Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence by Bruce Robbins (review)

If all human beings have an equal claim on the earth’s resources, the claim is routinely ignored by rich and empowered nations like the United States, whose agricultural subsidies and drug-marketing rules cause damage to poor people in Bolivia and Angola. Bruce Robbins is an earnest and sensitive contributor to the increasingly robust debate on global justice. His intervention has a strong English department accent, focused on the ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Martha Nussbaum, Stefan Collini, Louis Menand, and W. G. Sebald. By sticking with this bunch, Robbins asks the concept of cosmopolitanism to do a huge amount of political work. There is an equally substantial literature produced by political scientists, economists, and legal academics, keyed by Charles Beitz’s 1979 classic, Political Theory and International Relations. Samuel Scheffler long since distinguished between cosmopolitanism about culture (which is what Robbins engages, mostly) and cosmopolitanism about justice (which is what Beitz and his commentators pursue). Robbins parlays culture-centered cosmopolitanism into a wise protopolitics while delivering the most discerning commentaries I have yet to read on the theorists whose work he does engage (including my own). But the next step, surely, is to integrate the English department’s idea of a cross-disciplinary conversation with what’s doing next door, in law schools and social science departments. We are all in this together, as cosmopolitans should know.