Cosmopolitanism and Liberal Universalism in International Relations Theory: Moralising Politics or Politicising Ethics?

Realism and Idealism Today: A Philosophy of History or a History of Forgetting?

A founding figure of Classical Realism, Hans J. Morgenthau considered prudence the ‘supreme virtue’ of political morality. ⁴ Borne out of a reaction against the platitudes of liberal Enlightenment, Wilsonian internationalism, Realism is part of a larger genealogy of skepticism toward liberal universalism and progressive narratives of history. Not surprisingly, then, there is a tendency amongst Realist scholars to view cosmopolitan theories of world politics as utopian: commendable in theory but too idealistic and even potentially dangerous when it comes to the implementation of universal ethics in the practice of International Relations. As such, critics suggest, advocates of well-intentioned but ‘unrealistic’ aspirations to cosmopolitan norms must reckon with the relentless charge of impractical idealism (and what is more, Western imperialism) if they wish to remain relevant in theory and practice.

Whether or not what Morgenthau called the ‘merger’ of idealism and realism represents a new direction for IR largely depends on the extent to which the dominant Realist historiography continues to discipline a rather ambiguous intellectual lineage. Despite the legacy bequeathed by the ‘lore’ of realism, ⁵ the so-called Classical Realist position, in its various guises, exceeds paradigmatic assumptions: in its initial articulation, it was quite ambivalent, idealistic, and even cosmopolitan to some extent. E. H. Carr was sensitive to the dialectical relation of politics to morality; but he sought to reconcile morality with politics in a way that was distinct from a Kantian Republicanism. Rather than avoid the political decision by subordinating political power to morality through law – a largely depoliticising strategy Carr identifies with liberal internationalism – Carr refused to moralise politics. Likewise, Richard Beardsworth’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory has no pretense to moral virtue. Beardsworth develops a ‘realist’ prudence into a refined ‘Cosmopolitan Realism’: that is, a non-normative, political ethics in the Weberian sense, a theory and practice of ethical responsibility in the ‘force-field of politics’ (p. 239).

Despite Carr’s critique of Kantian idealism, Beardsworth concedes that Carr’s so-called Classical Realism, much like his own brand of Cosmopolitan Realism, is remarkably liberal, idealistic and even ‘Kantian’ in some respects. ⁶ In the concluding chapter ‘Realism and Idealism Today’, Beardsworth reads Carr’s Kantian tendencies through Kant’s language of faculties: ‘without intuition “thoughts are empty”, but without concepts, “intuitions are blind,”’ (p. 228). As Beardsworth notes, Kant is talking here about cognition and not ‘rational moral interest’, but the logic of the argument reflects the desire to effect a compromise between ethics and politics in political decision-making. A responsible theory and practice of world politics, Beardsworth concludes, must seek the ‘union’ of idealism and realism: by ignoring concerns of power and interest, ethical thought is ‘empty’ (p. 228). Despite some noteworthy affinities between Cosmopolitan Realism and Kantian Republicanism, Beardsworth’s refusal to subordinate politics to moral law does represent a significant departure from a Kantian faith in international law, a moral-legalistic attitude which Beardsworth, following his Realist predecessors, dismisses as idealistic.

Overall, Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory makes an impressive contribution to the literature on cosmopolitanism and IR. The specific details of Beardsworth’s cosmopolitan commitments will be discussed momentarily. For now it is important to recognise that in spite of some nuanced insights about the relationship between cosmopolitanism and IR, Beardsworth’s entire text rests on some anachronistic assumptions concerning the cosmopolitical and the complex nexus between cosmopolitanism, liberalism and nationalism. To be fair, Beardsworth does provide readers with some background behind the development of the ‘Cosmopolitan Disposition’ (see pp. 17–21), specifically the fusion of Stoic Moral Cosmopolitanism and Christian Universalism which became the language of natural law, and the subsequent basis for a more ‘systematic’ cosmopolitanism during the European Enlightenment (p. 17). While Beardsworth directs the reader’s attention to the chief historical developments underpinning modern cosmopolitanism, he does not adequately address the complicated relation between cosmopolitanism and liberalism that is so crucial to his argument, nor does he mention the complex historical relation between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. He does note that there are a number of reasons why cosmopolitanism and liberalism ‘cannot be aligned,’ yet he also claims that contemporary cosmopolitanism is subsumed within Enlightenment Liberalism (pp. 5–6). Without a doubt, there is a strong connection between modern cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment Liberalism (see p. 228), and while Beardsworth remarks that it is wrong to conflate the two, he proceeds to do so, with little explanation as to why. As Pheng Cheah ⁷ has demonstrated, the Kantian idea of the cosmopolitical was formulated in the transition between the age of absolutism and the age of liberalism, and because nationalism was ‘embryonic’ at this stage, Kant’s Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism was neither liberal nor post-nationalist (p. 22), as Beardsworth’s interpretation tends to imply. In this regard, within Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory, the status of the cosmopolitical is unfortunately largely assumed and unexplored: the precise nature of the relation between cosmopolitanism and liberalism, and between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, is left unsaid.

Beardsworth’s rather teleological history of liberal cosmopolitanism provides an interesting, though somewhat selective and anachronistic account of the history of ideas. Ironically, his revisionist liberal cosmopolitanism or ‘Cosmopolitan Realism’ is seduced by the appeal of a kind of idealism, what Classical Realist Martin Wight called a philosophy of history – what is perhaps better characterised here as a history of forgetting. Beardsworth presents an innovative, cosmopolitan response to Realism, Marxism and ‘postmodernism,’ but his account glosses over the complex status of cosmopolitanism throughout the history of ideas, both within and beyond IR. From Stoic moral philosophy to Enlightenment liberalism, cosmopolitanism lacks a unitary trajectory – the history of cosmopolitan ethics is a story of rupture and transformation. In an instructive destabilisation of this history, Gideon Baker’s Politicising Ethics in International Relations: Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality (2011) illustrates precisely this discontinuity. What we need, he argues, is a genealogy, not the search for irrefutable origins, and certainly not another linear narrative or philosophy of history. As a Realist would suggest, when theorising about the status of modern cosmopolitanism – the cosmopolitical – it is important to exercise prudent judgment.

Cosmopolitan (Im)possibilities: Rethinking the Empirical/Normative Divide

Ever since E. H. Carr presented his so-called ‘Realist’ critique of ‘utopianism’ (more specifically, liberal internationalism) in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, the study of world politics has sought to coordinate the legacy of philosophical idealism and political realism. ⁸ The crux of this problem continues unabated in the context of the cosmopolitan responses to globalisation. Though it remains a subject of intense epistemological disagreement, most IR theorists now endeavour to strike a balance between morality and political judgment, theory and practice, in a way that responds to the normative dimensions of the empirical; that is, the globalisation of contingency, and the need for a radical response to the global crises that transcend the political boundaries of sovereign states.

Accusations of starry-eyed idealism are nothing new when it comes to the critique of cosmopolitan thought. The alleged implausibility of modern Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism was not lost on one of its primary intellectual forebearers, Immanuel Kant. Kant famously remarked that cosmopolitan thought has always been ‘ridiculed by great statesmen, and even more by the heads of state, as pedantic, childish and academic ideas’. ⁹ Although cosmopolitanism is generally more normative in focus, and mainstream IR is more empirically oriented, at present cosmopolitanism has ‘increasing purchase on empirical reality’, with regard to a number of collective action problems, including, but by no means limited to, problems related to international security, climate change, economic regulation and humanitarian intervention. ¹⁰ Thus, in light of several legal and political applications of a cosmopolitan ethos (e.g. the international human rights regime, the International Criminal Court, etc.), what Kantian Jürgen Habermas calls the ‘juridification’ of International Relations, ¹¹ many believe the line separating the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of world politics can no longer be sustained.

The normative ‘hovers’, in Beardsworth’s view, between the empirical and the non-empirical (p. 33). Thus, for Beardsworth, much like Kant, the intellectual merit of cosmopolitan ideals lie in their heuristic value as immanent normative impossibilities for the framing of International Relations and a better world to come. These ‘impossibilities’, however, are distinct from a sort of philosophical utopianism. Rather, a critical cosmopolitanism emphasises immanent tendencies or immediate possibilities – im-possibilities – that suggest feasible transformations beyond the anarchic order of statist fragmentation. According to Beardsworth, ‘the impossibility of an enacted set of global rights and duties’ in an international system defined by state sovereignty, ‘nevertheless motivates more sophisticated legal and political invention’ (p. 32). Beardsworth, in this regard, is highly cognisant of the complex status of the normative in IR; he says normative cosmopolitanism is already ‘embedded’ in the human rights regime, and the idea of human rights is an ‘emerging reality at all levels of governance’ (p. 30).

Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory: Towards a Cosmopolitan Realism?

Cosmopolitanism is a complex, multidimensional view of world politics. The normative force of cosmopolitan declarations, Beardsworth contends, should not be underestimated in an era of complex interdependence. Cosmopolitanism constitutes an ‘intellectual framework’ within which problems of a global dimension, and questions about the indeterminate ‘we’ of a common humanity, can be theorised and problematised (p. 13). For Beardsworth, cosmopolitanism cannot be dismissed as lofty utopianism; with increasing frequency, the normative status of liberal cosmopolitan has been shown to have strong ‘legal, institutional and political implications’, in the ‘real world’ of international politics (p. 13). Admittedly, says Beardsworth, the cosmopolitan disposition involves a certain degree of naiveté (p. 14). However, understood vis-à-vis the tradition of liberal thought, cosmopolitan ideas address ‘the practical reality of interdependence’, and are thus ‘empirically meaningful’ (p. 109).

Cosmopolitanism does not, as Beardsworth is careful to note, describe a single moral, normative, legal, institutional or political outlook – one of his primary claims is that cosmopolitanism is a highly differentiated form of universalism: the political feasibility of cosmopolitan ideas depends on context and the cosmopolitan modality (moral, legal, institutional and political) in question. Additionally, to illustrate the variety of cosmopolitan commitments that may be politically feasible or unfeasible in a given area, Beardsworth begins by drawing the reader’s attention to the ‘Cosmopolitan Spectrum’ which ranges from the weak cultural cosmopolitan to its strong political variant (see Ch. 1).

Beardsworth’s major contribution to the discussion of cosmopolitanism and IR concerns the way his analysis answers to the Realist demand for judgment while addressing and responding to elements of the postmodern critique of cosmopolitanism, including the critique of liberal universalism. As a ‘no clean hands’ approach to IR, this book does not moralise the messy world of politics – in fact, if anything, it teaches us to be ‘less virtuous.’ It stands, therefore, as a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how both cosmopolitanism and postmodern IR (particularly Derridean inspired scholarship) can offer insightful political advice to Realism without either falling back on a programmatic ethics or becoming complicit in oppression for the sake of unconditional singularity.

The idea of ‘singularity’ frequently appears within the postmodern literature in IR. The notion of singularity describes a particular instance or concrete manifestation of that which exceeds generalities or universal principles: the absolutely specific in contrast to the absolutely general. In considerations of political morality, then, the refusal to subordinate decision-making to a programmable ethics or universal moral law also requires bringing the singularity of the decision and judgment back into the political. In this regard, a Derridean-influenced reading of the political rehabilitates the existential and singular quality of the political decision formerly expunged by liberal cosmopolitanism and universal ethics.

The work of Richard Beardsworth (2011) and Gideon Baker (2011) converges around this Derridean-style approach to the political. Each author also contends, however, that the postmodern critique of cosmopolitan domination is often weary of universalism to the point of political paralysis. Postmodern resistance to cosmopolitan norms, they argue, must be supplemented by a greater attention to the limits posed by the demand for political judgment and decisionism in the face of uncertainty; only through a practical appraisal of the requirements of the political real can postmodern approaches to IR offer an ethically responsible alternative to the structural violence of law and the imposition of a ‘totalizing Western liberalism’.

The scope of this project is bold and ambitious, but as Beardsworth reminds us, given the urgency of global crises, ‘these projects are needed – whatever the risks, the unintended consequences, and the possible complicites’, (p. 200). Radical versions of political thought, the author suggests, must own up to the fact that political determination is necessary, even in the context of undecidability: as such, postmodern IR ‘must address this point squarely’, (p. 200) for it cannot maintain a position of self-satisfied righteousness. The refusal to think and act politically amounts to pious behaviour and irresponsible indecision. For Beardsworth, the problem with a postmodern approach to the political is that, in wishing to resist closure and prevent mastery, ‘it runs the risk of reproducing it by not contesting it in determined ways’, (p. 221). Indeed, as he suggests in a Realist manner, ‘the political game will go on regardless’, (p. 221). By developing a kind of Realist prudence in the face of the abyss of Derridean ‘undecidability’, Beardsworth formulates his own nuanced account of the ‘Cosmopolitan Disposition’, a political ethics that, while urging ethical responsibility, also positions itself against virtue ethics. Beardsworth’s argument retains selective aspects of a postmodern approach to ethics insofar as he denounces moral universalism: in the ‘force-field’ of world politics, principled action blind to local context is depoliticising and even ‘self-destructive’ (p. 53). In this manner, Beardsworth puts forth a sympathetic critique of the Derridean account of ethico-responsibility which incorporates a ‘realistic’ form of decisionism.

Beardsworth’s attempt to work through the practical implications of his Cosmopolitan Realism using the concrete example of circular migration policy in the European Union reflects a refreshing turn to practice in IR and is therefore highly commendable. However, his position on the issue of immigration resembles more of a utilitarian calculation of means-ends than a responsible cosmopolitan ethic. His solution to the global division of labour, circular migration policy, is an example of the ‘lesser violence’ that characterises Cosmopolitan Realism and its approach to political judgment; it is a necessary starting point before the move toward a more inclusive and global policy on labour mobility is possible. This option advocates the lesser violence not in the terms of postmodern IR, that is, between unconditional freedom and the risk of decision (i.e. Derridean ethico-political responsibility), but within a real force-field of political constraints (pp. 219-24). Certainly, Beardsworth is well aware of the risks posed by circular or ‘temporary’ migration policies but he nonetheless believes the prospect of upward mobility embodies the ‘cosmopolitan principle of moral personhood’ (p. 223). Without a doubt, starting from a practical, concrete reality instead of ‘unconditioned singularity’ is the only way IR can begin to influence global politics beyond the walls of academia. However, with this undeniably difficult choice for the lesser violent terms of entry and exit, Beardsworth comes closer than he might admit to a conservative, Realist prudence that simply works within the pure practical limits of the status-quo. Given the ethical dilemmas posed by second-class citizenship, the renewed significance of temporary migration programmes throughout much of the global North is a cause for concern, and not an example of a cosmopolitan ethos.

Given the focus on circular migration in the context of cosmopolitanism, it is peculiar that Beardsworth’s text does not address the large literature on hospitality and cosmopolitanism, nor does it emphasise the fact that Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism is limited to the conditions of hospitality. By contrast, in Politicising Ethics in International Relations: Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality, Gideon Baker seeks to understand why there has been ‘so little reflection’ on an ethics of hospitality in the discipline of IR, especially given the turn to ethics since the end of the Cold War (p. 3).

Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality: A First Philosophy

In Politicising Ethics in International Relations: Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality, Gideon Baker seeks to reconceptualise the debate around cosmopolitanism and IR by providing a theory of cosmopolitanism that goes beyond extant liberal tenets to understand cosmopolitanism as hospitality. Cosmopolitanism as hospitality does not moralise the messy world of politics: inclusion necessarily requires exclusion, so hospitality means ‘the welcome of the foreigner’ rather than ‘the goal of a world in which there are no more foreigners’ (p. 12).

Building off the post-Kantian Derridean deconstruction of hospitality (and the impossibility of unconditional hospitality in practice), Baker claims that the welcome of the foreigner requires a decision in spite of an incalculable undecidability; Baker demonstrates that cosmopolitanism as hospitality, by making this decision, is therefore ‘always as much a politics as it is an ethics’ (p. 15). Importantly, for Baker, cosmopolitanism as hospitality is not an absolute ethic that can serve as a normative guide to political behaviour. Following Derrida, the decisionism of political responsibility requires sacrificing ethics, that is, ‘sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all others’. ¹²

Chapter six, ‘Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality’, lays out the book’s primary claims. This chapter follows a comprehensive genealogy – one which provides an instructive contrast with Beardsworth’s account of Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism – of the discontinuous legacy of cosmopolitan thought from the Stoics to the natural law tradition through to Kant and Levinas. Rather than providing an ethical foundation for the moral duty of subjects, Baker departs from Kantian hospitality and reappropriates Derrida’s reading of Levinasian ethics to show how hospitality operates in a more phenomenological register as an Event that founds subjectivity itself – the relation of self to Other as well as to ‘other others’, such as the mediating factor of ‘the Third’, the interlocutor of unconditional, universal justice, impossibly attentive to singularity (p. 76). In this sense, hospitality is not an ethical maxim, rather, it constitutes a ‘first philosophy’: it is ‘the very birth of the subject as responsibility for the Other’ (p. 82).

Although there exists a postmodern literature in IR that focuses on the centrality of Derridean undecidability to a politically informed ethics, Baker suggests this literature has largely focused on the critique of liberal universalism while largely ignoring what ‘the implications of undecidability’ mean for ‘ethico-political practice’ (p. 106). Surprisingly, for a book concerned with the welcome of hospitality, Baker teases out the implications of undecidability for the practice of humanitarian intervention. Hospitality and intervention, he suggests, are inseparable – they are two sides of the same coin. Thus, the imperative of justice ‘inexorably leads us from hospitality to intervention’, since hospitality is ‘an unenforceable justice’, toward those who find themselves in humanitarian emergencies but have no ability to ‘travel to the home that we might open up to them’ (p. 111).

Baker positions himself against non-interventionists and liberal interventionists in a way that is attentive to the singularity of conflict. As Baker notes, the ‘application’ of the ethics of hospitality to intervention, ‘seems to call for a consideration of specific cases’ (p. 107). However, Baker resists this call because ‘the ethics of hospitality does not, cannot, programme an answer to the question of whether to intervene in specific cases’ (p. 107). Since political decisions take place in a field defined by ‘ethical undecidability’, specific instances of decision-making cannot be judged from some ethical norm ‘without undecidability collapsing back into decidability’ (p. 107). Like Beardsworth, Baker rejects a universalising, programmatic ethics or principled action that would allow the issue of intervention to be decided upon beforehand, regardless of context.

Baker formulates a sophisticated concept of hospitality that is attuned to the paradoxes associated with the tension between universality-particularity and identity-difference in debates about globalisation. Baker is sceptical about aspirations toward global civil society believed to accommodate both universality and particularity in world politics. The characteristic tension between liberal cosmopolitans and their critics, a debate which ‘rebounds monotonously between the rock of universalism – imperialistic projections of identity – and the hard place of particularity – essentialising projections of difference and otherness’, is a nevertheless productive and unavoidable site of tension for cosmopolitan theorising (p. 91).

In relation to this theoretical impasse, Baker disputes the idea that the concept of global civil society can offer a better solution to the problem of identity/difference than the notion of state sovereignty. The concept of global civil society, he writes, merely reproduces in different form the dialectical approach to the problem of world politics, that is, the ‘statist attempt to describe a universal structure of particularity’ (p. 91). To wit, both statist and globalist conceptions of political community share ‘a dialectical approach to the question of how to find a place for both identity and difference (where dialectics is understood as seeking to synthesize identity and difference by subsuming the particular within the universal)’ (p. 91). Contra postmodern condemnation of cosmopolitan imperialism, Baker demonstrates that attempts to ‘transcend the [universality-particularity] dichotomy in the direction of singularity, as much as in the name of universality, are fundamentally flawed’ (p. 92). This is because valorisations of particularity turn plurality into a universal in a similar dialectical move toward synthesis (p. 104). Baker’s comprehensive rethinking of the cosmopolitan project develops a form of cosmopolitanism that explicitly disavows the option of transcendence in relation to this dichotomy. Rather than retell another ‘depressingly familiar’ version of the dialectical schema characteristic of statist and globalist resolutions, Baker works within the site of this productive tension between identity and difference in order to open up the political space for negotiation between each extreme in a way that is irreducible to either option (p. 104).

Beyond the Rationalist and Reflectivist Debate: Eurocentrism in International Relations Theory

Recent historiographical investigations demonstrate that the notion of IR’s ‘Great Debates’ is misleading if not untenable. Regardless of whether one buys into the story of a polarised discipline, there was rarely considerable dialogue between each ‘camp’, nor did such apparent antagonism between so-called rationalist and reflectivist positions necessarily entail the mutual exclusivity of either approach. Though caricatures of disciplinary debates tend to circulate as common intellectual currency and conventional readings of this ‘sub-field’, whether or not such epistemological, methodological and ontological differences do (or ever did) in fact constitute a debate is likely to remain contested for the foreseeable future. Instead, what many IR theorists now seek to unsettle and re-imagine as a discontinuous, fragmentary trajectory is precisely this celebratory and retrospective narrative: the ‘clashes’ of IR’s ‘great traditions’ – a series of debates framed as a variation on the theme of modernity and its heroic ethos, what Brian Schmidt calls the ‘epic rendering’ of the discipline. ¹³

Rather than rehash old debates about rival theoretical frameworks and pit claims for and against the potential for a value-free analysis of IR, Hobson ¹⁴ argues the ultimate question faced by IR theorists today no longer concerns the question of positivism versus post-positivism; for as he understands it, the construction of theories about world politics are bound to be value-laden. Moreover, it is now widely accepted that methodological pluralism is commonplace in IR. For Hobson, at present, the most pressing matter concerns the historiographical issue of Eurocentrism in international theory: ‘To be or not to be Eurocentric, that is the question’ (p. 325).

Mapping out a ‘twin revisionist’ narrative of the dialogic interplay between influential thinkers of international theory and scholars of IR, Hobson’s most recent book provides a long-overdue account of the Eurocentric metanarratives circulating within these traditions of modern Western thought since the mid 18^th century. Before Hobson catalogues the primary ‘isms’ of IR – categorised into the dominant paradigms of Liberalism, Realism and Marxism – and dissects each for its latent or manifest Eurocentrism, he provides a more nuanced account of Eurocentrism in response to many suggestive but inadequate formulations of Eurocentric critique, which still tend to endorse the pioneering yet all-too-reductive conceptualisation of Edward Said. In an interesting two-step maneuver, Hobson disentangles what he refers to as the ‘Gordian Knot’ between Eurocentrism and Orientalism, and in doing so, provides an instructive destabilisation of the strict binary separation of a ‘tolerant’ and a Eurocentric account of world politics altogether.

In relation to cosmopolitan responses to globalisation, Hobson uses David Held’s theory of cosmopolitan democracy as a ‘hard-test case’ for Eurocentric theories of globalisation. Hobson considers Held’s work on globalisation, particularly his pioneering book Democracy and the Global Order, to be ‘a highly sophisticated version of cosmopolitanism liberalism, filled with many nuances’ (p. 295), and though Held has defended himself against various charges of Eurocentrism, his work on cosmopolitan democracy reproduces perfectly the Western account of historical experience, what Hobson calls ‘the Eurocentric big-bang theory of globalization and world politics’ (p. 296). Though overly-reliant on rhetorical tropes to make substantive claims, Hobson provides a convincing inversion of Held’s ‘implicit Eurocentric idioms’; ‘the West made globalization, and globalization made the Rest’ (p. 298). Hobson’s historical-sociological knowledge of Eastern civilisations is displayed elsewhere (pp. 24-6), and while it directs the reader to this work, this book tends to assume the reader is keenly aware of the fact that the West is, as Hobson notes, ‘significantly Eastern Other-made rather than purely European Self-made’ (pp. 24-6). Without simply repeating himself, Hobson’s powerful critique could have benefited from a greater integration of the knowledge from his other works ¹⁵ in order to highlight the reciprocal dynamics associated with the East-West historical experience.

Though comprehensive and highly commendable as an effort to address and deconstruct the presence of Eurocentrism within IR, and what this absence of reflexive inquiry means for positivist theories of the international, there are several problems with Hobson’s analysis. The following issues in particular detract from an otherwise persuasive work. First, the scope and breadth of this enormously impressive work is both its strength and weakness. Hobson treads a line between, on the one hand, normative prescription, and on the other hand, a diagnosis of the fundamental tensions existing within IR. Unlike other attempts to ‘provincialize Europe’, Hobson does not provide the reader with an idea as to how we might deal with the baggage of universal historicism and Western political thinking about the international. ¹⁶ Second, read and written for a multidisciplinary audience, political theorists in particular might feel uncomfortable about the amount of time dedicated to the compartmentalisation of thinkers. At times this tendency evinces a concern with temporal periodisation over sustained critical engagement. By his own admission, Hobson accepts that the nature of his historical-sociological enterprise means he is unable to focus on a minimal number of thinkers, ‘as is the preference of many political theorists’ (p.14). Thus, many of the chapters exhibit the tendency to pigeonhole and categorise a great number of thinkers into dualistic categories (pro- vs. anti-imperialist; full vs. conditional agency; paternalist institutional vs. anti-paternalist institutionalism) for the sake of theoretical parsimony and conceptual clarity, rather than interrogate the constitutive paradoxes between standard paradigms and the positions and figures they supposedly represent.

Despite his proclivity for nuanced analysis, perhaps due to Hobson’s historical-sociological inclination, he attempts to fit historical moulds into ready-made containers rather than limit his work to a more selective and sustained analysis of representative figures of the Eurocentric conception of world politics. The value of this book, however, lies in Hobson’s ability to illuminate what is most often glossed over when scholars and thinkers of the international speak the conventional (Eurocentric) languages of IR.

Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory: Contesting the Status of the Cosmopolitical

Each of the above books will be of great interest to scholars from a variety of backgrounds, including students of political theory, IR, postcolonial studies and philosophy, who are interested in expanding the debate around a common humanity beyond extant liberal tenets. Collectively, these books represent an emerging multidisciplinary dialogue that provides several insights about the contested history of cosmopolitanism, and the connections and tensions between cosmopolitanism, liberal universalism and IR. By engaging across the discipline and beyond to incorporate insights from postmodernism, Marxism and postcolonial critique, these recent interventions into the relationship between cosmopolitanism and IR work to politicise the ethics of cosmopolitanism through an inquiry into the origins, prospects and limits of a cosmopolitan approach to world politics. Clearly, cosmopolitanism is a fiercely debated concept, and it seems that most critical analysis of the epochal transformations known as globalisation advocate at best the cultivation of a highly qualified, cosmopolitan disposition – one that is responsive to claims of liberal universalism. Within this unresolved territory, cosmopolitanism cannot be understood as ‘an easy perch from which to survey “the world” and its possibilities’. Rather, as Rob Walker has written, cosmopolitanism names a site of ‘profound antagonisms’. ¹⁷

Etymologically and historically linked to the Greek notion theoros, if theory is a means of ‘looking’ and ‘gazing’ at the world, then the cultivation of a relationship between IR and cosmopolitan theory would be wise to avoid the representational thinking of the cosmotheoros, a subject-of-the-world representing the world as an object. ¹⁸ Grand macro-level theorising remains necessary, but perhaps the most appropriate theoretical vantage point from which to view ‘the world’ is not from above but from below. Seeking to explain the power dynamics of early 16^th century Florence, Machiavelli recognised the value of multiperspectivism in this process, especially insofar as it granted him a view of politics from both ‘above’ and ‘below’. He explained his multiperspectivism in optical terms, analogous to the method of a landscape painter.

For just as those who paint landscapes place themselves in a low position on the plain in order to consider the nature of the mountains and the heights, and place themselves high on top of mountains in order to study the plains, in like manner, to know the nature of the people well one must be a prince, and to know the nature of princes well one must be of the people. ¹⁹

Similarly, to properly assess the political feasibility of cosmopolitanism, and in order to concentrate on the possibility of a ‘Post-modern Prince’, ²⁰ IR theorists ought to redirect their eyes away from the privileged ‘summit’ of academia toward what is happening on the ground. Indeed, IR must come down from its lofty perch to see globalisation from the bottom up; in other words, the academy must step outside the ivory tower to see cosmopolitanism for what it really is: a site of ‘profound antagonisms’.