Far Away Is Close at Hand: A Critique of Martha Nussbaum’s Cosmopolitanism

Martha Nussbaum’s method of philosophising is intrinsically historical. Unlike other contemporary philosophers who advance a normative scheme for a global socio-political order, though — say, Peter Singer, or the later Derek Parfit — Nussbaum engages with history not for fundamentally historical reasons (that is, to improve the accuracy, breadth, or depth of the historical record). Rather, her aim is to infer from that record conclusions about how the world of human beings and their resources should be organised. Her use of history is therefore didactic, not descriptive. How successful this approach is will be one of the questions addressed in this essay.

It should be noted early on that the normative scheme for the world that Nussbaum first announced in a landmark article in The Boston Review in 1994 — Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism — has undergone significant change over the years. Her trumpeting of cosmopolitanism as an ethically compelling model for socio-political affairs — encompassing domestic politics, education, and international relations — provoked much interest, support, and, inevitably, criticism. Two years after the publication of her article, an entire volume emerged in direct response to it — For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Edited by Joshua Cohen, the volume contained a wide range of views, but two in particular are worth noting briefly here. In her paper, Nussbaum proposes that the place of one’s birth is merely accidental, referring to national identity as morally inconsequential. She also refers to what she clearly regards as anthropologically constant, culturally transcendent, shared purposes, desires, and ideals of human beings, and their diverse concrete manifestations in particular places and times. Michael W. McConnell takes issue with the first point, arguing that teaching the moral irrelevancy of national identity risks undermining “coherent moral education”, which takes validly divergent forms in specific historical and cultural contexts, and replacing it with a cosmopolitanism which is “too bloodless to capture the moral imagination” (p. 79). Gertrude Himmelfarb takes aim at both points, asserting that our personal and cultural origins are not “accidental”, as Nussbaum claims, but rather “essential…Identity is neither an accident nor a matter of choice. It is given, not willed” (p. 77). She also affirms that Nussbaum’s purportedly universal values, which the latter claims are instantiated in only superficially different cultural forms, are in fact “quite different values, which have little in common with her own”. And Nussbaum’s own values, Himmelfarb observes, are “predominantly, perhaps even uniquely, Western values” (p. 75). The first of these criticisms clearly hit home; the second less so.

By the time Nussbaum came to reiterate her support for cosmopolitanism at greater length and in more detail, in her book of 2019, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble But Flawed Ideal, her choice of title alone told a story; she had conceded that her original, bullish and unqualified, statement of her position required modification. She now accepted that family and nation have a legitimate claim to be the fundamental source of a person’s sense of security and identity, even if, in her view, they function merely as a first basis of attachment from which a superior cosmopolitan worldview can grow. For Nussbaum, then, patriotism comes first temporally, but not socio-politically or ethically — its role is to make possible the development of a cosmopolitan consciousness, and nothing more. This, I would argue, betrays a tendency to a reductionism that is common in the West — the presupposition that one value must inevitably be grounded in or hierarchically related to another — a sort of Rawlsian exercise in the ordering of incommensurable values and ideals. But what if the pulls of home and humanity are equally strong, cannot be ranked in general terms, and must be chosen between? Some have argued that since Plato, Western thought has been bedevilled by absolutist idealism, and the authoritarianism that accompanies it (Berlin 1991; Popper 1945). I suggest that Nussbaum’s failure to recognise cosmopolitanism and patriotism as competing, conflicting, and incommensurable worldviews — in other words to conceive of them in neat hierarchical terms, rather than, with greater realism, in more problematic value pluralist ones — offers a clear example of such a tendency. The result is an idealised world that bears little resemblance to the real one, to the hard and intractable facts of human nature and life, and which itself is home to a form of prescriptive socio-political and ethic absolutism, however humane, benevolent, and noble its intentions.

I turn now to her latest book on the subject, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (2019). That all human beings, as such, are in some sense equal and intrinsically valuable, members of a global community, is not overly contested; what is in dispute is the sense in which they are so, and to what international rights they are thereby morally entitled. This question provides the central focus of The Cosmopolitan Tradition.

Nussbaum differentiates between “duties of justice” and “duties of material aid”, arguing that whereas the cosmopolitan tradition has made considerable progress in respect of the former, it has almost totally neglected the latter. Hence in that part of the world where the tradition applies — the West — human beings, at least notionally, enjoy the right to freedom of thought and action, to self-determination, and a private life, but at the same time many lack the material wherewithal needed for them to make the most of these precious gifts. The author claims that the historical roots of this imbalance in the provision of rights lie in the radical indifference to the world, and its unequally distributed and ephemeral goods, of Stoic morality. The dignity of the Stoic is sufficient unto itself, impervious to personal ties and the vicissitudes of fortune alike, steadfastly undergoing whatever external ills it happens to be assailed by, for quiet endurance is the supreme expression of moral character. Though its tone is rather more triumphal than that associated with Stoicism, I am reminded of Rupert Brooke’s poem 1914, in which the suffering yet remarkably sanguine soldier proclaims:

Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace…

But only agony, and that has ending;

And the worst friend and enemy is but Death (Keynes 1977: p. 19).

What need would such a noble soul have for assistance or comfort from without, when he can sustain himself through the worst of storms absolutely from within? This extreme self-sufficiency and equanimity in the face of all ills that was both preached and practised by the Stoics created, Nussbaum argues, a “bifurcation” of duties of justice and of material aid, such that to be consistent the Stoic “must scoff at money, rank, and power, saying that they are unnecessary for human flourishing” (p. 5). She regards the “deepest source” of this attitude to be the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics, their “distrust of personal attachment” and “their view that all strong attachment is at root non-cosmopolitanly personal” (p. 94). Nussbaum sees this attitude as being partly rooted in something much more general than the Stoic tradition, though; she proposes it is a product of gender. Writing of this indifference to external woes as one element in the thought of Adam Smith, she argues that whilst it does not constitute “the machismo of everyday male aggressiveness”, nevertheless “It is a subtle Stoic machismo, the machismo of self-command and contempt for adversity”, the socially damaging implication of which is that what is thought to be “the most precious type of moral virtue may actually be incompatible with ease and happiness”(pp. 197–198). Thus has the cosmopolitan tradition, argues Nussbaum, based on the Stoic ethic of indifference to external goods, cleaved apart the rights, on the one hand, to justice and freedom, and, on the other, to the very material arrangements which make the realisation of these more abstract goods possible. In so doing, she concludes in a striking phrase, it has served “to romanticize loss” (p. 205). What is needed to correct this interpretive error in moral thinking, Nussbaum contends, is a recognition that rights of material aid are as important a requirement for human prospering as are rights of justice; indeed, that they are in fact paramount, as the former enable the optimal realisation of the latter. As she succinctly puts it: “there is no coherent way of separating duties of justice from duties of material aid” (pp. 236–237).

An interesting comparison suggests itself here. Nussbaum has clearly identified a prime intellectual reason why the cosmopolitan tradition has focused almost exclusively on the provision of rights of justice, and neglected rights of material aid — the Stoic assertion that human beings are morally valuable purely in and of themselves, and possess a dignity that no external misfortune or injury can destroy or even impair (although she refers to this attitude as belonging in the realm of “moral psychology”, the Stoics clearly arrived at it by a process of logical thought, notwithstanding its proposed gendered element). In contrast, the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin sees Stoicism as having arisen, at least in part, from an emotional source, pointing out in The Roots of Romanticism that “in Ancient Greece when Alexander the Great began to destroy the city-states”, the Stoics:

began to preach a new morality of personal salvation, which took the form of saying that politics was unimportant, civil life was unimportant, all the great ideals held up by Pericles and by Demosthenes, by Plato and by Aristotle, were trivial and as nothing before the imperative need for personal individual salvation (Berlin 2000: p. 37).

He goes on to say, in a highly memorable phrase, that “This was a very grand form of sour grapes”, and further that such an attitude was characteristic also of the response of eighteenth-century Germans, envious of their neighbours, to the intellectual and political ascendency of the French:

If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth, into a kind of inner citadel, in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The king of my province – the prince – confiscates my land: I do not want to own land. The prince does not wish to give me rank: rank is trivial, unimportant. The king has robbed me of my possessions: possessions are nothing…And so forth (Berlin 2000: p. 37; author’s emphasis).

What seems interesting about this contrast is that it appears to reside in two different conceptions of human nature and action, one that assumes the primacy of premeditated rational thought, the process of concluding that indifference to the world demonstrates one’s superiority to and victory over it, and another that ascribes priority — in certain situations at least — to instinctual emotional response; to wounded pride, envy, and retreat from the world. A conspicuous strength of Nussbaum’s book is the clarity and coherence of her reasoning, the crisp logic of her arguments; at the same time, though, she tends perhaps to neglect somewhat the incorrigibly unenlightened and ignoble kinds of purposes and conduct which play an inescapable role in human affairs, to which the likes of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre have directed our attention, and which led Kant to depict humanity as a “crooked timber” (a phrase quoted often by Berlin).

Nussbaum’s analysis of the cosmopolitan tradition begins with Diogenes the Cynic, who famously proclaimed himself “a citizen of the world”. Confronted one day by Alexander the Great whilst sunbathing in the marketplace, and invited to ask for anything he wanted, Diogenes replied “Get out of my light”. Nussbaum writes, beautifully, that:

This image of the dignity of humanity, which can shine forth in its nakedness unless shadowed by the false claims of rank and kingship, a dignity that needs only the removal of that shadow to be vigorous and free, is one endpoint of a line that leads to the modern human rights movement (p. 2).

Noble though Diogenes’ response is, however, it does not constitute a demand for transnational social justice — and the redistribution of wealth which that requires — and from this early point onwards the question of rights to material aid becomes the central focus of the book. Next to be considered is Marcus Tullius Cicero, whom Nussbaum regards as the prime historical source of the separation of duties of justice and duties of material aid:

The general line he takes is that duties of justice are very strict and require high moral standards of all actors in their conduct across national boundaries. Duties of material aid, however, allow much elasticity, and give us a lot of room to prefer the near and dear. Indeed, Cicero thinks that we positively ought to prefer the near and dear, giving material aid to those outside our borders only when that can be done without any sacrifice to ourselves (pp. 20–21).

With this, Nussbaum argues, the die is cast — the provision of material aid to other societies is hereafter considered largely a matter of goodwill, not a demand of moral duty — and this, as Nussbaum points out, despite Cicero’s simultaneous commitment to what she calls a “doctrine of negative responsibility”, according to which we are as culpable for failures to act in assistance of others as we are for any harmful actions we actively inflict upon them, as guilty of “sins of omission”, if you like, as of “sins of commission”. A further inconsistency in Cicero’s position, Nusbaum tells us, is that between his firm denial of the ultimate importance of “externals” — including close personal ties — along with the corollary that those who mourn their loss thereby display moral deficiency, and his own profound and prolonged grief at the death of his beloved daughter, Tullia.

The discussion next turns to Marcus Aurelius, and although Nussbaum notes that the cosmopolitan tradition begins with Diogenes and the Cynics, she indicates that she has drawn heavily on the Roman Stoics — and later thinkers influenced by them — owing to the paucity of evidence on the Greeks. This is a resounding strength of the book since it helps foreground the somewhat neglected contribution to the Western philosophical tradition of Roman thought, overshadowed as it often is by that of its Hellenistic progenitor. Marcus Aurelius, we are told, rejects externals — again including intimate personal associations — as decidedly as, if not even more resolutely than, Cicero, but his thoroughgoing cosmopolitanism demands that he nevertheless accords to even the most troublesome or unpleasant of his fellows — no matter how “interfering, ungracious, insolent, full of guile, deceitful and anti-social” they may be — that dignity which is native to all human beings as such (p. 81). His is a rather patronising and lugubrious Stoicism. He regards human beings as essentially stupid and infantile, but in so being as worthy of the same understanding, patience and gentle humouring that we extend to the very young. And his approach to some of the most enjoyable, intimate and joyful experiences of life, Nusbaum tells us, is relentlessly one of reductio ad finem, so he urges that we consider the food on our plates as “the corpse of a fish” or “the corpse of a bird or a pig”, wine as “just some grape juice”, and coitus as “the rubbing together of membranes, accompanied by the spasmodic ejaculation of a sticky liquid” (p. 88). It is not true to say of him that he was cautiously pessimistic and saw his glass as half full, since it clearly appeared to him as in fact devoid of anything whatsoever that might produce the slightest pleasure or even comfort, save the meditation on death which he similarly entreated. Nussbaum quotes him thus:

Think all the time about how human beings of all sorts, and from all walks of life and all peoples, are dead…We must arrive at the same condition where so many clever orators have ended up, so many grave philosophers, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates; so many heroes of the old days, so many recent generals and tyrants…Think about all of these that they are long since in the ground…And what of those whose very names are forgotten? (p. 95).

As she concludes, Marcus Aurelius’s position is both patronising and deeply depressing, but primarily “it seems insufficient to motivate the kind of aggressive concern with the redistribution of externals that a cosmopolitan life would seem to require” (p. 87). If the native dignity of all is to be recognised and protected, then the prime and inescapable importance of duties of material aid must be accepted, seriously and without question.

According to Nussbaum, a significant if only partial move in this direction is made by the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius. Before considering Nussbaum’s view of Grotius’s role in advancing the cosmopolitan ideal, though, it is interesting to note that the historical distance between him and Marcus Aurelius is quite considerable, and that Nussbaum might have made some reference in this hiatus to the influence of cosmopolitanism on Christianity. She does note very briefly that “the Cynic/Stoic tradition…strongly influenced the Christian tradition” (p. 71), but there is no elaboration of the point. To be fair, as Beros (2016, p. 199) points out, the “initial development of the idea of cosmopolitanism was followed by a period of ‘dormancy’ for this theme, which to a certain degree endured until the eighteenth century”. However, he goes on to note the cosmopolitan character of Dante’s De Monarchia in the fourteenth century, and of Erasmus’s political thought in the sixteenth. More broadly, even, the Christian ethic of renunciation of the world and its goods embodies perhaps more fully than any other Western historical movement the austerity of the Stoic ideal. That Nussbaum sees religion as a competitor of cosmopolitanism is perhaps at the root of this seeming omission. As McConnell puts it in For Love of Country: “There is something peculiar about invoking the ancient teachings of the Stoics and the Cynics in support of ideas that are taught every week in Sunday school” (pp. 83–84).

Returning to Grotius, Nussbaum points out that a central Grotian concern is the importance of autonomy, both for individuals and for societies, and, increasingly during the period of his political thought, for the incipient nation-states that were beginning to emerge and gradually pull away from the shackles of ecumenical control culminating in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. A corollary of this concern was his cosmopolitanism, which he derived explicitly from Cicero but which he interpreted and developed in the light of his own more modern age. However, these twin concerns produced a “tension” in his thought, Nussbaum argues, between his recognition of the inviolability of national sovereignty, which alone guarantees the authentic self-determination of peoples, and his belief that all human beings — considered individually — have a natural, inalienable right to similarly unimpugnable self-direction. For what if in some sovereign states the autonomy of individuals is trampled underfoot by tyrants or dictators? Surely in such cases the genuinely committed cosmopolitan has a moral duty to intervene to attempt to restore the freedom and dignity of the oppressed? Certainly, Grotius advances and defends a notion of international law, according to which rules of the kind which naturally regulate social interaction between individuals within societies apply also at the level of reciprocal relations between nations, rules which, Nussbaum summarises from his On the Law of War and Peace:

must do several basic things. They must instruct all to abstain from aggression and theft; they must arrange for restitution of what has been taken by aggression or theft, and for the punishment of the guilty parties; and they must point the way to a fair distribution of property. Importantly, the law of nature enjoins that agreements are to be honoured…for without such a principle, the whole edifice of law would necessarily collapse (pp. 111–112).

More than this, though, Grotius argues that humanitarian intervention is both permissible and laudable (even if not strictly ethically obligatory) in extreme circumstances, such as (alluding to a historical tale from Plutarch) the premediated murder of parents by their offspring so the latter are freed from the need to nurse them in old age, or cannibalism, or piracy. As Nussbaum points out, these activities would be roundly condemned no less in modern times than in the seventeenth century, but another of Grotius’s examples, homosexuality, would of course be regarded altogether differently in the modern world. As she puts it: “even those people [today] who basically agree with Grotius [that homosexuality is contrary to nature] do not think widespread toleration of same-sex relations in a nation is an occasion for military intervention!” (p. 126; my interpolation). Hence whilst Grotius’s list of proscribed activities inevitably shows the stamp of its age, it retains some currency.

Interesting and highly significant is the distinction that Grotius draws between law and custom: Nussbaum informs us that for him “the fact that another nation does not observe one’s own national customs does not license intervention…nor does the fact that they do not observe one’s own religion and its divine laws” (pp. 124–125). This would have been sage counsel indeed for the political leaders of the US and Britain in the aftermath of 9/11, and although it would not have stopped the retaliatory invasions, it might at least have prevented the anthropologically wrong-headed, socially and culturally disastrous, and ideologically imperial attempts to “plant the seeds of liberal democracy” in the most unpropitious (and sovereign) tribal soils of Afghanistan and Iraq. So Grotius has much to teach the modern world. A further thread in his thought about international relations concerns duties of material aid, and here he “supplies the tradition with two key notions: common goods, and claims of need” (p. 128). The former include such natural goods as sea and air, but it is in relation to the latter that Grotius’s argument begins to take the tradition forward, according to Nussbaum. She points out that in On the Law of War and Peace:

Grotius advances a much broader principle of access to material goods, based on the idea of basic needs. In time of necessity, he argues, “natural equity” requires that you first try to meet your need from your own property. But if that proves impossible, you are permitted to use the property of others…Thus, it is forbidden to destroy surplus food, and anyone who needs it may use it; water may similarly be used in time of need. This same right seems to him to yield a right to possess and cultivate unoccupied land…Even within a territory, foreigners are entitled to cultivate and take possession of uncultivated land (p. 129).

Clearly, this is a big step (in thought if not deed) in the direction of redistribution of material resources to accommodate those in need, but Grotius goes further, arguing that in such cases even property rights can be superseded by entitlement to material aid, so that, Nussbaum writes, “even if the owner doesn’t consent, that does not undermine the claim of the needy, for, given that it belongs to the needy by right, it does not belong to the owner in any case”. Furthermore, Grotius extends rights of material aid to migrants — a timely issue both then and now. A migrant himself, Grotius “is very concerned with the situation of people who are forced by need or political circumstances to leave their own country”, arguing that they should be accorded temporary stay and accommodation, and, where they have been forced to flee their home country, lasting haven. Nor should migrants be subject to expulsion on the ground that a host nation has begun to suffer economic misfortune and therefore has insufficient resources to cater for them, and migrants should also have the right to marry individuals from the indigenous community. Hence, Grotius’s “picture of the world is highly porous, protecting a lot of the movement of peoples from nation to nation…and protecting certain minimum welfare rights for all world citizens, even when the wherewithal to meet those needs must come from another nation’s store” (p. 131). It cannot escape notice here what a marked contrast exists between this humane and principled Grotian position and the current British Government’s Rwandan “policy” on handling migrants, which bears more resemblance to the wilfully reductive and chauvinistic attitude towards refugees of the eighteenth-century French reactionary Joseph de Maistre, characterised thus by Isaiah Berlin in his Introduction to an English translation of Maistre’s Considerations on France:

He says to the Emperor of Russia: Do not allow all these Lutheran Germans to come and teach in your schools. Who are these people who are pouring in, in endless numbers, into your kingdom? Good men – family men who have traditions, faith, religion, respectable morals – do not leave their countries. Only the feckless and the reckless and the critical do so. This is the first real sermon again refugees, against freedom of the spirit, against the circulation of humanity – the first, certainly, made in violent and intelligible and, indeed, memorable terms (de Maistre 2000: p. xxvii).

Nussbaum’s reading of the various thinkers she considers in this book is close, perceptive, and nuanced, and yields many insights. A broad overview is possible here but there is no substitute for reading the book itself, such is the depth and detail of her research and the sophistication and lucidity of her arguments. A particular strength of the book is Nussbaum’s incisive and revealing analysis of the contribution to the cosmopolitan tradition made by Adam Smith. Although he is regarded widely as the foremost historical advocate of the free market, she notes that “it is a great mistake…to read Smith as the prophet of mere self-interest” (p. 148). Nussbaum stresses both the deep attraction of Stoicism for Smith — the ancient ideal of the noble individual who seeth all, suffereth all, but complaineth not — and his fundamentally structural understanding of human flourishing (and its opposite), two elements of his thought which of necessity do not coalesce and end up producing a tension or contradiction in his overall position. This reveals itself most sharply in the profound difference between the central conclusions of his two main works, The Wealth of Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments. Nussbaum points out that in the former, despite its being “a work commonly reputed as callous”, Smith demonstrates an acute awareness of “the depth to which human abilities stand in need of material goods and institutional arrangements”, whereas in the latter “(allegedly) softer and more humane” work, he falls back on the austere forbearance of his Stoicism, advocating and defending the view that the true moralist is indifferent to “externals”, and that human dignity is impervious to material deficits and misfortunes. Certainly in The Wealth of Nations, as Nussbaum amply shows, Smith adopts a thoroughly empiricist approach to the differences evident between people, which he regards, she writes, as “the effect, rather than the cause, of the division of labour”. She then quotes from that work: “The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seem to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education” (p. 150). Unlike Cicero and the Stoic tradition, Smith:

sees that a life worthy of human dignity requires more than the absence of aggression, torture, and theft. It requires, as well, certain conditions of labor, because it is in the sphere of labor that a person’s humanity is deeply and fundamentally expressed. The freedom to contract for one’s own labor, the freedom of movement, and the free choice of occupation are all essential to a life in which one can ‘barter and exchange’ like a human, rather than fawning like an animal (pp. 158–159).

However, Nussbaum goes on to outline that for Smith the dignity of humanity is reliant also on other but related factors, such as adequate pay, recreational opportunities, and egalitarian institutions, thus advancing a thesis which “strikingly anticipates similar arguments made by proponents of the Capabilities Approach today” (p. 159). The question remains, though, of why Smith’s attitude to human dignity in his first great work is almost completely at odds with that in his later one? As with the Stoic tradition more generally, Nussbaum sees this contradiction as emanating from Smith’s gender, and as evidencing “the intuitive power of the Stoic doctrines, at least in connection with some very traditional and deeply-rooted ideas of masculine virtue that are often closely linked to ideas of human dignity”. This is a psychologically perceptive and thought-provoking argument, for which Nussbaum adduces telling evidence in the book, such as Smith’s criticism of “the shameful behavior of a French duke, the Duc de Biron, who actually wept on the scaffold” and his caution against the display of emotion following bereavement, such as might be shown by “an affectionate, but weak woman”. Also noteworthy is the fact that Smith, though his “account of trade questions the salience of national boundaries”, does not argue specifically in favour of the free international movement of people, despite it seeming to follow logically and practically from what he says about removing fetters from commerce, nor, indeed, does he consider the matter of migrants more generally, which, Nussbaum argues, constitutes “a large gap in his account” (p. 171). So whilst Smith’s thought represents a clear advance in the tradition vis-à-vis the importance of material environment and aid for human well-being, it remains somewhat strained and ambivalent internally, and underdeveloped in a major direction.

Similarly, Nussbaum notes, “Grotius never pursues the radical implications of his ideas”, though she adds, “But it is always open to us to do so” (p. 133), before going on to accept her own invitation, concluding:

The picture of international society I have mapped out, following Grotius, holds that the international realm is always moral but not by any means always legal. International law has some useful roles to play, and might be further developed. But one should always beware of leaching away national sovereignty, particularly in favor of an international realm that is not decently accountable to people in each nation through their own political choices and self-given laws (pp. 218–219).

Thus can a balance be struck, Nussbaum argues, between the unavoidably competing demands of maintaining and respecting national autonomy on the one hand, and protecting the rights of human beings globally, on the other. She cites as an example of how such a hybrid model of international relations can be effective the women’s rights movement, which has wrought much positive change around the world through the moral validity and force of its arguments, without the default need for recourse to legal routes. As Nussbaum points out: “Documents propel things forward, give a sense of progressing common cause” (p. 221). Nussbaum also draws attention to the problem of distributing aid in an effectual and morally cautious way, citing the problem of organising aid effectively on such a grand scale, the “sectarian political or religious agenda” of many NGOs, and in particular the mounting evidence that foreign aid does little good and may even be counterproductive, breeding political apathy among the very populations it is intended to galvanise. However, she does not conclude in the light of such evidence that duties of material aid are impossible to fulfil, but rather that more evidence of this kind is required to direct our efforts with greater success.

In this regard, Nussbaum’s book concludes with a chapter devoted to explaining her version of the “Capabilities Approach”, which she views as a contemporary replacement for the cosmopolitan tradition, one which embraces but updates its insights. Central to this objective is the recognition that duties of justice and of material aid are inseparable, since social justice can only be attained by the stable provision of material or substantial goods which support the flourishing of human capabilities. She goes further, however, noting that she is “diverging from many of my colleagues” (p. 238) in this respect, by arguing that “the tradition is relentlessly anthropocentric”, and that on this question “the tradition must be rejected”, both “to admit the equal dignity of human beings with severe cognitive disabilities”, and more radically “to do justice to the claims of sentient beings of other species” (the influence of Peter Singer and his famous rejection of “speciesism” is clearly evident here). Interestingly, Nussbaum notes the existence in “other schools in antiquity – Epicureanism, Neo-Platonism (the vegetarian works of Porphyry and Plutarch), and in some ways Aristotle” (p. 237) of a less anthropocentric, more inclusive approach.

In several places during her argument, Nussbaum makes it clear that mutual understanding, agreement, and even genuine disagreement require some general conceptual framework within which they can occur. She argues that such a framework does exist. For instance:

Ignorance, distance, obtuseness and various artificial distinctions separate us. But our human capacities are such as to make us members, in principle, of a global moral community. Any child might have been born in any nation and spoken any language. Events in other nations are comprehensible to us as human events, affecting members of our species. Our moral concern, our enthusiasm, and our passion are frequently, if unevenly, aroused by events in other regions. Each child who is born, is, as Kant says, therefore not just a little worldly being, but also a little world citizen (Weltburger) (pp. 206–207).

In similar vein, she proposes the existence of a very broad moral framework which is common to humanity, and permits both agreement and (at least intelligible) disagreement, but cautions that any list of necessary protections for human dignity therefrom must be limited so as to recognise and protect the integrity of local cultures. I am reminded once again here of the work of Isaiah Berlin, who argues there is a limited “core” of human values which he contends are almost universally shared in common and which permit — at least potentially — very broad moral agreement across time and place. However, he also stresses the irreducible plurality of human values, as well as their incommensurability and frequent incompatibility (both conceptually and practically), which lead inevitably to conflicts on questions of fundamental value which are barely resolvable, if at all, and Nussbaum demonstrates a similar awareness of this pluralist fact. Referring to Cicero’s recognition that core human values may clash, she writes: “There is tension in this life, and there is conflict”: then goes on to cite as a particular contemporary example of such conflict the debate in the US (and elsewhere) regarding whether and how people with certain religious beliefs may “express their disapproval of gay, lesbian, or transgender people”, without violating “those people’s fundamental rights” (p. 215).

Two philosophers who are absent from this book but who have advanced similar arguments about the relationship between justice and liberty rights and rights to material aid are Michael Sandel and Jonathan Riley. Sandel’s (1984: p.4) distinction between “Egalitarian liberals” who “support the welfare state, and favour a scheme of civil liberties together with certain social and economic rights – rights to welfare, education, health care, and so on”, and “Libertarian liberals” who “defend the market economy, and claim that redistributive policies violate people’s rights” and who “favour a scheme of civil liberties with a strict regime of private property rights”, certainly resembles that drawn by Nussbaum between thinkers such as Grotius and Smith who recognised the importance of material circumstances for human flourishing, and the Stoic defence of private property and their ideal of a noble, self-sufficient individualism. (though it could be argued that a comparison between private property as defended by the Stoics and what is referred to and understood by that phrase in the modern world is inadmissibly anachronistic). Even more pertinently, Riley (2001) argues that any consistent political liberalism — despite the historical association of liberalism with capitalism and the free ownership of assets — in fact presupposes the duty of the state radically to curtail private property rights in certain extreme circumstances, such as those of famine, since the right to be free from arbitrary murder is a fundamental human right in even a minimally liberal state, and morally it is irrelevant whether such murder proceeds directly from the act of a random assailant or indirectly from structural failures of the state. It cannot escape notice, of course, that there is a distinctly Grotian ring to this argument.

Though many of Nussbaum’s ideas and arguments in this book are sound and persuasive, some seem utopian in the extreme. Among the most obvious examples is her exhortation that:

We need…to undertake a project that the Stoics not only ignored, but also would likely have repudiated: the systematic study of infant attachments, as they unfold in constant interaction with cultural norms and perceptions. A kind of anthropological psychoanalysis, if you will. If we don’t do this, our high-minded proposals will very likely prove fruitless, inasmuch as they will not be addressed to real people as they are (pp. 212–213).

She continues that what is needed is “a large research program in which many nations and traditions should participate, describing the roots of prejudice, stigma, and hate in many times and places and using these insights to form useful policies” (p. 213). Whilst, on one level, this is clearly an understandable and laudable aim, it does not seem a remotely realistic one, demonstrating as it does a faith in the possibilities of the human “sciences” and human collaboration that many would find difficult to share, or perhaps even take seriously at all. There is also something unsettlingly Comtean and clinically intrusive about such an approach. The main reason, though, that such a project would seem highly unlikely to succeed is that, sadly, “prejudice, stigma, and hate” are too fundamentally a part of what human beings are prone to, too embedded within and supportive of the differences which separate and define diverse and opposing cultures, and on which such cultures pride themselves, too susceptible to political manipulation and exploitation, for a transformation of the species of the kind envisaged by Nussbaum, and effected by rational means, to be possible. Would it were not so, but regrettably history shows us that it emphatically is, as do such clear-eyed students of the human jungle as Burke, de Maistre, and, of course, before them, Machiavelli and his stark (but honest) political pragmatism. Theirs is not the whole truth, to be sure, and we have some shining examples of human progress — modern sanitation, medicine, international laws to safeguard human rights — but some of what they say about the ineradicable flaws of the human species is undeniably true, and this despite our modern ability to generate and manipulate masses of data about ourselves and our world (a fact evidenced most glaringly by our failure to address the climate crisis in a serious manner).

At the outset, the question was posed whether Nussbaum’s didactic use of history is successful — whether her historical approach in advancing a normative scheme for society adds weight to her arguments that a purely analytic and contemporary approach would lack. On its face, this question does not differentiate between two relevant senses and kinds of history (between which of course there is interplay). The first is the history of ideas — of seminal historical works, their core ideational content, and the influence of that content, both contemporaneously and over stretches of time. The second is the history of events — of the growth and decline of nations, of shifting enmities and allegiances between them, of wars and genocides, and of utopian and dystopian projects. Nussbaum’s book focuses primarily on the former — the tradition of cosmopolitan thought, its historical influence, and what it might teach us today. But it is the latter history — that of events — which prompted de Maistre to declare that humanity “is too wicked to be free”, and that “war is in a sense the habitual condition of mankind” (de Maistre 1965: p.144, p.61; author’s emphases). Some modern commentators have argued notably that violence in the world is gradually reducing (Pinker 2011) But the contemporary world does not seem short on bloody and protracted conflicts, which fly in the face of the idealism and optimism that pervade Nusbaum’s original article, features which remain prominent — if less bullish — in her later book. If history teaches anything, voices such as de Maistre’s would counsel, it is not that we are apt to love others as ourselves.

The question whether Nussbaum’s didactic use of history is successful may also be thought to presuppose the possibility of a culturally transcendent normativity that in fact does not, and never can, exist. In For Love of Country, Amartya Sen, rejecting Himmelfarb’s “sharp distinction between Western and non-Western values”, argues that: “one may or may not agree with Ashoka that gratuitously harming person A for whom another person B has affection is also to harm B, and that justice requires that this not be done for the sake of both A and B…but it would be hard to know what he was discussing if it were presumed that nothing about justice was being discussed (in a land far away from the West)” (p.117). Yet in one culture it is thought “just” to punish the perpetrator of rape, in another the victim, and each would not recognise or perhaps even deny the “justice” of the other approach? The first society prioritises the principle of the inviolability of the person, the second the sanctity of cultural norms. That these examples do not instantiate a single sense and kind of justice is not hard to see; hence, Sen’s argument fails. The difficulty here is the underlying assumption that the defining characteristics of value pluralism can be made somehow to go away — the irreducibility, incommensurability in general, and incompatibility of human values. In his Preface to For Love of Country, Cohen evidences this assumption when he writes that: “Cosmopolitanism is a controversial view, one tendency of moral thought opposed by outlooks that resist its ideal of world citizenship in the name of sensibilities and attachments rooted in group affiliation or national tradition. The responses to Nussbaum reflect these conflicting pulls, highlighting at once the complexity of these issues and the importance of their resolution” (p. viii; my emphasis). But can the conflict between love for one’s own and love for humanity be “resolved”? Must we not choose between them, either in general or differently in different situations?

In her Reply at the end of For Love of Country, Nussbaum writes that: “The challenge of world citizenship, it seems to me, is to work towards a state of things in which all of the differences [between cultural norms or values] will be nonhierarchically understood” (p. 138; my interpolation). Yet choices between values — or indeed culturally conditioned acceptance of them — entail hierarchy. I choose peace over conquest, you conquest over peace. I accept the primacy of individual freedom, you that of cultural identity. But binary alternatives are not helpful. What is needed is middle ground — empathy, communication, concession, compromise — wherever it is practically possible to promote and establish this. As Michael Walzer writes in For Love of Country: “A particularism that excludes wider loyalties invites immoral conduct, but so does a cosmopolitanism that overrides narrower loyalties. Both are dangerous; the argument needs to be cast in different terms” (p. 127). Nussbaum’s attempt at this in The Cosmopolitan Tradition — whilst exceedingly interesting, scholarly, and, indeed, noble — is, I think, ultimately and inevitably flawed, since it proposes to ground cosmopolitanism in a patriotism that withers away once its horizons have been expanded, when in truth neither of these fundamental allegiances is wholly compatible with, or reducible to, the other, but exists rather in a state of permanent competition and tension with its alternative.