Robert Fine

Taking the ‘Ism’ Out of Cosmopolitanism An Essay in Reconstruction

This article addresses the character and potential of the radical cosmopolitanism that is currently flourishing within the social sciences. I explore how cosmopolitanism is articulated in a number of disciplines–including international law, international relations, sociology and political philosophy–and how it conceives of its own age. I focus first of all on the timeconsciousness that informs the cosmopolitan representation of modernity, in particular its projection of a rupturebetween the old ‘Westphalian’ order of nation states and the advancing cosmopolitan order of the present, and, second, on the nature of cosmopolitan critiques of nationalism, socialism and ‘modernist’ social and political thought in general. Behind this focus lie a question over the extent to which cosmopolitanism replicates in its own normative proposals the defects of that which it criticizes, and another question over the means by which the critical kernel of contemporary cosmopolitanism can be separated from its doctrinal shell.

Civil society theory, enlightenment and critique

This essay examines the current state of civil society theory and its debt to Enlightenment concepts of civil society. The central argument is that contemporary civil society theory loses touch both with the critical aspect of enlightenment thought itself and with the critique of enlightenment thought that we find most developed in Hegel and Marx. After charting the development of the Enlightenment perspectives on civil society, and the critique that Hegel and Marx make of civil society, two related points are made: first, that it is one‐sided and menacing to grant primacy to civil society, just as it is to grant primacy to the state or to the market; second, that further research in the area should develop a ‘third way’: one that recognizes the validity of the concept of civil society without romanticizing it, without idealizing it, and without abstracting it from its social and historical ground. In conclusion, it is argued that the identification of civil society with ethical life not only avoids confr...

Kant’s Theory of Cosmopolitanism and Hegel’s Critique

Kant’s theory of cosmopolitan right is widely viewed as the philosophical origin of modern cosmopolitan thought. Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theory of cosmopolitan right, by contrast, is usually viewed as regressive and nationalistic in relation to both Kant and the cosmopolitan tradition. This paper reassesses the political and philosophical character of Hegel’s critique of Kant, Hegel’s own relation to cosmopolitan thinking, and more fleetingly some of the implications of his critique for contemporary social criticism. It is argued that Hegel’s critique was neither regressive nor nationalistic, but rather that he advanced the theory of cosmopolitan right beyond the Kantian framework of formal natural law. The main proposition is that Hegel was not only the first to recognize cosmopolitanism as a definite social form of right, relative to other forms in the modern system of right, but that his ‘scientific and objective’ approach to the issue makes a substantial contribution to restoring the severed connections between the realism of war between nations and the normativism of perpetual peace.

Fighting with phantoms: a contribution to the debate on antisemitism in Europe

ABSTRACT The point of departure of this paper is the polarization of ways of thinking about antisemitism in Europe, between those who see its recent resurgence and those that affirm its empirical marginalization and normative delegitimation. The historical question raised by this polarization of discourses is this: what has happened to the antisemitism that once haunted Europe? Both the current camps—‘alarmists’ and ‘deniers’, as they are sometimes known, or, perhaps more accurately, new antisemitism theorists and their critics—have the strength to challenge celebratory views of European civilization. One camp sees the return to Europe of an old antisemitism in a new and mediated guise. The other sees the return to Europe of a rhetoric of antisemitism that is not only anachronistic but also delusory and deceptive. Overshadowing this debate is the memory of the Holocaust and the continuing presence of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The aim of this paper is to get inside these discourses and deconstruct the dualism that generates homogenizing and stigmatizing typifications on either side. The spirit of Hannah Arendt hovers over this work and the question of the meaning of her legacy runs through the text.

Crimes Against Humanity Hannah Arendt and the Nuremberg Debates

The institution of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg in 1945 was an event which marked the birth of cosmopolitan law as a social reality. Cosmopolitan law has existed as an abstract idea at least since the writings of Kant in the late eighteenth century, but Nuremberg turned the notion of humanity from a merely regulative idea into a substantial entity. Crimes against humanity differ significantly from the traditional categories of international law: war crimes and crimes against peace. While the latter generally treats states as subjects of right and upholds the principle of national sovereignty, the former treats individuals as subjects of right and encroaches on national sovereignty. I focus here on the writings of Hannah Arendt on the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial and the actuality of crimes against humanity perpetrated in totalitarian regimes. I explore her relation to the optimistic and naive cosmopolitanism of Karl Jaspers, as well as to the two prevailing forms of critical thought: the cynical realism towards the law adopted by many of the defendants, including Carl Schmitt, and the deconstructive attitude to humanism and technology adopted by Martin Heidegger. I maintain that Arendts rugged cosmopolitanism, tested against its critics, remains exceptionally revealing on the issue of crimes against humanity now that this issue has re-emerged, after many years of silence, as arguably the most important question of our own day.

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE: THE EQUIVOCATIONS OF THE NEW COSMOPOLITANISM

Our point of departure is a reservation concerning the validity of cosmopolitan ideas in response to 9/11. Cosmopolitanism in the social and political sciences plays an important role in the reconstruction of conceptual tools, the diagnosis of the current epoch and the creation of new normative standards. Its key motif, however, that of epochal change from a nationally-based to a cosmopolitan world order, is prematurely dismissive of traditional categories and assimilative of a normative vision. The separation of the present from the past is as overstated as is its conflation with the future.

Social theory after the Holocaust

This collection of essays explores the character and quality of the Holocausts impact and the abiding legacy it has left for social theory. The premise which informs the contributions is that, ten years after its publication, Zygmunt Baumans claim that social theory has either failed to address the Holocaust or protected itself from its implications remains true.

Introduction to the special issue on "Social Theory and Natural Law"

Relations between social theory and natural law have not figured prominently in scholarly debates, and the case for their interconnections, which is far from self-evident, needs explicit justification. The aim of this special issue, which is to explore linkages between social theory and natural law, requires that we take a step back and redefine the ways in which these traditions are conventionally viewed. We see natural law as a heterogeneous intellectual tradition whose core lies in the question of universalism. We can differentiate between traditional and modern, conservative and radical, religious and secular forms of natural law, as well as between natural law and natural right; but in all cases the problem of universalism remains central. We see social theory as a modern intellectual programme that, over the past two hundred or so years, has sought to understand the rise and main features of a number of socio-historical trends that still very much configure the world in which we live: capitalism, democracy, the international system of states, and the differentiation of spheres of social life. The history of social theory’s relations to natural law builds on a distinction between the difficult but often intimate relation to natural law that social theory has actually experienced, and secondary reconstructions of social theory that read as if social theory has definitively moved beyond natural law and established in its place a scientific perspective. Our special issue confronts the latter view by explicitly addressing their interconnections. We should like to make explicit four related aspects of the relationship between these two traditions. First, natural law brings the normative into social theory based on some kind of contrast between actually existing society and an ideal society organized according to the laws of nature. Both traditions seek to understand the tensions between description and normativity. Second, social theory brings history into natural law by emphasizing human agency in the making of history and the changing circumstances under which human beings make history. It brings contingency into natural law by emphasizing that social life is not organized according to fixed laws of nature or history. An ideal society is neither the starting point nor the endpoint of history. Third, the idea of natural law only Editorial

The Marx-Hegel Relationship: Revisionist Interpretations?

right to morality (Moralitat) and its internal division into responsibility, welfare and conscience. He moves from morality to the forms of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) which include the family, civil society, the state and relations between states. The ‘higher dialectic’ is the movement of right through its various concepts and shapes. It is not an ‘external activity of subjective thought... but the very soul of the content which puts forth its branches and fruit organically’ and which thought merely observes (Hegel  §). Hegel’s philosophy of right foregoes the purely historical task of viewing ‘the emergence and development of determinations of right as they appear in time’ (Hegel  §R), for the development from the most abstract to the most concrete is a conceptual sequence which may or may not coincide with the temporal sequence of their actual appearance. Hegel characterises his methodology thus: We merely wish to observe how the concept determines itself, and we force ourselves not to add anything of our own thought and opinions. What we obtain in this way, however, is a series of thoughts and another series of existent shapes, in which it may happen that the temporal sequence of their actual appearance is to some extent different from the conceptual sequence. Thus we cannot say, for example, that property existed before the family, although property is nevertheless dealt with first. One might accordingly ask at this point why we do not begin with the highest instance, that is, with the concretely true. The answer will be that we wish to see the truth precisely in the form of a result, and it is essential for this purpose that we should first comprehend the abstract concept itself. What is actual, the shape which the concept assumes, is therefore from our point of view only the subsequent and further stage, even if it should come first itself in actuality. The course we follow is that whereby the abstract forms reveal themselves not as existing for themselves, but as untrue (Hegel  §A). Hegel provided the model for Marx. Marx too started from the simplest and most abstract elements of contemporary society and worked upwards toward the more complex and concrete. It is only their subject matter that is different and marks them apart. Capital & Class #75 78 The case for reading Hegel and Marx together In the Philosophy of Right Hegel explores the forms of right which constitute political modernity while in Capital Marx explores the forms of value which constitute economic modernity. Another way of putting this is to say that the subject matter of the Philosophy of Right comprises the forms taken by subjects in the modern age, that is, the people who bring their commodities to market (including their own capacity for labour and intellectual ideas) and sell them in exchange for money or other goods. The subject matter of Capital comprises the forms taken by things in modern capitalist society; that is, by the products of human labour. We should not make any a priori assumption that one subject matter is more essential than the other. With Hegel we address the ideal forms of modernity, with Marx its material forms. But their work is complementary in that Hegel’s analysis is concerned with the forms of right which constitute modern political life, while Marx’s analysis is concerned with the forms of value which constitute modern economic life. Read together, they offer a more ‘rounded’ image of modernity as a whole than each can offer in isolation. Marx did not realise how closely his method followed that developed by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right. Both start with the simplest and most abstract form of their subject matter and progress to more complex and concrete forms. In relation to the political forms of the modern age Hegel argues that the simplest and most abstract element is abstract right and analyses its self-division into ‘person’ and ‘thing’. In relation to the economic forms of the modern age Marx contends that the simplest and most abstract element is the commodity and analyses its self-division into value and use value. For Hegel, the movement is from abstract right through contract and law to the state. For Marx, it is from value through exchange value and money to capital. They both begin with simple forms which permit them to explain more developed forms and order their presentation according to the increasing complexity of these forms, so that at every level the theory can be formulated in terms of concepts elaborated at the previous level. In neither case are we presented with the ‘empirically existent’, for both the forms of the state and the forms of capital abstract from all the contingencies, accidents and differences which they possess in actual political and economic systems, but in neither case 79 The Marx-Hegel relationship are we given an a priori construction. Their objects of investigation are different but their approach to scientific investigation is the same. Capital and the Philosophy of Right also supplement one another by overcoming the other’s potential limitations. In the case of the Philosophy of Right, what is overcome is the idealism which flows from identifying modernity exclusively with the ideal forms of legal and political life. In the case of Capital what is overcome is the materialism which flows from identifying modernity equally exclusively with the material forms of economic life. In fact, Hegel was an idealist only to the extent that he focused on the ideal forms of subjectivity which mark the modern age at the expense of the material forms taken by products of human labour; and Marx was a materialist only to the extent that he focused on the economic forms taken by the products of labour at the expense of the ideal forms of the modern subject. Both Hegel’s idealism and Marx’s materialism are wrong only to the extent that they are one-sided, but in their own spheres of investigation they are equally valid. Such tendencies to one-sidedness as are present in Hegel and Marx may have been accentuated, however, in two traditions of social theory derived from them: one drawn from Hegel, fixes on the forms of freedom and discipline which mark the modern age and uses the concept of modernity to convey this focus; the other drawn from Marx, concentrates on the commodification of social life and uses the term capitalism. (Fine : ch.) Recognition of the unity of Hegel and Marx allows us to keep in mind that the dichotomies of the modern age— subject and object, person and thing, freedom and determination, politics and economics, right and value—are social rather than merely cognitive and historically grounded rather than reducible to general considerations of an abstract theoretical type. It means that we start from the substance of the social order rather than proceed atomistically and end up in the juxtaposition of separate spheres. It makes it possible to comprehend the twin illusions of the modern age, political freedom as well as economic determination, the fetishism of the subject as well as the fetishism of the commodity, rather than oscillate from side to side. If Hegel’s concern was with personification and the fetishism of the subject, and Marx’s with reification and the fetishism of the commodity, it is when we draw these abstract forms of domination together that we can see a) that the modern age Capital & Class #75 80 creates and recreates these divisions and oppositions, b) that the achievement of the modern age is to contain and support such contradictions, and c) that the greatest danger arises when subject and object are cast adrift from and lose touch with one another. One manifestation of this separation is to be found in the phenomenon of totalitarianism, and one substantial ‘payoff’ of this intellectual reconstruction of the Hegel-Marx relation lies in our refreshed ability to grasp a phenomenon with which Marx never got to grips and on which Marxism has all too often foundered. Hegel’s philosophy of right embraces the r ight of subjective freedom as a supreme achievement of the modern age, but it also stands in opposition to subjectivism (or the fetishism of the subject) which converts the subject into an absolute and fixes on this moment in its ‘difference from and opposition to the universal’ (Hegel  §R). Hegel’s insistence that the goal of a free mind is to ‘make freedom objective’ indicates both that the right of subjective freedom has to be actualised in the world as something substantial and politically real, and that the metamorphosis of the subject into a supreme power, unrestricted by any spiritual or material constraint, is not the goal of a free mind. For Hegel, the distinction between subjectivity and subjectivism is crucial. If the former is the achievement of the modern age, the latter constitutes its pathology. For the subject becomes like a God. Its will appears absolute. It demands to be worshipped. What starts life as a principle of critical thought becomes in the course of its own development a source of modern superstition and subjection. Nowhere is this critique more sharply drawn out than in Hegel’s analysis of the subjectivism of the modern state. The state presents itself as an earthly God. It assumes its own divinity. It demands to be worshipped. It equates itself to the power of reason itself. It does not appear as a form of right relative to all other forms, but as the Absolute. The concept of the modern state is itself irrational, one-sided, untrue. The contradiction at the heart of the modern state, as Hegel presents it, does not lie in the difference between its concept and the grubby empirical existence of actual states but in the concept itself. The pretension of the modern state to be absolute is dangerous enough without political philosophy demanding that all obstacles to the realisation of this pretension be overcome. 81 The Marx-Hegel relationship

Natural law and critical theory: Bringing rights back in

This paper re-assesses the significance of the idea of ‘right’ in the tradition of critical theory. Focusing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, especially their confrontation with totalitarianism, it addresses their conceptualization of rights, their engagement with the philosophies of right created by Kant and Hegel, and the ambivalent place of Marx in their thinking about rights. My argument is that critical theory turned to natural rights in response to the perceived difficulties positive sociology had in confronting the barbarities of fascism and Stalinism. Critical theory steered a path between philosophies of right that acknowledged the idea of right within an unacceptably naturalistic frame of reference, and a sociological consciousness that de-natured the idea of right at the cost of its devaluation. Arendt and Adorno both confronted the contradictions of an age in which the rights of the individual were elevated as a supreme value while individuality was subjected to the forces of technological and economic determination. Both understood the barbarism of their times in terms of the disintegration of mediations between freedom and determination. Both recognized the gulf that separates the concept of rights from the material interests, inequalities and prejudices concealed behind them. And both drew on the critical substance of natural right theory to distinguish between the critique of rights, which has as its end their revaluation, and the trashing of rights, which serves to reinforce their devaluation. I argue that there is much to be gained, in terms of our understanding both of rights and of critique, from critical theory’s engagement with the natural law tradition.