The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal - Hardcover

Nussbaum, Martha C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674052498 ISBN 13: 9780674052499

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2019

Synopsis

From one of our preeminent philosophers―winner of the Berggruen Prize―a work that engages critically with important examples of the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient Greece and Rome to the present.

The cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought begins with the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, responded that he was a citizen of the world. Rather than declaring his lineage, city, social class, or gender, he defined himself as a human being, implicitly asserting the equal worth of all human beings.

Nussbaum pursues this “noble but flawed” vision of world citizenship as it finds expression in figures of Greco-Roman antiquity, Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century, Adam Smith during the eighteenth century, and various contemporary thinkers. She confronts its inherent tensions: the ideal suggests that moral personality is complete, and completely beautiful, without any external aids, while reality insists that basic material needs must be met if people are to realize fully their inherent dignity. Given the global prevalence of material want, the lesser social opportunities of people with physical and cognitive disabilities, the conflicting beliefs of a pluralistic society, and the challenge of mass migration and asylum seekers, what political principles should we endorse? Nussbaum brings her version of the Capabilities Approach to these problems, and she goes further: she takes on the challenge of recognizing the moral claims of nonhuman animals and the natural world.

The insight that politics ought to treat human beings both as equal to each other and as having a worth beyond price is responsible for much that is fine in the modern Western political imagination. The Cosmopolitan Tradition extends Nussbaum’s work, urging us to focus on the humanity we share rather than all that divides us.

About this title

About the Author

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. Among her many awards are the 2018 Berggruen Prize, the 2017 Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.

Review

“At a time of growing national chauvinism, Martha Nussbaum’s excellent restatement of the cosmopolitan tradition is a welcome and much-needed contribution. Masterfully tracing the development of the idea of universal human dignity from antiquity to the present, she highlights the major contributions of this tradition to our thinking about morality and law, while also providing a persuasive critique of its limitations. Her revision of the tradition, articulated here...is illuminating and thought-provoking.”―Lior Erez, Times Higher Education

“In a penetrating and salient collection of essays, Nussbaum...examines the cosmopolitan tradition and its relationship to the challenges of pluralism and globalism in contemporary life...A timely and insightful analysis of ethical dilemmas.”―Kirkus Reviews

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0674052498
• ISBN 13: 9780674052499
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320