How To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism: A Tribute to Michael Brooks

by Matthew McManus

the contradictions of neoliberalism abroad through neoconservative empire building, post-modern conservatives want to tear down the internationalist order to free themselves to reconstruct ethno nationalist polities from within. The enemies of the right, and the battles they seek, are not internal rather than externalized.

One of our jobs will be to combine the localism of militant particularism with the internationalism of classical socialism.

From the beginning cosmopolitanism looked sharply on the arbitrary accumulation of power in the hands of some over others and strove to wean us off the conceit that this was simply the way things must be.

Stoics like Seneca were also among the

first to stress the fundamental equality of all human beings,

A tragic irony of the early tradition is that it is difficult to dissociate the history of cosmopolitanism from imperialism and political quietism on a lot of important issues.

times. Cosmopolitanism has often had a radical edge to it that makes it eminently compatible with a tradition like socialism. Both

are fundamentally humanistic doctrines that reject artificial differences in wealth and power playing a determinant role in social relations. But at many points cosmopolitanism can slide into a kind of cheesy moralism which sheds a tear for current social conditions but is incapable of getting at the real roots of the problem. At its worst cosmopolitanism can either serve as an apologetics or even a justification for the exercise of the most brutal forms of power; as Martti Koskeniemmi will remind us in The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, many of the Founding Fathers of international law saw colonialism as a way of spreading Enlightened doctrines across the world at the point of a gun.

So what emerged in the early liberal era was a strange mélange of emancipatory principles advocating universal human rights, a defense of the modern leviathan of state and its active role in advancing market culture, a wariness of that same state where it might prove a tool to challenge property, a defense of sovereignty for the “civilized” world of possessive individualism, and a limitless right to conquer and even exterminate those who were deemed uncivilized by European standards.

Kant’s initial project was aimed at explaining how pure reason was possible for human subjects, before going on to explore its fundamental limitations in terms of what we can possibly know.

As it turned out these limitations are quite glaring; Kant insists that from the standpoint of pure reason at least, we’ll never have an answer to big questions about the transcendent meaning of existence.

Consequently Kant argues that all states must

transition toward a republican form of government, that such states should band together in a federation, and gradually seek to both eliminate armies and make war permanently illegal.

The paradoxical qualities of this reasoning are rather transparent. On the one hand the market is to be treated as a sublime object, beyond our full capacity to understand or control. On the other we can indeed know that the market is beneficent, and that even if no one can control the market we can nonetheless impact and damage it through interventionist policies.