Abstract
At the beginning of her new book on human rights and cosmopolitanism, Seyla Benhabib retrieves a quotation from a 1985 article on narrativism and historiography by David J. Depew. “Cosmopolitanism,” so Depew, “considered as a positive ideal, whether formally or materially, generates antinomies that undermine its internal coherence. . . . Considered, however, as a critical ideal, these difficulties largely disappear. The resulting conception of cosmopolitanism [is] a negative ideal aimed at blocking false totalization” (2). 1 Depew’s concern was with writing history while dealing with the 1980s bugbear of grand narratives, but his solution transfers well to political theory: we can save cosmopolitanism from its contradictions, which can turn an inclusive, egalitarian project into an exclusive, elitist or domineering one, by interpreting it negatively, as a check on precisely the sort of totalizing projects that tend to call themselves cosmopolitan. Those familiar with Benhabib’s strong defenses of universalism over the years may be surprised that she adopts Depew’s formula, “a negative ideal aimed at blocking false totalization,” for her own cosmopolitanism. In the end I think the label fits surprisingly well, and illuminates something important about the strengths of her approach.
Dignity in Adversity gathers previously published work on cosmopolitan themes from the last six years. More than most post hoc collections, the essays are arranged not only to articulate a general orientation but to tell an overarching story. While the volume’s core is the philosophy and politics of human rights, pieces on theories of Nazism and anti-Semitism and crimes against humanity as well as utopia and dystopia allow Benhabib to reflect on the historical constellation that gave rise to today’s cosmopolitanism and how we should think about its future. In addition to weaving the themes of her recent work into a broader tapestry, she develops their implications in an impressive range of contemporary scholarly debates. Followers of her work will find plenty of new refinements and elaborations here, though the central arguments will be familiar; newcomers will find a topical and accessible introduction to current debates around cosmopolitanism and human rights as well as the distinctive approach Benhabib has developed to them over the last decade or so.
Benhabib’s cosmopolitanism rests on two pillars: one moral, the other political. On the moral side, she argues that legal and political universalism cannot be sustained on merely pragmatic grounds, but must rest on moral universalism. Rather than a thick but contentious foundation like natural law, Benhabib finds a “non-metaphysical” basis for her human rights in the presuppositions of communicative interaction. Here she appeals not to Habermas, but to Rainer Forst’s notion of a “basic right to justification.” 2 As she summarizes this idea: “In order to be able to justify to you why you and I ought to act in certain ways, I must respect your capacity to agree or disagree with me on the basis of reasons the validity of which you accept or reject. But to respect your capacity to accept or reject reasons the validity of which you may accept or reject means for me to respect your capacity for communicative freedom” (67). Respecting others, on this version of discourse ethics, means recognizing them as potential partners in dialogue.
On the political side, Benhabib’s central claim is that while everyone is entitled to “communicative freedom,” this entitlement must be realized by each community in its own way. While Benhabib heralds the rise of transnational human rights norms and the weakening of state sovereignty, she does not, like many cosmopolitans, simply champion them against a declining Westphalian order. To the contrary, for her the state remains irreducible as a focus of democratic citizenship. While universal morality in the form of human rights should provide local norms with their deep justification, they must be democratically legislated and articulated in light of local contexts and concerns in order to be legitimate. “Without the basic rights of the person, republican sovereignty would be blind,” as she puts it; “without the exercise of collective autonomy, rights of the person would be empty” (128).
Human rights stand at the junction of these two arguments, and Benhabib accordingly makes Hannah Arendt’s “right to have rights” do double duty: not only does she interpret it as Arendt did, as membership in a political community; for her it also stands for moral respect as such (62). Benhabib’s careful management of the relation between morality and politics allows her to circumvent problems that plague other theories. Unlike approaches that try to secure human rights’ universality by keeping them minimal, she accomplishes this by making them vague—a “principle” rather than a “schedule” (74). Yet by regarding human rights as moral before they are political, she is able to dodge the vexing question of their enforcement. Thus, while she argues against Rawl’s and other minimal accounts of human rights that a right to “communicative freedom” amounts to a universal human right to democracy, she insists that this right must be realized within national political contexts. Importantly, it cannot justify intervention.
While she does not put it this way, I think this balance Benhabib maintains between the moral and the political, involving both their overlap and their separation, is the most immediate sense in which her cosmopolitanism serves as a “negative ideal.” Human rights norms help check the false totalizations of states, cultures, and communities by providing a resource for inclusion, empowerment, and resistance, yet the idea that they must be realized democratically checks the false totalizations of cosmopolitanism (human rights fundamentalism, cultural and political imperialism, etc.).
Benhabib relies on two concepts she introduced in The Rights of Others (2004) to mediate between morality and politics: democratic iterations and jurisgenerative politics. Democratic iterations, on a definition she has given elsewhere are “processes of linguistic, legal, cultural, and political repetitions-in-transformation” through which “a democratic people, considering itself bound by certain guiding norms and principles, reappropriates and reinterprets these, thus showing itself to be not only subject to the laws but also their author” (112). Jurisgenerative politics, meanwhile, are “moments when a space emerges in the public sphere, when principles and norms which undergird democratic will-formation become permeable and fluid enough to absorb new semantic contents, which, in turn, enable the augmentation of the meaning of rights” (183). Together, these concepts describe how the universal normative logic of human rights touches down in particular contexts. For Benhabib, this is mainly a matter of what political scientists tend to call “uptake,” but she would prefer to see as re-articulation or appropriation—peaceful if contentious democratic processes through which transnational human rights norms are taken up in national politics.
Benhabib was an important early interpreter and advocate of Habermas’s work, and her articulation of universal communicative morality with democracy owes much to his political theory. As on his discourse-theoretical account of law and democracy, for Benhabib human rights and democracy are both ideally expressions of “communicative freedom,” and therefore not fundamentally opposed. When she claims that “transnational norms are not opposed to democratic will-formation; they facilitate rather than limit the expansion of democratic legitimation” (132), we should note that what at first appears to be a parallel is in fact an opposition. While human rights may help “expand” democracy, they typically do so by checking democracy in its more common political sense, as the assertion of a collective will. And, indeed, Benhabib reproaches Habermas for trying to substitute a logical deduction for contingent political processes in the actualization of rights, and for underestimating the extent to which private and public rights can collide in practice (264n).
It is hardly surprising, then, that in the examples that fill Benhabib’s later chapters what we find is not so much the harmony of human rights and democracy as their tensions and “paradoxes”—a word that recurs. Revisiting cases she has explored in greater length elsewhere, like ‘headscarf affairs’ in France, Germany, and Turkey or the use of Sharia law in Canada, she shows that such rights are controversial, hard won, and often hard to assess on normative grounds. Politically speaking, moreover, they are seldom the work of elected legislatures. While Benhabib highlights the roles of civil society organizations and shifting public opinion, by and large the rights she hopes will emerge from democratic politics (supported by transnational human rights) are in practice created and defended by judges and administrative tribunals.
This raises a question for me about the fit between Benhabib’s theorization of human rights and democracy and her appreciation of the tensions between them in practice. To be sure, it may be helpful to argue that human rights protections should be regarded as “democratic.” Such an account can help us criticize exclusionary institutions. As she suggests in her final chapter on Ernst Bloch, it can also provide us with a sort of “concrete utopia” of cosmopolitan republican federalism. At one point, Benhabib characterizes her account of democratic iterations an “idealized account of political legitimacy” (151). As long as this idealization remains, on Depew’s formula, “negative,” there seems to be no harm in it. An idealizing account may not help much with hard cases, or do much to prepare us for the virulence of conflicts that are in fact not so much between the universal and the particular as between competing universals, but it can serve as a basis for criticism and a goal to aspire to.
The risk with idealizing accounts, of course, is that they can become what Charles Mills has called “descriptive idealizations,” 3 so that we confuse real things with the promise we have invested in them. The danger, to which idealizing theory is especially prone when it seeks to interpret institutions and events, is that we will see actual political entities in terms of their normative justifications or potentials rather than (instead of in addition to) the forms of power and exclusion they inevitably also embody. Benhabib is careful to avoid this—more, I think, because of her sensitivity to paradox and the gaps between morality and politics as well as her tendency to view institutions from the perspective of those outside them than because of the underlying theory. The result is a highly engaging display of the discourse-theoretical approach at its most critical and therefore best, and a stimulating guide to the difficulties and tensions of politics across borders.