Cosmopolitan Risk, Neoliberal Un-Freedom: Transparency and Responsibility in John LeCarré’s The Constant Gardener

At the heart of both Kantian cosmopolitanism and liberal capitalism is the belief that they offer the best option for freedom from parochial curtailments of safety and liberty. On the one hand, a cosmopolitan federation of states provides the best option for freeing Europe (and, thus, the argument claims, the globe) from the violence that follows national affiliations and sovereignty. On the other hand, laissez-faire economics best ensures individual autonomy and freedom. While one focuses on the universal and the other on the individual, both understand freedom as best emerging from the disappearance of the nation-state. But, alongside both notions of freedom, cosmopolitanism and liberal capitalism both displace risk, by either attempting to eliminate it altogether in global geopolitical harmony or limiting it to an expression of personal decision-making and enterprise. As a result, the risks that accompany the expansion and operation of contemporary global capital tend to have no way to be expressed outside of historically familiar and paternalist colonial language of civilization and personal responsibility. This paper examines how John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener provides a way to think about globalized risk and responsibility outside of the limitations of cosmopolitan and capitalist discourses by making visible the differential costs both cosmopolitanism and capitalism impose on bodies and places. I argue that the novel uses explicitly cosmopolitan rhetoric of global ethical and political responsibility to critique the self-centered entrepreneurial rationalism of contemporary neoliberalism and its implications for thinking about risk in a transnational context.

At the heart of both Kantian cosmopolitanism and liberal capitalism is the belief that they offer the best option for freedom from parochial curtailments of safety and liberty. On the one hand, a cosmopolitan federation of states provides the best option for freeing Europe (and, thus, the argument claims, the globe) from the violence that follows national affiliations and sovereignty. On the other hand, laissez-faire economics best ensures individual autonomy and freedom. While one focuses on the universal and the other on the individual, both understand freedom as best emerging from the disappearance of the nation-state. But, alongside both notions of freedom, cosmopolitanism and liberal capitalism both displace risk, by either attempting to eliminate it altogether in global geopolitical harmony or limiting it to an expression of personal decision-making and enterprise. As a result, the risks that accompany the expansion and operation of contemporary global capital tend to have no way to be expressed outside of historically familiar and paternalist colonial language of civilization and personal responsibility. This paper examines how John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener provides a way to think about globalized risk and responsibility outside of the limitations of cosmopolitan and capitalist discourses by making visible the differential costs both cosmopolitanism and capitalism impose on bodies and places. I argue that the novel uses explicitly cosmopolitan rhetoric of global ethical and political responsibility to critique the self-centered entrepreneurial rationalism of contemporary neoliberalism and its implications for thinking about risk in a transnational context. cosmopolitan views than one might expect of a mid-level diplomat and, on the other hand, the ease with which cosmopolitan platitudes are co-opted in service of neoliberal expansion (paralleling the similar co-optation of cosmopolitanism by colonial projects) (Brennan, 1997;Calhoun, 2002;Cheah, 2006)). The substantive difference between Harvey's and Justin's descriptions remains, however, the forthright acknowledgement of market forces. But as Justin's future wife, Tessa, makes clear in a rejoinder about the responsibility to intervene in failed states, international trade cannot be understood outside of market forces: 'You negotiate with other countries, don't you? You cut deals with them. You legitimize them through trading partnerships. Are you telling us that there's one ethical standard for your country and another for the rest' (Le Carré, 2001: 146, emphasis in original)? Her reply reveals that discussions of successful and failed states rest on market decisions in ways that Justin does not want to acknowledge with his ongoing investment in imperial diplomacy between ' civilized' states.
These tensions between the neoliberal state, responsibility, and, as the novel unfolds, risk undertaken in restitution of colonial and neocolonial wrongs, are the engine of Le Carré's critique. Tessa deliberately courts risk once she and Justin arrive in Nairobi, escalating the scale of these risks further after she delivers a stillborn child.
As understood by both Tessa and the novel, risk is the hinge between the neoliberal status quo (which understands market gains as the only measure of freedom and value) and the demands of responsibility (framed as deliberately cosmopolitan in its scope in the novel). Put differently, and to use the novel's medical rhetoric: if cosmopolitan ideals of shared humanity work to diagnose the ills of globalized neoliberal realpolitik, then risk is imagined as, if not the cure, then as palliative careand care that is deliberately cosmopolitan in its application.
Cosmopolitan values have long been understood as those most likely to inspire the production of a more secure global public sphere. For Immanuel Kant, for instance, one of the three articles of his vision of global peace is the right to free, cosmopolitan mobility which derives from shared, human inhabitance of limited global space; the right to present oneself to societies different from that of one's birth is one that Johansen: Cosmopolitan Risk, 'belongs to all mankind in virtue of our common right of possession on the surface of the earth on which, as it is a globe, we cannot be infinitely scattered, and must in the end reconcile ourselves to existence side by side' (Kant, 1903;138). Cosmopolitan individual mobility-and subsequent hospitality-offers, for Kant, a scaled-down model of the relationship between states, working together for global security: 'In this way far distant territories may enter into peaceful relations with one another.
These relations may at last come under the public control of law, and thus the human race may be brought nearer the realisation of a cosmopolitan constitution' (Kant, 1903;139). For Kant, a cosmopolitan constitution is one that is resolutely liberal and republican: made up of autonomous subjects and nation-states, working together to create and preserve a secure and lasting global peace. The liberal cosmopolitan values he espouses leads to particular practices designed around them, all of which work to make the globe peaceful and safer.
Emerging in response to Kantian philosophy, modern iterations of cosmopolitanism have, at their root, a similar preoccupation with linking cosmopolitan values with the practices necessary for a globally secure life. In its post-World War Two iteration, cosmopolitan theory has thus interrogated the relationship between the subject, the nation-state, and a broader vision of global safety and security. Much of this work indicates a debt to Hannah Arendt, one of the preeminent philosophers of post-World War Two mobility and its link to human rights, particularly her notion of the changing operation of 'the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity' (Arendt, 1968: 298). Moreover, scholars of 'vernacular cosmopolitanisms,' to use Homi Bhabha's phrase, have been particularly interested in refugees and other forms of coerced and forced migration, emphasizing cosmopolitan mobility's connection to dangerous and precarious forms of life (Bhaba, 1996;Mignolo, 2000;Werbner, 2008). This strand of cosmopolitan theory, heavily influenced by the work of postcolonial writers and scholars, has typically been skeptical of forms of cosmopolitanism understood as both too easily amenable to global capital and too quick to dismiss the contemporary relevance of the nation-state (Gilroy, 2005;Rao, 2010;Robbins, 2012). Indeed, cosmopolitanism Johansen: Cosmopolitan Risk, has often been characterized, in vernacular cosmopolitanism, as a negative force that seeks to obscure and exnominate the hierarachies and power imbalances endemic to the global expansion of neoliberalism. Cosmopolitanism has, thus, been uneasily complicit with imperialism-a practice visible in Justin's semi-cosmopolitan defence of the neoliberal and imperial state quoted at the beginning of this article.
Yet, as Derrida's (2002) consideration of cosmopolitan hospitality demonstrates, cosmopolitanism offers a compelling paradigm for offering forms of self-consciously global refuge that explicitly engage with the questions of precarity and responsibility central to this article. In other words, if the neoliberal externalization of risk has often couched itself in cosmopolitan terms (for instance, universal access to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency), we might also find cosmopolitan values and practices useful to interrupt this same externalization of risk.
Indeed, over the last 50 years or so, the rise and expansion of neoliberal financialization has seen particularly economic risks as the route to the biggest possible gain for the biggest possible cross-section of global society. The cosmopolitan risks described in The Constant Gardener act as a link between these two conversations.
The novel thus imagines a globality that brings together the discursive operation of neoliberal financialization with aspirations for a universal, cosmopolitan humanity.
If neoliberal freedom entails that 'you are free insofar as you assume the way of life (consumption, work, public spending, taxes, etc.) compatible with reimbursement' (Lazzarato, 2012: 31, emphasis in original), then the cosmopolitan risks at play in this novel, which do not presume reimbursement (and, indeed, lead to Tessa's and Justin's violent deaths) are a rejection of this modality of freedom in favor of a recognition of ethical indebtedness. As Justin observes of Tessa, 'she was born rich but that never impressed her. She had no interest in money. She needed far less of it than the aspiring classes. But she knew she had no excuse for being indifferent to what she saw and heard. She knew she owed' (Le Carré, 2001: 155, emphasis added).
The Constant Gardener illustrates that this recognition of debt provides a pathway to risky cosmopolitan acts that neither replicate the privatizing logic of neoliberalism nor conform to lingering colonial hierarchies. Johansen: Cosmopolitan Risk, As illustrated in The Constant Gardener, thinking about cosmopolitan risk is not to break altogether from the practices and values of either neoliberalism or colonialism; it is, instead, to turn these discourses in on themselves. Describing the change in capitalism's tone, following the 2008 crisis, Maurizio Lazzarato observes that 'the dedication, subjective motivation and the work on the self preached by management since the 1980s have become an injunction to take upon oneself the costs and risks of the economic and financial disaster. The population must take charge of everything business and the Welfare State ' externalize' onto society, debt first of all' (Lazzarato, 2012: 9, emphasis in original). Similarly, Miranda Joseph notes that 'the combination of privatization and personal responsibilization with "the financialization of daily life"… requires us all to manage our own lives through financial accounting practices' (Joseph, 2014: xi). Paul Langley demonstrates that 'neo-liberal government… stimulates, promotes, and shapes subjects who, selfconsciously and responsibly, further their own security and freedom through the market in general and via calculative investment in the risks of the financial markets in particular' (Langley, 2008: 55). As these critics make clear, the nexus of risk and responsibility is one way in which neoliberal 'regime[s] of capital accumulation and

Transparent Information and Calcuating Risks
One of the technologies of risk management that administers the relationship between individual and population, the exception and the norm, is the emphasis on predictive calculations that Ian Hacking tracks over the last 150 years. In tracing the social rise of chance at the expense of determinism, he observes that, through the concomitant rise of the norm, 'we use variation from the normal today in order to relieve a sense of responsibility' (Hacking, 1990: 168). Similarly, he notes that 'by covering opinion with a veneer of objectivity, we replace judgment by computation' (Hacking, 1990: 4). Miranda Joseph observes that the processes of statistical accounting central to contemporary risk management do not just manage populations, but 'they also operate at an ideological level, inviting subjects to recognize themselves as members of those populations, to 'become statistics' through their own practices' (Joseph, 2014: 94). Joseph notes, via Kathleen Woodward, that 'we experience and 2 I follow, here, from James Ferguson's Give a Man a Fish (2015) and Aihwa Ong's Neoliberalism as Exception (2006) where they argue that a monolithic and blanket critique of neoliberalism works to obscure its more ambivalent operations, particularly in the Global South.
Johansen: Cosmopolitan Risk, Neoliberal Un-Freedom 8 respond to risk' by ' a one-two punch' of the 'interpellat[ion] and implicat[ion]… of number and narrative' (Joseph, 2014: 94). While the protagonists of The Constant Gardener grapple most directly with information passed on via narrative (rather than statistic), this 'interpellation and implication' dyad is replicated both in the mode of ideological control Joseph points to and as a means of defamiliarizing this same project by imagining it as a pathway for resistance. Woodward theorizes that the contemporary 'society of the statistic' produces a particular feeling: 'statistical stress or statistical boredom, which is related to it, can be understood as constituting a particular structure of feeling, one that discloses the society of the statistic in which we live today-a mediatized, marketized, and medicalized culture in which the notion of being at risk has assumed dominant proportions' (Woodward, 2009: 212).
This emphasis on prediction aligns with and relies upon broader neoliberal aspirations towards full transparency. As Clare Birchall notes, ' as a proactive implementation at moments of crisis or moral failure, a visible response to public disquiet, transparency has attractive, palliative qualities for politicians and CEOs who want to be seen doing rather than reflecting' (Birchall, 2013: 77, emphasis in original). Yet the ideological formation of transparency moves beyond governmental and corporate spheres to 'position citizens as individually culpable for the data that transparency exposes' (Birchall, 2013: 83). While this might begin to suggest a democratic loosening of the reins of power, 'this new requirement of citizen vigilance transfers responsibility (to catch wrongdoing) onto the citizen' (Birchall, 2013: 83).
As Wendy Brown observes, the practices of neoliberal governmentality 'substitute ever-evolving new management techniques for top-down rule in state, firm, and subject alike. Centralized authority, law, policing, rules, and quotas are replaced by networked, team-based, practice-oriented techniques emphasizing incentivization, guidelines, and benchmarks' (Brown, 2015: 34). Given this managing 'requirement' for vigilance, it is not surprising that popular cultural forms are teeming with amateur detectives who reveal the lingering opacity surrounding both the state and the corporation. This same sense of the need for vigilance makes itself visible in The Constant Gardener, organized as it is around characters who stumble upon Johansen: Cosmopolitan Risk, scenarios where transparency is revealed to be anything but. If ' economic pressures encourage the trend towards greater transparency [as] investors want to invest their scarce resources in countries where they have credible information about risks and rewards [and where they can] predict what the investment climate will look like in the future and ascertain that the government upholds its commitments' (Lord, 2006: 9), this entrepreneurial logic of risk, reward, and global investment is turned on its head in Le Carré's novel.
Transparency does not here name a practice for searching out sites for capital investment, but, instead, locations for ethical action and contingent communities.
Moreover, The Constant Gardener reveals the way that transparent knowledge already circulates among those who possess social and economic power. Rather than acting as a tool for democratic expansion, this knowledge provides both the currency for in-group social advancement and a site for the re-entrenchment of imperial control.
If neoliberal claims of transparency seem to ' deliver raw material, "original" data and information free from human distortion and the attendant risks of re-presentation' (Birchall, 2013: 80), The Constant Gardener consistently reminds us that this raw material and data is neither as initially opaque as it is alleged to be nor as 'free from human distortion.' In other words, it reminds us that actions become risky for our protagonists when they are required to excavate information deliberately buried by corporate and governmental power structures and thus to interrupt the smooth operation of power in response to already-knowable information. The novel illustrates, then, how the calculative information needed to take risky actions is situated at the intersection of knowing and not-knowing, seeing and not-seeing, transparency and opacity. This ambivalence undercuts the pervasive and bulldozing logic of neoliberal transparency by demonstrating its uneven operation. Despite popular claims that global subjects require further transparency in order to act, the forms of cosmopolitan risk depicted in these novels highlight that risk is a matter of will, not knowledge; that in fact narratives of 'further examination' are often alibis Justin must-almost compulsively-retrace Tessa's steps and actions; he reanimates her through repetition. Indeed, while his actions are framed, to some degree, as an attempt to find and bring to justice her murderers, he ultimately loses this specific interest, becoming a martyr at the site of her death (in part, this is in response to the varied levels of guilt held by many people: Tessa is murdered by many, not just those who physically kill her). Justin's compulsion to repeat thus ultimately occludes any deaths that are not Tessa's. His need to make Tessa live by making the knowledge she acquired transparent is increasingly posited as a reflection of an epic love story in a way that situates Justin's actions within a neoliberal frame of romance as selfrealization. 3 Moreover, this move on the novel's part to contain Justin's actions within a familiar narrative of romantic love downplays not only the cosmopolitan development he undergoes, but it, in some sense, ironically gives credence to the narrative surrounding Justin developed by the British Foreign Office: that, in his grief, he loses his grip on reality. His actions are those of a grief-stricken widower, not those of a man who belatedly realizes his own complicity in global oppressions and violence.
More significantly, this way of reading the novel does further discursive violence to the dead Africans who populate it, particularly Wanza and Arnold (Tessa's friends and co-conspirators). These deaths become incidental-no matter either the violence with which they are committed, or their role in a larger pattern of globally unmourned, unnoticed African deaths. 4 Indeed, Ghita, a friend of Tessa's and contract employee at the British Consulate, is the one who most visibly reacts to the brutality of Arnold's death, when the facts are revealed to her and Justin-suggesting that it is outside, in some sense, of Justin's interests. Moreover, the brutality of Arnold's death is connected explicitly and repeatedly to his homosexuality, suggesting that his death emerges out of a pre-modern Kenyan homophobia; in contrast, Tessa's murder is represented as the responsibility of a resolutely contemporary and transnational corporate criminality. The novel generally resists all too familiar depictions of Africans as less civilized than Europeans and North Americans, 5 depicting the predatory capitalism of ThreeBees and the 'Moi's Boys' as being both the result of lingering colonial inequalities and the 'natural' effects of unregulated neoliberal economic globalization. Arnold's death, and the justification of it, therefore, strikes a jarring note. In the shift to globe-trotting romance, these deaths become nearly invisible as the narrative can only focus on Justin's need to recover the lost love object.
Transparency, here the reporting of facts necessary for making the decisions that make both risk and ethics possible, is insufficient as a route to any meaningful sense of shared collective life and responsibility. The transparent knowledge that neoliberalism claims as a sufficient response to moments of failure, even disaster, is shown in this novel as merely revealing information that is already available.
Cosmopolitan commitments to a global humanity become possible, instead, as Justin shifts from simply making information transparent (pain observed) to becoming enmeshed and self-consciously invested in concerns about responsibility (pain shared).

If transparency as it operates both under neoliberal orthodoxy and in The Constant
Gardener produces ambiguous effects, it nonetheless remains imaginatively central and necessary as a tool of neoliberal risk-management. In order for risks to appear as reasonable and productive, risk takers must have access to transparent knowledge in 5 The film does not entirely resist this narrative of civilizational hierarchies. The Sudanese that attack Lorbeer's refugee camp at the end of the film are depicted as almost pre-historical invaders. This scene does not appear in the novel.  (Joseph, 2014: 95). 6 Instead, risky acts are imagined here as the only responsible way to account for one's already existing position as a global subject; responsibility is understood as a scenario where ' all security actors [understood by Le Carré as all humans] bear a responsibility to consider the global impact of their decisions' (Burke, 2013: 14). These are deliberately cosmopolitan notions of responsibility. Neoliberal freedom is a further expansion of liberal autonomy, envisioning ' a society, [where] freedom has nothing to say about what an individual does with his freedom; it is not an all-embracing ethic. Indeed, a major aim of the liberal is to leave the ethical problem for the individual to wrestle with' (Friedman, 2002: 12 Understanding this awareness of the cosmopolitan scope of risk and the necessity for thinking responsibility beyond the individual and the nation marks one way of considering particularly contemporary risks and attending to the transition from welfare state risk management to neoliberalism to some potential mutation beyond.
As Anthony Giddens traces this transition, he notes that: The welfare state… developed as a security state, a way of protecting against risk, where collective rather than private insurance was necessary. Like early forms of private insurance, it was built on the presumption of external risk. External risk can be fairly well calculated -one can draw up actuarial tables and decide on that basis how to insure people. Sickness, disablement, unemployment were treated by the welfare state as ' accidents of fate', against which insurance should be collectively provided. (Giddens, 1999: 4) He goes on to observe that 'the crisis of the welfare state is not purely fiscal, it is a crisis of risk management in a society dominated by a new type of risk' (Giddens, 1999: 7). Without Giddens naming it as such, this crisis also reflects neoliberal shifts away from the collective to the individual: 'when people have a more active orientation to their lives, they also have to have a more active orientation to risk management, so it is not surprising that those who can afford it tend to opt out of existing welfare systems' (Giddens, 1999: 7). Giddens' narrative, with its internalized neoliberal assumptions (the activity of enterprise vs. the passivity of welfare, for instance), is one that, elsewhere, highlights the particular global element of changing relationships with risk: the rise of 'manufactured risks,' 'risk situations which we have very little historical experience of confronting [and which are] directly influenced by… intensifying globalisation' (Giddens, 2003: 26). For Giddens, 'living in a global age means coping with a diversity of new situations of risk' (Giddens, 2003: 35).
This new 'global age' is brought to the forefront in Ulrich Beck's term, 'world risk society ' (1992), and its description of risks (such as nuclear war and climate change) that cannot be accounted for by either national or strictly individualistic accounts of risk, both in terms of causality and responsibility. For Beck, the risks that particularly characterize 'second modernity' (a period more or less coterminous with the rise and entrenchment of neoliberalism) are cosmopolitan: they demand global thinking for understanding creation, reach, and response. His evocation of cosmopolitanism points to his understanding that it is a necessary response to global realities: ' as recognition of the risks springing from global interdependencies increase, so too do the compulsion, the opportunity, but also resistance … to arriving at cosmopolitan solutions' (Beck, 2006: 22). The cosmopolitan responsibilities of contemporary risk-management, therefore, are posed by Beck (and implicitly by Giddens) as the only possible responses to threats and dangers that exist transnationally. Yet, as Beck notes repeatedly, the cosmopolitan possibilities of risk are ambiguous, just as liable to reinforce territoriality as promote openness. Beck's distinction between ' cosmopolitanism' and 'really existing cosmopolitanization' may be useful here: ' cosmopolitanism is a conscious and voluntary choice, and often that of an elite.
The concept ' cosmopolitanization' is designed to draw attention to the fact that the becoming cosmopolitan of reality is also, and even primarily, a function of coerced choices or a side effect of unconscious decisions' (Beck, 2006: 19). He goes on to clarify that:  (Beck, 2006: 19, emphasis in original) This notion of ' actually existing cosmopolitanization' suggests the inescapability of cosmopolitan connections (for Beck, primarily centered on risk) but also the inadequacy of typical notions of nation-state sovereignty and personal responsibility.
It is easy to see, however, the overlap between this mode of cosmopolitanization and neoliberal divestment from the state. Beck's call for 'global communities-at least ad hoc ones for the historical moment' (Beck, 1996: 20, emphasis in original)-has the potential to overlap with the NGO-ization of global politics and humanitarianism, as much as it creates real political alternatives to the statist system and its corporate analogues. How, then, to understand an awareness of cosmopolitan risks and responsibilities that do not just further minimize the role of the state? Indeed, Justin's early definition of failed states inadvertently highlights the centrality of the state's responsibility to its citizens-but emphasizes infrastructural operation and maintenance (echoing Chicago School understandings of the state as umpire in the game, not a player 7 ). Justin's emphasis on infrastructure in contrast to Tessa's ethical imperative is shown to be hollow in the face of state sponsorship of violence at home and abroad. Thus The Constant Gardener asks, directly and indirectly, how, once one is aware of the scope of particular threats and dangers exposed in the transparent expansion of knowledge, might one understand personal risk and responsibility?
And, more importantly, how might one act?
Common and persistent in The Constant Gardener are Justin's assertions about decision-making and its consequences; he claims either that he did not know the details or depth of the violence surrounding him or, if he did know, that he was unsure of the most effective way to act. Justin exists in a space characterized by stark oppositions between knowing and not-knowing, acting and not-acting, framed by the language of safety and protection. Justin's desire for safety and protectionfrom physical and mental/emotional threats-seems, on one hand, eminently reasonable; on the other hand, the comparisons set up in the text between him and other characters who are forced to act in risky ways reveal this desire as not only impossible, but reliant upon privileges he does not wish to acknowledge fully and responsibilities he seeks to deny.
The first chapters of The Constant Gardener, told from the perspective of Sandy Woodrow, Justin's immediate superior in the British High Commission in Nairobi, crystallize this dynamic that runs throughout the novel, opposing those who research 7 Both Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (2007) and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (2002), foundational theorizations of neoliberalism, make versions of this claim. and those who take risks. This contrast maps itself through the binary between those who see the world as they want to (in a romanticized, idealized fashion), and those who know it as it transparently is (here, cynical and hard-bitten). Research and reflection is thus, paradoxically, set up by Sandy as irrational; or, at least, not as rational as risk-taking, which is posed as without reflexivity. In Sandy's world-view,  Carré, 2001: 19). Per Sandy's descriptions, the predictive and calculative research Justin does is no different in terms of efficacy than his interest in ornamental gardening; it makes things look better but has no larger purpose than the aesthetic. Sandy's perspective on the situation is inflected by both his own infatuation with Justin's murdered wife and his own self-importance, but it is not inaccurate. Justin's preoccupation with predictive research has indeed led to his removal from the world outside his office; this is made clear in the metaphorical work done by the plants he tends, for instance, as they are not native to Nairobi, suggesting a nostalgic investment in English gentility rather than an engagement with his actual time and location. While being interrogated by the British Foreign 8 These distinctions, as made by Sandy, are, on some level, ironized by his monstrous self-satisfaction and sense of self-promotion. His underestimation of both Tessa and Justin reveals him as remarkably short-sighted and an ultimately unreliable narrator, suggesting, eventually, the way neoliberal orthodoxies are not as transparent as imagined as they obscure behaviour that rejects economic selfinterest. Nonetheless, as readers, we do not fully know this yet in these first chapters.  Carré, 2001: 203). Given Justin's investment in the research he does for the embassy, it is difficult to categorize him as fully ignorant of the world; yet, when it comes to actionable information, his head is indeed in the sand. Research and rationality, action and irrationality, therefore, do not align in quite the ways their definitions would typically suggest. Nor, given the horrific violence of Tessa's death, is rational action a path to freedom understood as personal bodily autonomy.
These tensions continue throughout the novel, particularly in Sandy's descriptions of his fellow embassy officials, Coleridge and Donohue, which emphasize their relative disinclination to act on information. Coleridge, for instance, is ' a hollowed, hyperintelligent man, an eternal student of something [yet] had somehow remained stranded on the brink of manhood' (Le Carré, 2001: 25)-reiterating the claim that research prohibits achieving the heights of masculine risk-taking. Donohue, similarly, 'looked even sicker than usual… sunken, colorless cheeks. Nests of crumbling skin below the drooping yellowed eyes. The straggling mustache clawed downward in comic despair' (Le Carré, 2001: 8-9). Both men are characterized as hollowedout, occupying peripheral masculinities, either through the appearance of youth or extreme age. On hearing of Tessa's murder, Donohue responds with 'probing stares' (Le Carré, 2001: 17), while Coleridge is in tears (Le Carré, 2001: 25). Both Coleridge and Donohue, therefore, are understood as gatherers of informationbut in such a way that reflects their own emasculated decrepitude. Coleridge, in his reliance on colonial-era notions of English civility and good governance, attempts to address Tessa's death through gentility and the appropriate (though unofficial) bureaucratic channels. Yet, despite all of Coleridge's looking into things, he effects no change. Indeed, at the end of the novel, he disappears 'into the catacombs of official Whitehall [of which] little was said, but much implied' (Le Carré, 2001: 538).
Donohue, who collects information in the service of the British intelligence service and, implicitly, props up corporate and corrupt regimes, is a spectral figure who acts as a haunting reminder of the uses to which knowledge might be put as he is left beholden to his corporate overseers. Throughout these early pages of the novel, action which wants to follow the recognizable bureaucratic pathways to success and transparency reflects a childish and emasculated belief in rules and routines that can only reinforce the status quo for already existing ideological formations.
Actions that do not replicate bureaucratic success but, instead, produce an awareness of their global impact become visible when Justin attempts to figure out the causes of Tessa's death and disrupt the complacency of the corporate-neo-colonial complex. The ultimate implication of the novel is that action, framed as the necessary and responsible response to global circumstances, can only follow from research, which has been framed by Sandy as irrational because it does not follow the route to personal advancement. Yet these are actions that do not lead to the advancement of the autonomous neoliberal entrepreneur, driven ever forward in search of accumulation (per Friedman's definition of freedom), for this information is shown to be risky and costly. On one hand, those who are aware of the collusion between transnational pharmaceutical companies and Kenyan dictatorships, with the support of the British and other governments-and acknowledge the ethical issues surrounding it-end up demoted, at best, and murdered, at worst. And, on the other hand, Justin is required to spend his fortune travelling around the globe to securely acquire the information lost with Tessa's death. While we might hear echoes of the old adage, 'you have to spend money to make money,' there is no attempt by Justin-or Tessa-to transform this expense into something economically or even socially profitable to themselves (neither gain any social capital from their actions, and, in fact, lose much of what they have). Yet the gathering of information is very much secondary to the sense of urgency and necessity that specific actions must be taken; that to understand one's allegiance and responsibility to humanity as a whole, rather than along narrowly configured national or class lines, requires acts, not just intangible knowledge or feelings.
Like Justin's movement from the hermetic reality of diplomatic life, risky cosmopolitanism requires of its privileged subjects a rejection of the neoliberal freedom to endlessly accumulate alongside other similarly accumulating subjects.
Rather, it demands what might look like the 'un-freedom' found in putting one's safety-and, thus, potential for future accumulation-at risk for those who disproportionately bear the costs of contemporary life. Cosmopolitan risk and its corollary, neoliberal un-freedom, then, offers a tentative and contingent response to Butler's provocative series of questions in Precarious Life: If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally?… This can be a point of departure [from which we might] critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain human lives are more grievable than others. (Butler, 2004: 30) By rejecting neoliberal modes of personal freedom as the organizing principle of social life, we might begin to imagine other ways of establishing global communal life in the face of the violence and risks with which it is marked.