A Pragmatist Cosmopolitan Moment: Reconfiguring Nussbaum's Cosmopolitan Concentric Circles

Robert Fine and Robin Cohen conclude their essay “Four Cosmopolitan Moments” by stating that developing cosmopolitanism “has become an urgent moral necessity” (2002, 162). As resources for this task they offer the Stoics, Kant, Arendt, and Nussbaum as particularly important “moments” in the history of cosmopolitanism. David Held (2002, 57) shares their sense of urgency but worries that a Kantian understanding of political communities gives an inadequate basis for this task. David Hollinger identifies as “new cosmopolitans” an array of scholars who articulate alternatives to Nussbaum's universalism and Kymlicka's pluralism, in attempting “to connect the notion of a species-wide community to actual politics, to the complex of possibilities and restraints found on the ground” (2001, 238). Noting these scholars’ penchant for attaching adjectives to cosmopolitanism, Hollinger lists their modifiers as including “vernacular,” “rooted,” “critical,” “comparative,” “national,” “discrepant,” “situated,” and “actually existing” (2001, 237).

In this article I suggest a large project and carry out a small part of it. The large project is to propose early twentieth-century American pragmatism as another “cosmopolitan moment.” Several of the early pragmatists were engaged in precisely the task Hollinger describes above of connecting a species-wide community to on-the-ground politics; their work could serve as a historical resource for today's new cosmopolitans. The small project is to use essays written around the time of World War I by Randolph Bourne, W. E. B. DuBois, and Jane Addams, three American pragmatists and public intellectuals, to assess the Stoic metaphor of cosmopolitan, concentric circles of affiliation. Using Nussbaum's presentation of this metaphor to focus the discussion, I will show how these pragmatist cosmopolitans unsettle Nussbaum's implicit background assumptions that the circles are conceptually distinct and that the way to develop allegiance to the widest circle of humanity is through Kantian rationality. This small project will demonstrate how a pragmatist cosmopolitan moment can be a fruitful resource for today's new cosmopolitans.

I. A Pragmatist Cosmopolitan Moment

Global interconnectedness, wide-scale migration, the morally problematic character of national sovereignty, and the growing global gap between rich and poor motivate many of today's scholars of cosmopolitanism. In their introduction to Conceiving Cosmopolitanism Vertovec and Cohen write that “only a cosmopolitan outlook can accommodate itself to the political challenges of a more global era, marked by the overlapping communities of fate, multi-layered politics and new identity formations” (2002, 21). Though these issues take distinctive forms today, they are not new but, in fact, were debated vigorously in the early twentieth century. Migration was widespread, not only to the United States and not only from Europe (Guarneri 2007, 179–91; Takaki 1993). John Hobson's widely read Imperialism (1902), from which Lenin drew heavily, expressly connects economic imperialism with military force and empire building. Before and during World War I many prominent intellectuals debated whether national sovereignty was a morally harmful anachronism and whether the harm could be mitigated by transnational institutions of global governance (see, for example, Dickinson 1914, 1915; Russell 1917). Resources from the early twentieth century can provide patterns to stimulate creative thought about contemporary world conditions.

Pragmatism is particularly well suited for theorizing about on-the-ground realities. For pragmatists, theory is intimately and integrally connected with practice. Using Darwinian evolutionary thinking as a pattern, pragmatists stress context and process, conceiving of inquiry as experimental and knowledge as reconstruction. Pragmatists view an organism, an individual agent, or an institution in terms of its continuing interaction and engagement with its physical and cultural environment (Dewey 1980, 7–9, 26; 1985, 146). Historical processes are constitutive; what a thing “is” is never static but, rather, grows out of past interactions and engages in continual reconstruction, as organism and environment continually modify each other. Ends are shaped by the means used to attain them (Dewey 1985, 112–13); it is futile to theorize about cosmopolitanism as a goal without also attending to the means for attaining it.

Pragmatism contrasts with liberal perspectives by decentering and contextualizing individuals and institutions. For example, pragmatists appreciate individual autonomy, but rather than casting it in the lead...