of individuals—for example, social statistics. Doesn’t this also open the possibility that individuals as subjects (or evaluators) may accept conditions that require the asymmetrical treatments of individuals in the aggregation process in view of the information or knowledge that individuals with particular characteristics or experiences can have? For example, when we design a system securing basic wellbeing, a greater weight could be given in the aggregation process to individuals who have particular information on certain types of disadvantages from which they suffer. What should be stressed here is that, in the Rawlsian model, such asymmetric treatments, if possible, are accepted to be fair only on the basis of a symmetric concern and respect for all individuals. This implies that there is a prestage where other individuals who have a different kind of particular information or who have no particular information also accept the asymmetrical weighting to individuals who have access to what, in this case, is the relevant particular information, based on impartiality. In this context, we should interpret impartiality differently from what is done in utilitarianism, where impartiality means to sum up individual utilities, all of which are given the same symmetric weight, a conception that Rawls strongly criticizes. Rather, impartiality should be understood as one formal, epistemological constraint of evaluation, which can further be associated to substantive constraints of evaluation, which requires asymmetric treatments based on certain reason. How about Sen? His answer to the question of how we should treat individuals when they are considered as evaluators of social states, or to put it differently, his answer to the question of what are the substantive constraints on the aggregation of individual evaluations, can

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be understood in reference to two important papers, one on “positional objectivity” (Sen 1993; 2002: ch.15), the other on “open impartiality” (Sen 2000). In the first, Sen defines “position-dependent observation,” a “view from a delineated somewhere,” rather than a “view from nowhere,” as “positional objectivity.” In Sen a “position” is supposed to be formulated through parameters that can apply to different persons who share in common certain historical, social, cultural, or personal characteristics. In other words, a parameter represents within a category differences that are socially commonly accepted. An observation, claim, belief, or action is regarded as “positionally objective” if it can be recognized through a bundle of parameters that characterize the observation, claim, belief, or action, which itself is understood not to be uniquely identified by a proper name or pronoun. Let us note two points: first, “positional objectivity” does not guarantee “truth.” The claims made by individuals who share a certain position can merely constitute a shared “objective illusion.” Sen indicates that “trans-positional assessment”—“drawing on but going beyond different positional observations” (Sen 2002: 467)—is often useful to correct such objective illusions or prejudices. Second, the parameters which we select to characterize an observation, a claim, belief, or action as “positionally objective,” as well as a “trans-positional assessment,” cannot be free from the constraints imposed by our own position. Sen gives the following example: a claim A (e.g., that women are inferior to men) is sometimes claimed to be “objective” from a position whose central parameter is to be resident of society S, but actually there are residents of S who reject that claim. There is here, as Sen (2002: 476) points out, a trap in which cultural relativism fails when it claims cultural homogeneity within a given society. We must search for extra parameters, other than being residents of S (e.g., specific education or custom) to characterize the position that inevitably leads to sharing claim A. “Trans-positional assessment” should not, however, be confused with “trans-positional invariance,” of which Sen (1997: 480–82) is wary. Trans-positional invariance requires being perfectly neutral in regard to the positions of all agents (“agent-neutral”). It is often associated with the standpoint of consequentialist ethics and has been criticized by proponents of agent-relative ethics (Bernard Williams (1985), Thomas Nagel (1986), and others). Sen’s (2009) notion of “open impartiality,” which is mainly based on the Smithian [1776](1975) notion of “the impartial spectator,” is proposed as a criticism of Rawls’s model, which corresponds to “closed impartiality.” There are two aspects to the meaning of “open” in this context. The

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first, which I will address in the last paragraph of this section, relates to membership, to the domain of individual values. The second relates to the epistemological conditions that are required of the subject (evaluator) of social rules. “Open impartiality” requires one to maintain distance from any particular position, not only from one’s position within one’s focal group (the group to which the evaluator belongs) but also from the position of the focal group itself, whereas “closed impartiality,” according to Sen (2009), only requires one to take distance from any particular position within the focal group. Closed impartiality, unlike open impartiality, does not require “forceful examination of local values that may, on further scrutiny, turn out to be preconceptions and biases that are common in a focal group” (Sen 2009: 128). Let us combine the above remarks on “open impartiality” to the discussion of “positional objectivity.” We can see that “trans-positional assessments,” which compare viewpoints from different positions with one another, including the position of the subject (evaluator) itself, may have an evaluator close to “open impartiality.” Furthermore, we should note that Sen’s criticism of Rawls’s “closed impartiality” is directed toward its “closed” aspect only, not towards “impartiality” itself. The epistemic condition of “impartiality” is still required of the subjects (evaluators) of social rules. “The need for the discipline of ethical and political reasoning firmly remains” says Sen (2009 138). Then we can confirm that the remark we made above concerning Rawls’s conception of “impartiality” (“asymmetric treatments are only accepted as fair on the basis of impartial, symmetric concern and respect for all”) also applies to Sen. This implies, on the one hand, that through the process of “trans-positional assessments,” the subject (evaluator) of social rules can come to accept certain conditions that require the asymmetrical treatments of different positional evaluations and, on the other hand, that such asymmetrical treatments are accepted as fair on the basis of impartial, symmetrical concern and respect for all members of society.

Who are supposed to be included in the domain of individual values? The last point we need to look at is the domain of individual values. In Arrow’s model, as mentioned above, who is a member of a society is externally given; however, theoretically it is perfectly open. Arrow’s conception of society is sufficiently abstract that there is no need to specify which concrete social bodies a society should contain. Similarly, Rawls’s discussion also rests on a conception of “society as cooperation,” which includes different types of groups such as families, communities, and

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associations, each of which has its own aims, norms, and rules (including distribution rules). The role of “society,” understood as a higher unit of groups, is to adjust, with the help of the first principles of justice and following legislations, the various kinds of relationships among these groups, as well as to protect the basic rights of each and every individual, including one who cannot belong to any group, as an equal member of this society. It follows that the conception of society in Rawls’s model is also abstract and does not need to be reduced to or identified with a specific social body such as a nation state.19 As long as a collective shares certain “political ideas” or a “public framework of thought” that constitutes the basis of agreeing and cooperating and is responsible for determining, keeping, and revising the first principles of justice and other social rules, it can form a “society” or “society of societies.” As mentioned earlier, Rawls’s model on original position can be reformulated so as to take into account differences among members of a society as objects (recipients) of social rules and as subjects (evaluators) of social rules, based on information on “general facts about human society” including historical, social, cultural, or some other characteristics of individuals. Moreover, it can be reformulated in such a way that the members of a society are not determined once-and-for-all. Once we have broadened the model, we can ask again: what epistemological conditions should we require of the subjects (evaluators) who take the responsibility of determining and of revising social rules, and who should be recognized as subjects? What informational conditions should we assume of those who, as objects (recipients), are directly and indirectly influenced by social rules? Who should we consider are such objects? A suggestion on how to connect Rawls’s theory on justice with Sen’s idea concerning the domain of individual values—that is, who are included in a society as objects of social rules or/and as subjects of social rules—may be found simply in asking the above questions. And in asking these questions, as Sen’s (1999a: 13) claim that “Justice is important, and has to go much beyond the domain of communal affection” (italics in the original) shows, the conception of justice plays an important role in realizing open impartiality. The problem, therefore, is how we understand the fact of justice or one’s conception of justice.

Concluding Remarks: The Reach and Beyond of Liberalism Sen claims that his criticism of Rawls is based on the traditional economic framework. Actually, it is more exact to say that it is based on the

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new economics of Sen, which, if it inherits much from traditional economics, including the contributions of authors such as Hayek and Arrow, also departs from them in significant ways. This departure is crucial with regard to the critiques of the traditional “constitution of liberty” put forward by feminism, multiculturalism, or communitarianism, which argue that liberalism cannot take into account the particular demands of particular groups precisely because of its commitment to “imperial universalism.” As indicated above, there is a trend, illustrated by Arrow and Rawls, that gives much importance to the methodological demands for rationality (understood as internal consistency), universality, and symmetry, and that has had a great influence on the way of designing “constitution of liberty,” leading to an obsession with satisfying completeness, optimality, and determinacy. What I have tried to show is that these can be loosened while keeping some essential ideas, such as freedom and equality, which respect autonomy and impartiality. These ideas, which are central to liberalism and are commonly associated with the pure competitive market, are actually compatible with the asymmetric treatment of positionality, which takes into account differences in individual characteristics, on the basis of an impartial, symmetric concern and respect for all. We can say that Sen’s new economics is an attempt to formulate a new methodology of science that renounces a narrow imperialism of reason. Yet we must finally point out that Sen’s idea on justice opens a perspective that goes beyond “constitution of liberty.” To understand this, Sen’s (2009) essay on human rights is useful. There, in his response to Onora O’Neill, he provides an interesting interpretation of Kant’s concept of imperfect obligation. In relation to certain noninstitutionalized rights, for which we cannot specify the range or contents of the obligations necessary to realize them, it remains possible to resort to imperfect obligations. Suppose that a person is in a position to prevent an infringement of someone’s human right. The imperfect obligation provides her with a reason to act in order to prevent that infringement. Yet that reason in itself does not necessarily specify the content of the action. To specify which action should be taken, it is necessary to weigh or prioritize this obligation in relation to obligations that concern other human rights or obligations for various matters other than human rights. Furthermore, her personal situation (for example, she suffers from some illness that makes it difficult for her to take action to prevent the infringement) must also be taken into account. Nonetheless, the existence of an obligation constitutes a reason to act, which implies that there is a universal, ethical requirement to act.

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What is at stake is that this requirement does not automatically and unconditionally specify which action should be done; there necessarily remains some indeterminacy. Yet it does not follow that in such cases as these, the conception of human rights is useless. Sen (2009: 375) in this context quotes Aristotle: “we have ‘to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.’” We can summarize Sen’s arguments by saying that we should not be satisfied with the construction of “ideal institutions,” but address actual injustices. There are two reasons for this. First, it is impossible to specify in advance perfectly just institutions that satisfy impartiality in relation to all relevant particularities. For example, if we identify several positions with appropriate parameters and design a social rule that regards the difference of those positions in asymmetric distribution, it is possible that potential positions that cannot yet have been identified with parameters might be legitimately neglected with the existence of this rule. Similarly, if we achieve equality in a space of capability (with a specified list of functionings), inequality in other spaces of capability might remain and be legitimately neglected under the name of equality. To truly realize equality of differences based on the conception of capability, our considerations should go beyond making and implementing social institutions towards directly reaching individuals with names or pronouns. Second, and more important, to construct perfectly just institutions, if it were possible, is ethically wrong. This is so because, if we seriously respect individual freedom, we should not treat individual evaluations in such a way that they become fully internalized as operational factors in order to achieve ideal institutions that are devised once and for all. Repeated investigations and urgent interventions to correct actual situations of injustice are much more relevant to the practice as well as to the theory of justice than devising ideal institutions. This is the fundamental point where Sen’s idea of justice departs from Rawls, and where it requires a new framework for “society as social cooperation” (Rawls 1971), one which actually goes beyond the reach of reconceptualizing “the constitution of liberty.”

Reiko Gotoh is professor at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo (Japan). Her areas of interest are economics and philosophy, justice, the capability approach, social choice, and welfare. With Paul Dumouchel, she coedited Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen (Cambridge University Press, 2009); with Amartya Sen, she coauthored Wellbeing and Justice [in Japanese] (Uni-

Arrow, Rawls and Sen • 281

versity of Tokyo Press, 2008). She is the author of Economic Philosophy of Justice: Rawls and Sen [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shinpo Sha, 2002), and, with K. Suzumura, coauthor of Amartya Sen: Economics & Ethics [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Jikkyo Shuppan, 2001).

Notes Chapter epigraph is from Sen’s Rationality and Freedom (2002: 66–67). Epigraphs for section titled “Rawls’s ‘Well-ordered Society’” is from Rawls’s Political Liberalism (1993: 137). 1. On the similarities as well as the difference between Rawls and Sen, Sen (2009) gives a thorough examination. My understanding on this issue, which I have directly based on their texts, almost all published ones, partially overlaps with his. It is mainly different in its scope and idea (Gotoh 2002). 2. According to Sen, the capability of an individual is defined as a set of functionings (vectors of various doings and beings) which can be realized by transforming transferable goods and services through the individual’s nontransferable ability to utilize them (Sen [1980] 1982, 1985). 3. “Democratic equality” is originally defined as a conception that satisfies both “substantive opportunity” and “the difference principle” (Rawls 1971). It is a kind of equality that regards both opportunity and outcome. 4. Note that the conception of “constitution” can represent a “social state” (alternative) and a “procedure” itself depending on the context, which seems to correspond to the two functions of “constitution” that Hayek ([1960] 2006) points out: “commonly accepted principles” and “a regulation of the derivation of power.” 5. A “constitution” can be conceived either as a “social state” that is to be chosen—for example, choosing a constitution for the EU—or as a “social choice rule” that represents a procedural arrangement to choose a constitution. 6. The precise meaning of a “group” will be defined later. 7. Technically, this is usually expressed as a population of {1,…,n}(2⬉n⬍⫹∞) elements, where n refers to the name of the person of number n. 8. This theorem is accompanied by another theorem that states that every competitive market equilibrium is “Pareto efficient,” constituting a situation where no one’s utility can be raised without reducing someone else’s utility (“the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics”) See Arrow 1951 and Debreu 1959. 9. As for the methodological discussion on internal consistency and external references, see Sen’s excellent paper (2002: ch. 3). 10. In view of the following statement, “from the standpoint of the theory of justice, the two principles of justice define the correct higher criterion” (Rawls 1971: 305), this type of formulation seems to be possible. 11. This formulation is consistent with the following quotation from Rawls (1971: 307): “a conception of justice requires that when social conditions

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12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

change the appropriate balance of precepts normally changes as well. Over time the consistent application of its principles gradually reshapes the social structure so that market forces also shift, thereby resetting the weight of precepts.” Concerning the merit and the demerit of the economic formulation of the Rawlsian difference principle, see Gotoh and Dumouchel 2009: 5. It must be noted that these formulations differ concerning what kinds of factors should be included in modeling Rawls’s difference principle. According to Thomas Pogge (2000: 55), Cohen (1997) started from this type of model and tried to design a “master-goal monism,” which postulates that “all social institutions and personal dispositions, ethos, and conventions, ought to be shaped so that they together optimally promote this common master-goal,” an objective which Pogge himself rejects. “Indeterminacy” is, as stressed by critical legal scholars, based on the indeterminacy of language, the indeterminacy of standards, and so on, but, as Tamanaha (2004: 86) points out, there remain ambiguities as to “how indeterminacy was to be characterized and whether it threatened the ideal of the rule of law.” In this paper, indeterminacy will be characterized as “incompleteness,” which means that a rule cannot completely compare alternatives or cannot compare all alternatives. Rawls explicates social primary goods in various ways—for example, as “social values” (1971: 62), as “person’s needs as citizens” (1993: 179), and especially as “the social bases of self-respect” realized “by the structure and content of just institutions together with features of the public political culture, such as the public recognition and acceptance of the principles of justice.”(1993, 181) The distinction between generality and universality is explained by Rawls (1971: 132) in the following way: “For example, egoism in the form of firstperson dictatorship (everyone is to serve my—or Pericles’—interests) satisfies universality but not generality. While all could act in accordance with this principle, and the results might in some cases not be at all bad, depending on the interests of the dictator, the personal pronoun (or the name) violates the first condition (generality).” Actually, this type of reasoning is considered as a secret to resolve “the impossibility of the Paretian Liberal” by Sen himself (1976: 312–13). This interpretation also makes Rawls closer to Thomas Scanlon since, as the following famous quotation shows, Scanlon (1998: 153) does not assume complete rankings of alternatives. “An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement.” Most commentators, including Sen, may not agree with this interpretation, yet it should be noted that the concept of “society” (of a people) that Rawls refers to need not be restricted to a political “state” as traditionally conceived; similarly, Arrow’s concept of constitution need not be restricted to

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the “constitution” of a nation state. See Rawls 1999: 25, n. 20: “I think of the idea of nation as distinct from the idea of government or state, and I interpret it as referring to a pattern of cultural values of the kind described by Mill.” I believe that Sen would agree that an interpretation of Rawls inspired by social choice theory may be useful to understand the theory in its essence, though it is an abstract interpretation.

References Arrow, K.J. 1951. “An Extension of the Basic Theorems of Classical Welfare Economics.” In J. Neyman (ed.), Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (1951) 1963. Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed. New York: Wiley. Cohen, G.A. 1997. “Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26(1): 3–30. Debreu, G. 1959. Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium. New York: Wiley. Gotoh, R. 2002. Seigi no Keizai Tetsugaku [The economic philosophy on justice: Rawls and Sen]. Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shinpo Sha. Gotoh, R. and P. Dumouchel (eds.). 2009. Against Injustice: A New Economics of Amartya Sen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayek, F.A. (1960) 2006. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reprint, London: Routledge Classics. Quotations are from the Routledge edition. Pogge, T. 2000. “On the Site of Distributive Justice: Reflections on Cohen and Murphy.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 29(2): 137–69. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1982. “Social Unity and Primary Goods.” In A. Sen and B. Williams (eds.), Utilitarianism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1999. The Law of Peoples: With “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Samuelson, P.A. (1947) 1983. Foundations of Economic Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Scanlon, T.M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sen, A.K. 1970. Collective Choice and Social Welfare. San Francisco: Holden-Day. ———. 1976 “Liberty, Unanimity and Rights.” Economica 43(171): 217–45. ———. (1980) 1982. “Equality of What?” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. 1. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Reprinted in Choice, Welfare, and Measurement, 353–69, Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1985. Commodities and Capabilities. Amsterdam: North-Holland. ———. 1993. “Positional Objectivity.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22(2): 126–45.

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———. 1997. On Economic Inequality, expanded with a substantial annex by J.E. Foster and A.K. Sen. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1999a. Reason before Identity: The Romanes Lecture for 1998. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999b. Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2000. “Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason.” Journal of Philosophy 97(9): 477–502. ———. 2002. Rationality and Freedom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin Books. Smith. A. (1776) 1975. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Dutton. Tamanaha, B.Z. 2004. On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Conclusion Social Bonds as Freedom Paul Dumouchel & Reiko Gotoh

The individual we grow to be in the course of our life is only one of the many we might have been but had to leave behind—lamentable casualties of our inner army. It is important to enter existence with ample possibilities in order that we may oblige destiny, the fatal pruning knife, always to leave us some sturdy shoots intact. — Jose Ortega y Gasset, Towards a Philosophy of History

Viewing issues relative to multiculturalism, to either national or religious minorities, or to other differences in terms of the dichotomy between the universal and the particular, ultimately constitutes a caricature that misrepresents the complexity and wealth of the social bonds that both unite and divide us. As many chapters in this book document, social relations are not easily imprisoned in such a simple division. The alternative between “all” and “only some” is a particularly poor way of describing the social world. Not only is it the case, as Gurpreet Mahajan reminds us, that identity is always being renegotiated and is open to transformation through interactions with others, but, as Saskia Sassen shows, the meaning and borders of identity are also changing. The denationalization of citizenship, for example, implies that a fundamental means of social integration is progressively being detached from what in our societies constitutes a central marker of identity—the nation. Furthermore, as Laurent Thévenot’s chapter illustrates, in modern multicultural societies, commonality and community relations are not simply built on the basis of the shared values proper to different groups; to the contrary, local bonds are primarily anchored in specific places used in common (what the Japanese refer to as “ibasho”) or in shared concerns for particular and contingent issues that may directly affect only some of those who are concerned by them. These places and concerns provide occasions of building commonality among individuals who may

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be completely different in terms of their social, cultural, or religious values and identities—in other words, of creating bonds across differences that are often seen as divisive. The logical distinction between the universal and the particular need not lead to social conflicts. All differences are by definition particular, yet not all of them result in special claims or demands. The fact that some conflicts can be represented in the terms of this opposition should not be considered as proof that the dichotomy between the universal and the particular is in any way explanatory of these conflicts. Casting questions of minorities and differences in terms of this dichotomy often veers to philosophical mythology, especially when it is assumed that a logical opposition lies at the root of the problem, as if logical contradictions could drive social conflicts. According to Anne Phillips, there are no serious philosophical objections to cosmopolitan theories of justice. The particular worries that proposed objections reflect can readily be accommodated within the framework of universal theories of justice. The real difficulties concerning universalism, those that need to be addressed and taken into account, she argues, are fundamentally political. They do not stem from the philosophical idea of the universal, but from the way in which we propose to realize this ideal. Wolfgang Palaver, Fuyuki Kurasawa, and Paul Dumouchel in their different ways all agree. According to them, it is not the idea, but the way in which the universal is practiced and institutionalized that limits its scope, transforms it into an exclusionary device, and brings the universal theories that underpin these institutions and practices to ultimately belie the equality which they originally assert. There is, however, no necessity in this failure of the ideal. Reiko Gotoh proposes that within the general framework of social choice theory, it is possible to address particular cases and to make provisions for group differences. Once correctly reconceptualized, the “constitution of liberty” allows for the particular needs of specific groups to be taken into account while respecting fundamental requirements of political liberalism: equality, impartiality, and universality. The logical distinction between the universal and the particular does not constitute an insuperable obstacle that condemns universal theories either to erase local differences or to fail to attain their basic objective. Thus, to say that the real difficulties are political is not simply to reduce them to the contingent decisions of opportunist politicians. This distortion of the universal is not mere random drift; rather, it is deeply ingrained in the institutions that embody and give reality to the concept and in the way we conceive it. This problem is not in any way especially or exclusively true of liberal moral and political theory, but it

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gains in that context a particular urgency. Liberal democracies attach great importance to the idea of universal equality open to a plurality of conceptions of the good, an idea that they claim to defend against the particular demands of exclusive groups. However, not only in average liberal democracies, but even in open secularism, that claim is undermined by a pragmatic contradiction, to the extent that the efforts to preserve the universal lead towards a closed community that bans the symbols of religious difference or traditional dress codes. The dichotomy of the universal and the particular suggests that this setback—the closure of the universal upon itself—is inevitable. Yet imperial universalism is not preordained destiny but the result of conceptual and institutional commitments that hedge in the universal, commitments which we fail to question. Unlike being of the same height, same weight, or same age, equality is not an empirically determined relational property of agents. As Amartya Sen (1992) rightly argued many years ago, there are simply too many dimensions along which equality may be measured for us to pursue them all. Equality implies a choice; further, attempts to increase equality in one dimension may decrease it in another (Sen 1992: 12–30). This argument undermines the idea that equality is an empirical concept descriptive of natural equivalences between agents. Nor does equality necessarily rest on the claim that agents are all alike in certain characteristics; rather, it is a normative concept that is often asserted in the absence of shared characteristics. Thus, a universal equal rule asserts that, for certain purposes, some differences between agents will not be taken into account. For example, in liberal democracies, for the purpose of voting, the differences between rich and poor, men or women, well-educated or less educated, are not taken into account, no matter how important these differences may be in other contexts. However, other differences, like place of birth or residence or age, are, in contrast, judged fundamental to the issue. Such rules always embody a particular choice of differences that are disregarded, while others are taken into account. The fact is that we choose not to take into account certain differences, not simply that we fail to do so because their number is infinite. Considering some differences, such as age or nationality, as fundamental, while disregarding other differences, such as gender, income, or education, when it comes to voting, is a decision. But why should we choose to disregard some differences? The answer can only be because these differences are relevant; otherwise there is no reason to dismiss them, to explicitly cancel their influence. In other words, the

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reasons why we disregard, or take into account, certain differences can only be moral, normative reasons. On the basis of our understanding of the world as it is, these decisions point towards the world as we think it should be. Viewed in this way, as a moral objective to be accomplished, rather than as a given, equality points toward a broadening of our concepts of impartiality and universality as illustrated in Reiko Gotoh’s reconceptualization of the “constitution of liberty.” It is the moral purpose of the difference principle—to realize the right to wellbeing of all—that leads us to asymmetrically treat members of some groups, both as authors and as recipients of social policies. Only this moral purpose and the concern for justice that it instantiates makes it possible for the asymmetric treatment of different advantaged or disadvantaged individuals to be accepted as fair on the basis of an impartial, symmetric concern and respect for all. Towards the end of her chapter, Gotoh argues that Sen’s conception of justice opens a perspective that goes beyond the “constitution of liberty.” However, it does not follow that it is exterior to that beyond which it goes. Let us explain. Sen’s (2009) comparative approach to justice relinquishes the search for a complete—Sen says a “transcendental”1—theory of justice in favor of ranking existing and potential social states as more or less just or unjust. A fundamental aspect of this method is that the ranking of social states does not need to be complete in order to be informative. It is not necessary to be able to determine which social state is the most just of all, or to order every social state as more or less just than each other in order for a ranking of social states to be useful. To advance the cause of justice, it is often enough, argues Sen (2009), to be able to determine which social states are clearly unjust. Interestingly, this distinction between “transcendental theories of justice” and Sen’s comparative approach bears some conceptual affinity to that between closed and open moralities or between static and dynamic religions that was proposed by Henri Bergson a long time ago. According to Bergson (1935), going from a closed morality to an open morality involves more than simply extending the domain to which it applies, more than moving from the particular to the universal. For the universal, as Wolfgang Palaver also reminds us in his chapter, may be just as closed as the particular. Central characteristics of closed moralities, according to Bergson (1935: 256–59), are the attempt to derive from a unique principle all moral obligations and entitlements and the objective of exhaustively ranking and organizing moral precepts. Any morality which assumes that its system of obligations is complete, in the sense that anyone who fulfills these obligations is by definition

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justified in all his or her actions, is a closed morality. Restricting obligations to members of a particular group or limiting them to a given territory are but two ways, perhaps the simplest and easiest, of achieving that end. In contrast, an open morality is one that is sensitive to and accessible by claims that are not already covered by its systems of obligations. Such a morality is open in the sense that it considers that there may exist legitimate claims—therefore that injustice can exist—in the absence of a preexisting theory of justice that defines the claim as legitimate or the situation as unjust.2 Open impartiality, according to Sen (2009), requires us to extend impartiality beyond the limits determined by entitlement membership to include all those who have “enlightenment relevance.” Similarly, the comparative approach to justice recommends that we focus our attention on patent injustice that can be recognized in the absence of any theory of justice.3 The proximity between the two conceptions is further suggested by the role of incompleteness in both authors. For Bergson, the claim or requirement that a system of morals be complete is the sign that it is closed rather than open, while for Sen, one of the distinctive characteristics of the transcendental theories of justice that he rejects is their attempt to completely rank and order all social states. According to Bergson, closed systems of morality are never entirely closed. They are always to some extent open, and this openness is what explains their capacity to change. The fact is that, historically, closed systems of justice have given way to more open ones. Alternatively, a perfectly open morality mutates into something else, into pure mysticism. As morality, it can only exist within a system of rules that are by definition limited and whose confines it perpetually seeks to broaden. In Reiko Gotoh’s reconceptualization of the constitution of liberty, what brings about its broadening to include the asymmetric treatment of some under symmetric equal concern for all is the openness of impartiality, which points beyond the limits of the constitution of liberty.

Paul Dumouchel is professor of philosophy at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He is coauthor, with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, of L’Enfer des choses, René Girard et la logique de l’économie (Paris: Seuil, 1979) and author of Emotions essai sur le corps et le social (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en rond, 1999). With Reiko Gotoh, he coedited Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His latest books are Le sacrifice inutile essai sur la violence politique (Paris:

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Flammarion, 2011) and The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays (Michigan State University Press, 2014). Reiko Gotoh is professor at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo (Japan). Her areas of interest are economics and philosophy, justice, the capability approach, social choice, and welfare. With Paul Dumouchel, she coedited Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen (Cambridge University Press, 2009); with Amartya Sen, she coauthored Wellbeing and Justice [in Japanese] (University of Tokyo Press, 2008). She is the author of Economical Philosophy of Justice: Rawls and Sen [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shinpo Sha, 2002), and, with K. Suzumura, coauthor of Amartya Sen: Economics & Ethics [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Jikkyo Shuppan, 2001).

Notes The epigraph is from Ortega y Gasset’s Towards a Philosophy of History (2002: 19) 1. On Sen’s conception of “transcendental theories of justice” see Gotoh 2015. 2. For an analysis of the difference between the two forms of morality according to Bergson, see Dumouchel 2013: 99–112. 3. See Gotoh and Dumouchel 2009.

References Bergson H. 1935. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by A. Audra and C. Brereton. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Dumouchel, P. 2013. “La morale ouverte et l’idée de catastrophe morale.” In Annales Bergsoniennes VI Bergson, le Japon, la catastrophe. 99–112. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Gotoh, R. 2015. “Arrow, Rawls and Sen: The Transformation of Political Economics and the Idea of Liberalism.” Chapter 11 in this volume. Gotoh R. and P. Dumouchel (eds.). 2009. Against Injustice: The New Economics of Amartya Sen. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ortega y Gasset, J. 2002. Towards a Philosophy of History. Champaign, University of Illinois Press. Sen, A. 1992. Inequality Reexamined. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Index

A accommodation, 17– 19, 22, 23, 84, 179, 216, 239–41, 243, 245, 246–49, 251–54, 256–57. See also equal justice. See also Quebec (minorities). See also open secularism. cultural, 194 (see individual autonomy) minority accommodation, 17 account –s, 135, 193–94, 216, 218, 235. See also capabilities. See also Nussbaum. See also flourishing. proceduralist, 198, 217, 220 substantivist, 198, 217, 220, 222 action, 2, 16, 115, 117, 158, 221, 260, 276, 279–80. See also actions. See also agents. autonomous action, 18 communicative, 85 political, 1, 42 positive, 184–87 pragmatic, 57 social, 109, 112 (see also Hegel) technical, 73 actions, 2, 9, 11, 59, 63, 72, 100, 113, 118–120, 169, 185, 188, 218, 220, 251, 289 self-determined, 119 (see also Hegel) Aeschylus, 155–56 aesthesis, 68. See also ectasy. See also body. affection, 74, 119, 278. See also body and mind/body dualism. See also reciprocal care. See also love. agency, 116, 137, 225, 235, 272, 274 autonomous, 219–221 individual, 194, 218 moral, 202 political, 32

agent-s, 1, 2, 8–11, 16, 18–21, 77, 142, 178, 187, 203–204, 219, 227, 253, 265, 268, 276, 287. See also autonomous action. See also beliefs and practices. See also citizenship. See also rights. marginal, 6 agreements, 59, 63 contractual, 109 alien, 5, 40–41, 50–51, 159. See also membership. undocumented aliens, 6, 9 (see also immigrants; see also inalienability) Althusser, Louis, 196 alterity, 142 altruism, 23, 153, 271 parochial, 13, 17, 153–72 American Academy of Pediatrics, 228. See also circumcision. anonymity, 4, 180, 265. See also universality. See also equality. Arendt, Hannah, 202 Aristotle, 280 arranged marriages, 222 Arrow, Kenneth, 20, 260. See also Amartya Sen. assistance, 129, 141–42, 148, 162. See also victims. duty of assistance, 12 asymmetries. symbolic, 134 socio-political asymmetry, 146 attachment, 8, -s 16, 90– 91, 98, 197, 202– 205. See also bonds. communal, 181 emotional, 204 familiar, 91–97, 100–101 local, 175, 193 moral attachments, 12 personal, 83–85, 88, 97, 100–101

292 • Index

Australia, 226– 27, 231 autonomy, 18, 45, 113, 115, 122–123, 215–231, 234, 279 individual, 17, 21, 194, 197, 215, 233, 241, 264–266 Kantian moral, 10 moral, 121–122 (see also Hegel) political, 247 proceduralist, 217 substantivist, 217 B Bader, Velt, 222 Badinter, Elizabeth, 226 Barry, Brian, 177 beliefs, 2, 64, 67, 72–73, 112, 121, 244–48 beliefs and practices, 19, 247–48, 254 (see also open secularism) benevolence, 12–13, 128–130, 132, 139, 141, 144. See also universal egalitarianism. See also assistance. See also care. See also humanitarianism. See also compassion. Benhabib, Seyla, 192, 196–97, 207–208. See also Nussbaum, Martha. Bergson, Henri, 153, 156, 288 Berlin, Isaiah, 10, 110, 113. See also negative-positive freedom. See also liberty. bias –es, 82–83, 94, 99, 101, 105, 177, 199, 205, 233, 277. See also impartiality. patriotic, 15, 181–90 bio-politics, 62 biotechnologies, 62 blood transfusion, 221. See also autonomy. See also inalienability. See also informed consent. body (the), 62, 68, 74, 87, 198–201, 217, 230–31 bodily integrity, 185, 197, 200, 225, 227–30 bodily inviolability, 201 mind / body dualism, 74, 199 bond-s, 2, 5–7, 9, 13, 16–17, 20, 31, 57, 84, 87, 89, 99–100, 105, 157, 169, 174, 181, 195, 203, 205–206, 208, 286. See also boundary. cultural, 194

emotional, 128, 204 local, 285 moral, 7, 174 of attachment, 196, 202, 204–205 of commonality, 133 social, 1, 5, 11, 21, 204, 285 borders, 1–2, 8, 46, 49, 58, 100, 134, 146, 177–78, 192, 208, 285. See also citizenship. Education Without Borders, 100, 104 Bouchard, G., 19, 243–55 boundary- ies, 2, 7, 20–21, 61–62, 84, 87–89, 92, 100, 134, 161, 247, 257 cultural boundaries, 18, 58, 64, 100, 195 (see also multiculturalism) Bourgeois, 30, 33, 130, 199 Bowen, John, 224 Bowles, Samuel, 154, 157 Britain, 223, 226 Buddhism, 167 burqa, 17, 209, 225–26. See also agency. See also autonomy. See also inalienability. Butler, Judith, 201, 207–208 C Canada, 226, 246, 249, 256 capabilities, 194, 198, 206, 269–270, 280. See also substantivist account. See also Nussbaum, Martha. capability approach, 21, 260, 263, 280. See also Sen, Amartya. See also Nussbaum, Martha. capitalism, 33, 134, 145 corporate capitalism, 58, 61, 66 techno-nihilist capitalism, 7, 60–61, 70–79 care, 12–13, 97, 128, 139, 141, 196, 201. See also victims. health care, 7, 185–86, 223, 245 mutual, 78 (see also compassion; see also generosity; see also benevolence) reciprocal, 119 (see also affection) castration, 232. See also circumcision. See also female genital cutting. See also female genital mutilation.

Index • 293

catastrophe-s, 1, 128 charity, 12, 13, 129–34, 137, 142, 144, 146–47, 183 choice, 10, 18, 60, 90, 92, 130, 144, 161, 178, 203, 217, 219–21, 232, 234–35, 247– 48, 252–53, 287. See also autonomy. See also inalienability. individual, 20 social, 20–21, 259–65, 280–83, 286 Christian, 130, 133, 141, 148, 154–55, 157–58, 162–70 Christianity, 128, 154, 158–59, 162–70 Christman, John, 217–18 Circumcision, 225, 228 Male, 226–30 female circumcision, 18, 229, 231, 248, 252 (see also clitoridectomy; see also infibulations; see also female genital mutilation) citizen, 9, 14, 27–50, 76, 116–20, 144, 176, 182–83, 187–88, 190, 192, 219, 221, 233–34, 244–45, 266, 269, 282 citizenship, 5–8, 27–50, 58, 61, 77–78, 179, 285 flexible, 35 global, 37 post-national, 35 universal, 239 world, 192, 207 claims, 249 class, 1, 14, 33, 34, 244. See also citizen. middle, 33, 38–39, 79 working, 33, 79, 132 clitoridectomy, 230–32. See also female genital mutilation. collectivization, 139–41 Cologne Regional Court, 227 Committee for the Prevention of Torture, 232 commitments, 50, 128, 234, 252, 287 global, 204 partial, 174, 177–78 universal, 176 commonality, 8–9, 82–83, 85, 87–102, 133, 200, 285. See also bonds. common-place, 94–100, 103, 105 common good, 9, 84–93, 95–96, 104 communitarianism, 263, 279

community, 5, 6, 13, 19, 86,88, 96, 97, 100, 103, 120,156, 159, 165, 169, 193, 194, 204–205, 224, 240–41, 245–47, 253, 255, 257, 285, 287 ethnic, 199 imagined, 58, 181 linguistic, 67 political, 42,77 religious, 20 communities, 41, 57, 78, 87, 93, 156–57, 180–181, 190, 193, 219, 239–40, 243, 245–246, 252, 255, 277 aboriginal, 34 cultural, 19, 241–42 moral, 134 linguistic, 248, 257 religious, 192, 242, 244, 247, 249, 253–54, 256 compassion, 78, 128, 131, 134, 138, 147. See also generosity. See also mutual care. See also emotional bonds. See also sympathy. compatriots, 14, 174, 177, 182–84, 192 competitiveness, 34 compose, 85 conflict, 12, 13, 28, 63, 76– 77, 129, 132, 141, 154, 158, 163–64, 178, 187, 207, 270, 272. See also crises. See also solidarity. See also citizenship. See also disaster. See also market. conflict-based humanitarian emergencies, 133–134, 144, 147 social, 79, 183, 286 consensus, 64, 68, 249, 262. See also open secularism. overlapping moral consensus, 19, 133, 254 (see also Rawls, John; see also Justice as Fairness) consistency, 65, 264, 271–72. See also completeness. inner consistency, 262 internal consistency, 263, 268, 272, 279, 281 Constantinianism, 166, 168 contract, 27, 57, 84, 219. See also citizenship. See also justice. social, 5, 15, 177, 183–84, 186–188, 190

294 • Index

convention, 137, 139, 143, 264, 282 European Convention on Human Rights, 46 iconographic, 130, 138–39 symbolic, 141 convexity, 264 cooperation, 13, 182, 277, 280. See also Parochial altruism. See also Rawls, John. coordination, 83– 85, 94. See also commonality. corruption, 98, 179 cosmetic surgery, 230–31 cosmopolitan, 15, 16, 127, 175, 177, 181, 192–95, 200, 202, 204, 206–07, 268, 286 justice, 21, 174 reluctant, 192–215 universalism, 166 cosmopolitanism, 16–17, 43, 145, 175, 192–93, 195–96, 198, 199–200, 202, 205, 208–09 crises, 12, 128–30, 133, 135, 137, 138–39, 141–147. See also victims. critical reflection, 134, 135, 206, 218–20, 223–25, 228–30, 233 criticism, 20, 21, 67, 78, 84, 87, 89, 101, 114, 133, 195, 197, 198, 202, 204, 208, 265, 269–71, 276–78 cross-cultural dialogue, 197–98 culture, 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 16–18, 37–38, 50, 64–65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79, 83, 85,87, 90, 92–94, 101–02, 104, 105, 123, 154, 193–95, 197–98, 208, 246, 248, 254, 255 minority cultures, 18, 179, 242 D debt bondage, 220–21, 235 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 207 decisions, 63, 72, 109, 133, 194, 229, 257, 286, 288. See also critical reflection. collective, 71 decolonization, 131 deculturalization, 64, 78 democracy, 4, 46, 105, 190, 225 liberal democracy, 3, 19, 91, 263 multicultural democracy, 215 parliamentary democracy, 58 participative democracy, 87 deliberations, 72, 79, 115

determinations, 110 logical determinations of reason, 111–114, 118–119 deterritorialized aesthetic space, 64–65, 77 desires, 10, 113–115, 117–120, 122, 217 dialectic, 111 dialogue, 19–20, 193, 216, 254–255 cross-cultural, 197–98 Dignitatis humanae,167 difference, 1, 12, 14, 16, 18–21, 33, 38–40, 59–61, 68, 76, 85, 91, 98, 134, 142–46, 196, 240, 244–47, 251–57, 260, 263, 266, 267–69, 272–76, 278–79, 282, 286, 288. See also universal egalitarianism. See also citizen. See also eccentricity. See also commonality. See also the difference principle. bodily difference, 199 cultural, 36, 101, 194, 223 local, 192 politic of difference, 2, 104 religious, 241–42, 287 (see also individual autonomy) disadvantaged, 30, 34, 48, 145, 183, 288. See also citizen. disadvantages, 193, 245, 256, 265, 268, 273–75 disasters, 96, 139, 141, 147. See also earthquake. large-scale, 127, 129 discourse, 17, 39, 67, 129, 133–34, 137, 143–46, 195, 243, 247 discrimination of, 94, 201, 229, 240–42, 250, 252. See also exclusion. See also secularism. See also disadvantage. disestablishment, 240–41 disposition, 154, 235, 282 diversity, 21, 31, 38, 46, 50, 67, 69, 194, 216, 246, 248, 253, 257, 260. See also disadvantage. cultural, 18, 193, 239 linguistic, 193 racial, 3, 4 religious, 242, 244 (see also secularism) domination, 129, 134, 144, 147, 165, 170, 217, 223, 225, 230 dress codes, 245, 287

Index • 295

dualism. mind/ body, 199 duties, 32, 130, 174, 184–85, 203 associative, 14, 175–76, 178, 180–81 institutional, 250 particular, 189 special, 176–179 Dworkin, Gerard, 217–18, 220, 235 dynamics, 27– 33, 36, 38, 41,44, 50, 58, 63, 65 dynamism, 59, 120–21 E earthquake, 1, 147 eccentricity, 68 economy, 36, 75, 129, 135, 143, 264 market, 10, 119, 122 political, 20, 27, 259–61 ecstasy, 67– 68. See also deterritorialized aesthetic space. See also secularism. education, 218, 221, 248, 276, 287 boards, 245 moral, 138 egalitarianism. See also Patriotic Bias. intercultural, 131 liberal, 181, 188 (see also compatriot priority principle) universal moral, 12, 15, 178, 181, 184 elevate, 132, 144 embodiment, 112, 114, 115, 120, 122, 128, 134, 139, 199. See also selfdetermination. See also objectivation. social, 11 emergency, 137, 140 humanitarian, 135, 139, 141, 143 services, 223 emergencies, 34, 127, 129–30, 133, 135, 138, 143, 144, 148. See also large-scale disaster. See also crises. emotions, 12, 65– 66, 73, 79, 134, 139, 146–48, 195 altruistic, 129 collective, 71 empathy, 147, 200–01 engagement, 8, 9, 29, 82– 85, 89, 91– 97, 99–100, 102–103 England, 30, 244–46, 256–57. See also Muslim minority.

Enlightenment, 101–02, 128, 200, 215, 289. See also Romantic Expressivism. enmity, 13, 153–54, 156–157, 161, 164, 168, 169. See also Parochial Altruism. See also solidarity. entitlements, 33, 34, 201–02, 288. See also citizenship. environment, 37, 74, 86, 93, 97, 99, 100, 102, 111, 186, 194 institutional, 32 material, 87, 89, 103 equal treatment, 9, 19, 233, 239–41, 243–45, 247, 250, 253, 256–57, 266, 268. See also equality. See also equals. See also asymmetry. unequal treatment, 201 equals, 12, 14, 109, 120, 198, 240, 265–66. See also reciprocity. moral and political, 129, 134, 146 equality, 2–5, 11–14, 16, 19, 40, 86, 94–95, 109, 131, 134, 146, 168, 174, 176, 180, 183, 189, 197–201, 217, 219, 233, 240–41, 246, 257, 261, 263, 279–81, 286–88. See also neutrality. See also universality. formal, 18, 39, 239 gender, 195 of groups, 18 horizontal, 82 moral, 12, 20, 133, 145, 177, 244–45, 253 essentialism, 194, 196 ethical life (Sittlichkeit), 110. See also Hegel, Friedrich. ethno-culturally, 129, 131 ethnocentrism, 197 ethos, 112, 129, 130, 282. See also noblesse oblige. Euro-American, 127–145, 148, 150 euthanasia, 220–21 evaluators, 20–21, 261–63, 272–75, 277–78 excluded actors, 32 exclusion-s, 6, 9, 13, 16, 28, 40, 49–50, 82– 83, 87, 99, 165, 196, 201, 206–08, 241 existence (social), 111 exploitation, 70–72, 75, 79, 83, 93, 136, 146 Expressivism, 130 Romantic, 128

296 • Index

Europe, 17, 30, 39, 46, 82, 96, 145, 163–64, 196, 200–01, 209, 240, 242, 244, 257, 262 F familiar / -ity, 8, 9, 68, 83–85, 97, 100, 195, 202 engagement in familiarity engagement, 9, 84, 89, 92, 96, 99 familiar attachments, 91, 93–94, 101 family, 10, 36, 83, 100, 121, 122, 161, 164, 175, 179, 181, 192, 199, 204–05, 219, 224, 232, 248, 253. See also Axel Honneth. See also Jew. See also community. family farmers and producers, 93–94 famine, 136, 137, 140, 141, 147–49, 155. See also emergencies. See also crises. fellow-feeling, 130 female genital cutting, 221, 231–32. See also female circumcision. female genital mutilation, 18 feminism, 2, 3, 263, 279. See also multiculturalism. See also Nussbaum, Martha. feminist critique, 51, 198, 209 films, 97, 136–37, 148 flourishing (human), 194, 198. See also Nussbaum, Martha. format, 99–102 France, 9, 50, 86, 90, 99, 101, 103–05, 223, 226, 243–44 free will, 117 freedom, 1, 5, 9, 10, 11, 15, 19–21, 57, 58, 60, 67, 70–72, 109–18, 120, 120–23, 158, 168, 176, 185, 187–88, 220, 222, 229, 236, 241, 243, 253, 257, 260–61, 263, 266, 268, 272, 274, 279–80 communicative. negative, 110, 114, 265 of conscience and religion, 244, 246–248 objective, 119–20 positive, 110, 115 reflexive, 114, 117, 122 subjective, 121 Friedman, Marilyn, 36, 217 formal-ontological, 111–12 Foucault, M., 62

French Revolution, 207 friendship, 84, 114–15, 118–19 G Galeotti, Anna Elisabetta, 229–232 Gaus, Gerard, 219, 233, 235 gender, 2, 40, 94, 180, 195, 199, 206, 250, 253, 257, 287. See also differences. generality, 16, 192, 282. See also moral claims. See also universality. See also Rawls, John. generosity, 78, 129, 154. See also compassion. See also mutual care. See also victims. See also Parochial Altruism. Girard, René, 154–155, God, 13, 158, 159, 166–169 goods, 83, 92, 119, 187 social primary goods, 269, 270, 273– 74, 281–82 (see also Rawls, John; see Sen, Amartya) global (in) justice, 129, 131, 133–35, 145–46, 174–76, 206, 209 global villages, 63 globalization, 6, 28–33, 35, 37–39, 44–48, 101, 153, 162–63, 169 polycentric globalization, 63 governance, 7, 63, 92, 145 self-governance, 246, 257 grammar, 8–9, 82–83, 85, 88–105, 127, 136. See also commonality. See also engagement. moral grammar, 130, 132, 145 sentimental moral grammar, 128, 130, 133–34, 136, 138, 144 group, 1–9, 13, 18, 21–22, 27, 31, 35–36, 40, 58, 64–67, 77–79, 87, 92–93, 99, 104, 131, 133, 139–40, 148–49, 153–162, 174, 177, 180, 182, 186, 190, 192–93, 207, 227, 241, 245–247, 251–257, 262–63, 277–279, 285–289 guilt, 138, 147. See also sentimental grammar. See also emotions. H Habermas, Jürgen, 85, 103, 198, 216 Halbertal, Moshe, 215 Hayek, Friedrich, 260 Hegel, Friedrich, 9–11, 109–123, 178

Index • 297

hegemony, 71, 79 Hesiod, 155 hierarchical, 12, 17, 57, 59, 66, 92– 93, 128– 129 hierarchization, 142 hierarchy, 66, 88, 96, 209 hijab, 17–18, 209, 223–24, 226, 230, 244, 251. See also burqa. Hindu, 250 Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 86, 176, 183, 188, 190 homogeneity, 61 cultural, 276 Honneth, Axel, 9, 103 hospitality, 91, 104 hostility, 134, 154 ethnic, 158 human condition, 194, 202 Human Rights, 4, 31–32, 35, 37, 39–40, 44–47, 101, 127, 135, 148, 176, 184–85, 197–98, 200, 206–08, 266, 279, 280 lesbian and gay human rights, 207 United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 58, 147 women’s human rights, 37, 207 humanism, 202 humanitarianism, 11–12, 14, 127–37, 141–148, 198 humanity, 16, 82, 84, 86–89, 95, 101, 129, 131–32, 134, 147, 153–54, 157–60, 165, 170, 175, 180, 192, 196, 201–04, 209. See also commonality. See also Parochial Altruism. humanize, 132, 133, 136 humankind, 128–29, 131, 133, 136, 180 hybridity / - zation, 192–93 cultural, 193 I identical treatment, 239, 245–46. See also equal/equality. identification, 35–37, 62, 97, 117, 141, 143, 158, 249. See also solidarity. emotional, 143 imaginative, 202 identity, 19–20, 35–38, 76, 84, 160, 163–65, 195, 219, 225, 232, 239, 245–46, 248, 285 Austrian, 165

collective, 84 European, 164 Hindu, 150 Jewish, 150 linguistic, 248 political, 163, 165 religious, 219, 239, 246, 251, 255 sexual, 232 ideological, 92, 127–28, 133–34, 170, 242 post-ideological, 127 imagination, 50, 68, 105, 167, 206 moral, 135, 138, 142, 144 impartial spectator, 276. See also Smith, Adam. impartiality, 12, 19, 21, 128, 131, 249–51, 275–80, 286, 288–89 imperialism, 132, 165,-67, 170, 279 imperial universalism, 14, 17, 22 impossibility theorem, 265. See also Arrow, Keneth. impoverishment, 34, 78 inalienability, 18, 218–225, 228, 230, 231, 233, 235. See also autonomy. incentives, 182 labor, 273–74 incompleteness, 6, 27–29, 37, 49, 272, 282, 289 inclusion-s, 16, 38, 45, 50, 62, 76, 121, 196, 206, 208 indeterminacy, 20, 115, 268, 271–72, 280, 282 individualism, 133, 175, 192 inequality, 30, 38, 104, 130, 222, 225, 280, immigrants, 37, 50, 52, 77, 246, 256. See also alien. illegal, 6, 80 undocumented, 31, 32, 41, 99, 104 insiders, 153–54. See also outsiders. instability, 31, 68 institutions (formalized), 6, 27–28 intelligence, 201 intercivilizational, 131 intercultural egalitarianism, 131 dialogue, 216 neutrality, 133 interdependence, 87, 197 global, 37, 204 intention-s, 110, 113–14, 119–20

298 • Index

interest-s, 21, 33, 47, 82, 83, 84, 88–96, 119, 161, 193, 205–06, 216, 219, 223, 227–28, 259, 261–62, 267–68, 270, 272, 282. See also preference. See also minorities. strategy interest, 234 J Japan, 1, 9, 104 Jew-s, 157, 159–61, 199, 207, 245, 248 Jewish tradition, 165, 166 Jewish politics, 235 Jha, S., 256 Johnson, Matthew, 227, 229 justice, 1, 4, 5, 12, 15, 16, 20–22, 42, 57–58, 61, 71, 75, 78–79, 85–87, 100, 101, 103–04, 122–23, 127, 128–137, 146, 155, 159, 174–176, 179, 189, 195, 198, 201–203, 206, 209, 215, 232, 235, 260, 262, 265–66, 268, 270, 271–72, 278, 279–80, 282, 286, 288–89 as fairness, 266 justification, 8, 14, 82, 84–89, 98, 109, 118, 181, 188 K Kant, Immanuel, 118, 219, 279 Kantian conception, 182 Kantian freedom, 114 Kantian model, 115–16 Kantian moral autonomy, 10, 219, 235 Kantian moral obligations, 190 kindness, 13. See also benevolence. Kirpan, 18, 225–26, 252 Kukathas, Chandran, 215 Kymlicka, Will, 3–4, 35–36, 174, 190, 194, 215, 222, 239, 246 L laicité, 243 laissez-faire, 60 legal status, 32, 35, 39–40, 45, 50. See also citizenship. legein, 69, 72, 73 legitimacy, 15, 46, 67, 69, 89, 130, 135, 177, 181, 183–84, 243, 266, 274 Levey, Geoffrey Brahm, 17, 18, 227 liberal democracies, 17, 19, 32, 69, 215, 216, 217, 227, 240–42, 247, 248, 252–255, 287

liberalism, 3, 5, 14, 15, 17, 20– 22, 61, 133, 175, 178, 189, 198, 218, 260–61, 263, 279, 286 Political Liberalism, 89, 266. (see also Rawls, John) liberations, 166 liberty, 91, 110, 187, 220, 221, 226, 241, 253, 257, 268. See also Berlin, Isaiah. constitution of liberty, 20, 21, 260, 263, 265, 270, 279, 280, 286, 288, 289. (see also Hayek, Friedrich) equal, 239, 266, 267 negative, 113 lifestyles, 64–65 literature, 36–37, 50, 64, 95, 194, 202, 218, 222, 228. See also citizenship. imaginative, 200 multiculturalism, 215 localism, 205 Locke, John, 15, 176, 183, 187, 190, 218 Love, 109, 110, 114, 115, 118, 119, 147, 153, 155, 156, 159, 160, 161–64, 166–69, 195, 203, 217. See also friendship. love of country, 192 love of mankind, 192 (see also Nussbaum, Martha) romantic love, 120 Luther King, Martin, 157 M Mackenzie, Catriona, 217 Margalit, Avishai, 215 marginalization, 169 market, 7, 10, 20, 33–34, 45, 46, 61, 71, 76, 86, 87, 91, 93, 104, 109, 119–22, 263–65, 266, 270, 279, 281, 282 Marx, Karl, 206 Masters, 131, 135 membership, 19, 34, 38–40, 94, 160, 255, 277, 289 comprehensive, 39 open-ended membership, 39 political membership, 30 Meyers, Diana T., 217 Mill, John Stuart, 220 minorities, 2, 17–19, 37, 39, 194, 231–32, 234, 239, 242–46, 248–49, 251, 252, 253–257, 285–86

Index • 299

cultural, 216, 233, 239–40 Modood, Tariq, 243–44 modus vivendi, 19. See also open secularism. monarchy (constitutional), 10, 119 monotonicity, 264 moral claims, 16 morality, 13, 17, 121, 130, 146–47, 157, 165, 192, 215, 217, 288–90. See also imperial universalism. See also liberalism. multiculturalism, 2–4, 15, 17, 92, 100, 104, 192–196, 208–09, 215, 222, 239–243, 247, 254, 263, 279, 285 multiculturalist, 17, 36, 192–195, 209, 215 music, 67, 74, 138 Muslim, 9, 50, 157, 164–65, 192, 196, 224– 25, 229, 243, 245, 246, 248–50, 256, 257 mysticism, 158, 163 N narratives, 7, 8, 22, 143 tragic, 136 national solidarity, 3, 4, 206 unity, 4 nationalism, 39, 41, 50, 127, 155, 179, 193, 208, 242 assimilationist, 196 post-nationalism, 44 nationality, 33, 43, 47, 161, 175, 179, 287 dual, 31, 45 nature, 57, 92, 97, 98, 158, 162 human nature, 131, 146, 202 inner nature, 74 state of nature, 183 NGO (non-government organization), 11, 18, 37, 92–94, 132, 133, 135, 137–38, 144, 148–49 needs, 79, 120, 182, 186, 193, 195, 205, 206, 221, 245, 257, 266–67, 269–70, 282, 286 individual, 63 universal, 79 nepotism, 179 Netherlands, 93, 227 neutral, 41, 67, 193, 240, 251, 276 neutrality, 2, 3, 19, 133, 137, 148, 240–41, 244, 246, 249, 250–51, 265. See also equality. See also universality. nihilism, 70

noblesse oblige, 130, 144 Nussbaum, Martha, 192, 196–97, 206 O obligations, 7, 14, 15, 39–40, 66, 76, 121, 163, 175, 185, 187, 188–89, 192, 203–04, 206, 209, 217, 260, 262, 288–89 imperfect, 186 moral, 130, 177, 189–90, 288 perfect, 279 universal, 15–16, 174, 176, 178, 184 objectivation, 112–13, 115, 118–20 objectivity, 10, 73, 111–12, 114–117 positional objectivity, 276–77 O’Neil, Onora, 1, 22, 187, 279 openness, 121, 158, 289 oppression, 84, 91–93, 96, 99, 104 option-s, 10, 20, 38, 60, 82, 89, 90, 92, 93, 100, 121, 217, 221, 228, 231, 261, 271 organizations, 31, 87, 100, 137–38, 241 humanitarian, 128, 132, 141, 143, 148 Original Position, 266, 273–75, 278. See also Rawls, John. See also Justice as fairness. others, 6, 9, 12–20, 85, 89, 92, 93, 120, 122, 127, 130– 134, 139, 142, 147, 154, 156, 169, 174, 179, 181, 183, 184–189, 194, 203, 205, 208, 219, 221, 225, 226, 239, 272, 285. See also outsiders, citizenship. See also commonality. remote others, 129 outcry (collective), 122 outsiders, 6, 13, 153, 154, 177 P pain, 17, 129, 141, 145, 200–02 emotional, 200 pain thresholds, 201 physical, 200 Parekh, Bhikhu, 256 parochialism, 13, 154, 157, 159, 163, 193 particularism, 3, 17, 79, 178. See also universalism. cultural, 179 particularistic, 86, 193 particularity, 9, 16, 29, 30, 49, 166, 178, 192, 197, 202, 208. See also universality. See also Benhabib, Seyla.

300 • Index

personification, 139–40, 149. See also iconography. phenomena, 78, 114 phenomenological, 111, 118, 138, 142. See also Hegel. language, 114 phenomenology, 177 philanthropy, 130 Phillips, Anne, 15, 16, 286 philosophy, 110, 111–13, 116–122, 158, 169, 175, 202, 235, 280. See also Hegel, Friedrich. normative, 192 political, 1, 2, 162, 260 pity, 12, 128, 130–32, 134, 137–39, 142, 145, 147, 200. See also charity. See also compassion. politics of pity, 135 plan-s, 8, 9, 84, 85, 89, 92, 96, 99, 122, 155 pluralism, 69, 103, 118, 263 Pogge, Thomas, 175, 192, 204, 282 polygamy, 252–53. See also female circumcision. poor, 34, 77, 130, 157, 183, 287. See also disadvantaged. populations, 7, 91, 132–34, 136, 142–45, 148, 154, 177, 248, 256 indigenous, 239, 242 positionality, 21, 263, 279 poverty, 9, 40, 79, 203, 209, 259 global, 137 power (coercive), 15, 188–89 practices (rationally consensual), 118 preconditions (institutional), 117 preferences, 18, 20, 21, 83, 91, 93, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223, 259, 272 individual, 8, 90, 264, 267 revealed, 265, 267 prejudice-s, 12, 95, 120, 129, 189, 250–51, 276 pride, 7, 166 collective, 158, 167 principles, 14, 86, 103 principles of citizenship, 34, cosmopolitan principles, 202, 207 dialogic principles, 198, difference principle, 266, 267, 268, 273, 281, 282, 288 (see also Rawls, John)

normative principles, 145, 198, 254 universalist principles, 128 compatriot priority principle, 14–15, 174, 175–77, 181, 184, 186, 188–89 procedural independence, 18, 218, 220, 222–23, 229, 235 direct, 218, 221, 224–25, 230 indirect, 219, 221, 224–25, 228, 230, 233 processes, 9, 18, 31, 76, 111, 133, 138, 142, 160, 240 cross-border, 35 project-s, 9, 30, 33, 38–39, 42, 46, 47, 58, 59, 60, 64, 69, 75, 78–79, 84, 86, 87, 90, 92, 97, 101, 130–32, 138, 144–146, 164, 196, 260. See also membership. protection, 3, 19, 43, 76, 120, 220–21, 223, 227, 246, 248. See also linguistic identity. hospitable, 89 Q qualification-s, 84, 85, 86, 96, 100, 121 disqualification, 88, 91, 96 Quebec, 243, 246–50, 254 R race, 1, 40, 94, 161, 199, 206 rapprochement, 16, 195, 197–98 rationality, 63, 201, 262, 263, 268, 272. See also intelligence. See also inner consistency. deliberative, 59, 64, 69, 71, 72, 75, 78 Rawls, John, 15, 20, 21, 86, 103, 183, 215, 219, 235, 254, 260, 261–63, 266–283, 290 Raz, Joseph, 215, 217 Re “T” (1992), 221 reality, 21, 41, 58–59, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77, 84, 87, 111, 113–14, 116, 130, 140, 165, 167, 200, 206, 224, 286 social reality, 64, 113–15, 119, 121, 219, realization, 10, 11, 14, 111–13, 115, 119 self-realization, 111 reason, 73, 113, capacity for reason, 200, 202 cultural reasons, 93 deliberative reason, 59, 60, 64, 73, 79

Index • 301

political reasons, 196 speculative reason, 56, 60 reasonable accommodation of minorities, 239, 246, 248 recipients, 20, 21, 129, 131, 142, 144, 261, 262, 272–73, 279, 288 reciprocity, 18, 21, 34, 120, 122, 218, 219, 221–23, 225–26, 230, 233. See also inalienability. inter-subjective, 120, 121 recognition, 3, 10, 12, 16, 36, 59, 83, 87, 103, 131, 145–46, 200–01, 217, 222, 241, 259, 282 embodied, 202 reflection, 5, 12, 110, 115–16, 140, 162, 217 critical, 134–35, 206, 218–20, 223–25, 228–30, 233 refugees, 34 reflective equilibrium, 260. See also Rawls, John. Reich, Rob, 222 relations (causal), 113 relation-to-self, 114 relationship-s, 1, 3, 38, 60, 65, 73, 74–76, 99, 102, 109, 115, 118, 141, 194, 202, 203, 217, 246, 278 relativism, 70, 276 religion, 14, 19, 38, 40, 94, 133, 157, 158, 166, 167, 170, 175, 180, 199, 206, 224, 240–250, 252–53, 257 dynamic, 158, 159, 163, 165, 288 open, 13 static, 156, 157, 163, 165 religious and cultural, 161, 192, 221, 228, 239–42, 244, 248, 253–55 representation-s, 12, 29, 36, 65, 66, 121, 130, 245–48, 257 direct, 39 visual, 137–144 resistance-1, 9, 101, 145. See also aliens. responsibility, 37, 72, 127, 129, 134, 139, 145, 178–79, 204, 278 right-s (abstract), 121 basic, 15, 255, 275, 278 cultural, 3, 222, 233, 235 negative, 176, 184–188 positive, 176, 184–188 privacy, 31, 34, 45

social, 3, 76, 101, 184 rightness, 115 moral, 118 risk, 72, 127, 221, 223, 227, 230, Rorty, Richard, 202 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 86, 116, 130, 156, 183, 190 S safety helmets, 223 scarcity, 78 scapegoat mechanism, 155–157, 160, 162–165, 168 Scheffler, Samuel, 178, 204 secularism, 19, 20, 240–43, 252–257 moderate/open, 20, 244–251, 287 rigid/closed, 245, 254 secularization (discursive), 133 security, 8, 33, 39, 44, 79, 84, 109, 186, 219, 221, 225–26. See also equality. self-determining, 118 self-evident, 112, 114, 132, 175, 194, 202, 224 self governance, 246, 257 self-realizing, 112 self-recurring, 117 self-referential, 57, 77, 112 self-unchaining, 115 self-will, 117 Sen, Amartya, 20, 161, 259, 260, 287, 289. See also capability. See also positionality. sentience, 115 sentimentalism, 131, 142–144, 146 humanitarian, 128, 129, 133–141 servants, 131, 135 shock, 100, 138–40 Shue, Henry, 186 Sikhs, 18, 223, 226, 248–49 Singer, Peter, 203 slave, 136, 220 slavery, 28, 136, 147–48, 220, 235 Smith, Adam, 130 society. closed societies, 153, 157–160, 162–165, 167 liberal society, 215, 249 modern societies, 112, 118, 121

302 • Index

multicultural society, 9, 17, 18, 215 open society, 153, 159, 165, 166–67, 169, 221 universalistic societies, 57 well-ordered society, 260, 266, 269, 281 (see also Arrow, K.; see also Rawls, J.) solidarity, 4, 13, 35, 37, 40, 89, 93, 105, 123, 129, 132, 133, 145, 153–55, 161, 166 , 169, 206, 227. See also transnationalism. See also citizenship. civic, 96, 100 internal, 157 mechanical, 155 antagonistic, 156, 168 special treatment, 1, 239–40, 242. See also equality. spheres (Functionalized Institutional Spheres), 62–64 Spheres of Justice, 86, 103 (see also Walzer, M.) Spinner-Halev, J., 56 Spirit 115–122. See Also Hegel, F. objective, 115 self-referential, 112 stability, 66, 183 state (competitive), 34, 38 state neutrality, 240, 244 stereotypes, 250, 254–55. stereotypification, 160 stigmatization, 144. See also vulnerability. Stoljar, Natalie, 217 subjectivity, 60, 110, 112, 114–15. See also Spirit. Mutually communicative subjects, 117 subordination, 134, 224. See also inalienability. suffering, 11, 12, 14, 16, 97, 128–130, 133–143, 145, 147, 166, 201. See also others. superiority, 116, 128, 196 civilizational, 129, 135 moral, 12 symbolic, 65, 66–69, 76, 129, 134–35, 138, 141–42, 144, 229–31 symbolically, 129–30, 141, 251 symmetrical, 14, 178, 277. See also impartial. See also equal.

symmetry, 146, 263, 268, 279 sympathy, 128, 130, 131, , 134, 136, 142, 144, 145, 147. See also compassion. See also pity. See also Smith, Adam. See also recipients. system (ethical), 10, 117, 119, 121–23. See also Hegel, F. technical, 6, 62, 67, 77 T Tamir, Yael, 175 Taylor, Charles, 243–44, 246 technologies, 6, 62, 130, 135, 137 teleology, 207 test, 73, 74, 86–89, 97, 100, 271 teukein, 72–73 Theory (Critical), 99, 192 ethical theory, 174 mimetic theory, 155, 157, 160, 162–63 social theory, 101, 111 social choice theory, 20–21, 259–62, 283. See also Arrow, Keneth. See also positionality. thought (capacity for rational thought), 199, 201–02 transcultural, 61 transitivity, 270, 272. See also Arrow, Keneth. transnationalism-s, 37, 43, 49 transposability, 142–43 transposition, 141–42, 150 tsunami, 1 Tully, James, 3 typification-s, 139–41, 150, iconographic typifications, 138, 143 U United States, 30, 31, 33, 38, 40, 46, 50, 82, 164, 231, 235, 153 universal egalitarianism, 12, 15, 181 universalism, 3, 5, 14–17, 22, 58, 64, 79, 86, 128, 131, 142, 145, 157–60, 162, 166, 169, 175, 181, 193, 196–98, 201, 208, 279, 286. See also particularism. abstract, 21 Christian Universalism, 13, 165 moral universalism, 176, 178, 189, 194 reiterative universalism, 166

Index • 303

universalistic, 57, 58, 86, 192–93 universality, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 16, 19, 21, 49, 58, 176, 178, 180, 181, 188–89, 192, 208, 243, 262–63, 279, 282, 286, 288. See also equality. See also neutrality. utility function, 33, 34 V veil of ignorance, 273–74. See also Rawls, John. victims, 12, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134–140, 142–43, 145, 150, 170 victimhood, 143 violence, 144, 155–56, 170, 183, 185, 257 visuality, 135, 141 voice-s, 39, 48, 85, 121, 241, 252–53 vulnerability, 16, 136, 139, 141, 143, 201–02 bodily vulnerability, 201 vulnerable, 12, 39, 130, 134, 137, 144. See also stigmatization. W Wall, Iris Marion, 221

Walzer, Michael, 86, 165, 169 war, 33, 38, 42, 69, 90, 128, 130, 137, 139–40, 147, 154–56, 162, 165, 168, 188 First World War, 136 Second World War, 3, 73, 76, 131, 259 welfare policies, 4 states, 33–34, 205, 263 well-being, 1, 33 Western corporations, 144 Western humanitarianism, 11, 12, 14, 127–30, 135, 144 Williams, Mellissa, 256 working-class, 132 worth, 8, 82, 84–89, 92, 93, 95–96, 99– 100, 104, 120, 178, 203, 220, 233, 236 X Xenophobia, 165 Y Young, Iris Marion, 27, 35–36, 143, 199, 203–204, 239