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

Accessibly written yet decidedly ambitious and provocative in its theoretical reach, Bruce Robbins’s Perpetual War critiques the relativization of contemporary cosmopolitanism and the ways in which scholars have limited its scope to national or local contexts. Robbins engages an older understanding of cosmopolitanism that foregrounds detachment from local affiliations and loyalties in favor of perspectives that are transnational and encompass the whole of humanity. In so doing, Robbins’s engaging book does not argue for the rehabilitation of a normative Kantian ethical ideal. Instead, he asks what forms of critical distancing might accompany what he calls “new cosmopolitanism,” with its fixation on celebrating multiple forms of belonging, national allegiance, and transcultural mobility. His intervention begins from the following observation: “If the paradox of cosmopolitanism as multiple and overlapping belonging has become familiar, it’s because, paradoxical or not, there is more and more historical evidence that such attachment can and does generate forms of detachment” (17–18). This paradox infuses the book’s eight chapters, and what drives Robbins’s text on a less abstract level are his considerations of the responsibilities of intellectuals and the “academic left” when faced with the difficulties of a “cosmopolitan politics of the pragmatic sort” (3), one that mobilizes often-competing imperatives of attachment to and detachment from the nation and localized forms of identification.

In the decade’s worth of essays that comprise the book’s main chapters, Robbins wrestles with the ways in which contemporary cosmopolitanism’s inevitable “situatedness” uneasily coexists with much broader, normative concerns for global justice and the prevention of violence. His reflections turn on the complex roles US intellectuals inhabit when opposing American militarism (and the worldwide injustices to which the latter gives rise), while simultaneously negotiating their relationships to the nation whose politics and policies they disavow. For instance, in the first chapter—an essay on Anthony Appiah’s understanding of patriotism as part and parcel of “rooted cosmopolitanism”—Robbins converts Appiah’s sense of cosmopolitan patriotism into a staunch defense of the welfare state, a step toward economic justice on a global scale that is necessarily limited by concerns for the national and the distinction between citizens and non-citizens. The prescriptive “solution” Robbins offers here is only partial and not entirely in keeping with the breadth of his theoretical concerns, but this is precisely his point: the “dirty cosmopolitanism” (44) he advocates is unavoidably pragmatic and, as such, must reconcile political commitments on different scales in ways that are not always entirely satisfactory. This focus on cosmopolitanism’s constituent messiness does not completely jettison Appiah’s perspective, but it does place additional practical demands on the “new cosmopolitanism’s celebration of our hyphenated heterogeneity” (45).

Other chapters in the book connect this concern for a pragmatic cosmopolitan politics to the responsibilities of intellectuals and the humanities writ large. In his analyses of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, Robbins argues that, on the one hand, cosmopolitan humanists are not nearly as powerless (and, hence, as detached) as they might sometimes claim to be. On the other hand, though, he suggests that detachment is both the horizon of critical intellectual work and necessary for engagement in a pragmatic politics that by its very nature is predicated on attachment to specific themes, goals, and symbols. This latter point comes across quite forcefully in the essay on Said, whose secularism now appears as a qualified and partial sense of belonging instead of an absolute experience of exile characterizing all intellectual activity (120–21). Chapter 6, “Intellectuals in Public, or Elsewhere,” draws on Stefan Collini’s book Absent Minds and on New York Times op-ed pieces by Slavoj Žižek in order to challenge our understanding of the kinds of cultural publics with which “public intellectuals” (or those we recognize as such) are in dialogue. Intellectuals are “ordinary,” concludes Robbins here, because they are citizens of actually existing nations whose work more or less directly...