Theory & Event

Internet culture operates according to certain norms. One of them — - Godwin’s Law — - governs deployment of the Nazi analogy in theoretical conversation and political disputation. Godwin’s Law does not deny per se the validity of such a comparison; rather, to preserve the value and force of the comparison, it frowns upon its indiscriminate use. This stricture has led, in turn, to the presumption that the first person to invoke the Nazis in a discussion has both ended and conceded the argument. Nazis are for losers.

Seyla Benhabib’s first lecture in Another Cosmopolitanism, “The Philosophical Foundations of Cosmopolitan Norms,” begins with a section entitled “The Eichmann Trial.” Benhabib ostensibly discusses the kidnapping and trial for heuristic reasons, but the reader might well be concerned with the possible political effects of her startling introductory textual alliance with the Nazis. It’s not so much that the rest of Benhabib’s reflections are reduced to afterthoughts. It’s the suspicion that the reader is being set up to reach, without a full airing, certain problematic conclusions that Benhabib herself declines explicitly to draw: namely, that normative cosmopolitanism will and should flourish, everywhere.

Another Cosmopolitanism posits a political world in flux. “We have entered a phase in the evolution of global civil society, which is characterized by a transition from international to cosmopolitan norms of justice” (15–16). The former govern relations between and among states; the latter pertain to “individuals as moral and legal persons in a worldwide civil society” (16). With rampant ethnic cleansing, state terrorism, torture, extralegal rendition, secret prison camps, political and economic refugees, and mass migrations, this is a necessary and welcome development. Benhabib not only affirms the changes underway; she theorizes how best to augment, enhance, and disseminate them. And this is where things get tricky. How do you reconcile the imposition of cosmopolitan norms, the right to universal hospitality, crimes against humanity, and the right to have rights (to employ Arendt’s formulation) with the democratic will of self-governing sovereign states? This is problematic not only with people already committed to democratic principles and values; it is also and especially problematic where there is no such prior commitment. Democracies, of course, can reflexively reconstitute themselves; insofar as self-legislation means self-creation and self-definition, peoples cast and recast themselves through politics (34, 36). They possess the ability to close the gap between actuality and idealization. Other peoples may need assistance closing it.

Benhabib’s quest for closure draws inspiration from Rousseau. Her theorizations rely on a hypothetical future in which the democratic paradoxes engendered by cosmopolitanism have been overcome through a series of democratic mediations. We live, however, in the interim. What, for example, is to be done about Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Iraq? This is where the Eichmann affair, bidding to become cosmopolitanism’s veritable Munich, paves the way for an aggressive posture toward contemporary political phenomena. How often can we allow justice to be delivered decades after the fact by show trials, whether of Eichmann or Saddam Hussein? Benhabib’s ethos not only allows for humanitarian intervention, it positively welcomes, even encourages, it. She acknowledges the distance between the moral force of cosmopolitan norms and their enforcement. In the case of Kosovo, NATO negotiated it properly. In the cases of Rwanda and Darfur, the world watched — - and blinked. Benhabib laments the inconsistency and suggests an undeniable obligation to intervene, implicitly necessitating a resort to violence which becomes not only inescapable but potentially routine.

In her 2002 book, The Claims of Culture, Benhabib wrote: “To be sure, sometimes the hermeneutic conversation is far from civil, egalitarian, and mutually enriching: Wars, conquests, and plunders bring cultures and civilizations together as much as le doux commerce and other peaceful transactions. Some conversations are confrontations; and confrontations can be more or less violent. They may not permit a Verschmelzung, a melting together and into one another. They may present us with tragic alternatives in which there are winners and losers...” (34-35). In Another Cosmopolitanism, however, Benhabib does not pursue...