Globalization and Liberalism

Trevor Shelley

Description

In this learned and wide-ranging book, Trevor Shelley engages the controversial topic of globalization through philosophical exegesis of great texts. Globalization and Liberalism illustrates and defends the idea that at the heart of the human world is the antinomy of the universal and the particular. Various thinkers have emphasized one aspect of this tension over the other. Some, such as Rousseau and Schmitt, have defended pure particularity. Others, such as Habermas, have uncritically welcomed the intimations of the world state. Against these twin extremes of radical nationalism and antipolitical universalism, this book seeks to recover a middle or moderate position—the liberal position. To find this via media, Shelley traces a tradition of French liberal political thinkers who take account of both sides of the antinomy: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Manent. As Shelley argues, each of these thinkers defends the integrity of political bodies, denies that the universal perspective is the only legitimate perspective, and recognizes that, without differences and distinctions across the political landscape, self-government and freedom of action are impossible.

As human beings, we can live free and fulfilling lives neither as isolated individuals nor as members of humanity. Rather, we require a properly constituted particular political community in which we can make manifest our universal humanity. In the liberalism of these three thinkers, we find the resources to think through what such a political community might look like. Globalism and Liberalism demonstrates the importance of these writers for addressing today’s challenges and will interest political theorists, historians of political thought, and specialists of French political thought.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Comparative Politics
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• French philosophy
• Globalization
• Politics
• World
• European
• Pierre Manent
• Alexis de Tocqueville
• Montesquieu

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780268107314
• Langue: English

Extrait

GLOBALIZATION AND LIBERALISM
GLOBALIZATION and LIBERALISM
Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Manent
TREVOR SHELLEY
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control number: 2020932824
ISBN: 978-0-268-10729-1 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10732-1 (WebPdF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10731-4 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
For my parents
Tocqueville points out that in democratic times, in contrast to aristocratic ages, familial relations become “more intimate and sweeter” while “the natural bond tightens.”
As a most fortunate beneficiary in this regard, I am full of gratitude for their continued love and support— for their natural generosity that has made so much possible.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
ONE. Introduction
TWO. Montesquieu and the Ambivalence of the Heart: On General and Particular Passions
THREE. Montesquieu and the Opening of the Universe: The Earth, Commerce, and the Right of Nations
FOUR. Tocqueville and the Democratic Revolution’s Reach: Equalizing Conditions
FIVE. Tocqueville and Generalizing Ideas and Sentiments: The Effectual Truth of le semblable
SIX. Manent and Western Political Development: Humanity and a History of Political Forms
SEVEN. Manent and the City in Metamorphosis: The Western Dynamic and American Dynamism
EIGHT. Conclusion
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Montesquieu rather provocatively opens his great work, The Spirit of the Laws , with the following epigraph from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2.553): Prolem sine matre creatum (A work with no mother). It would be an egregious exaggeration to begin comparing my own work here with his masterpiece, but among the infinite things distinguishing (and elevating) his text from this work is the list of “matres” who inspired this humble creation. Among them are, first and foremost, the incomparable pedagogical parents with whom I had the fine fortune of studying political philosophy at Louisiana State University: James Stoner, Ellis Sandoz, and Cecil Eubanks. The differences and similarities among them, and their respective readings and teachings of great texts, have instilled fruitful tensions within my own soul. The influence of all three has found its way into this work—indubitably for better—and whatever flaws are to be found herein are most certainly my own. Indeed, their positive intellectual influence shall remain with me for my life’s duration.
I am especially grateful to Daniel Mahoney, who read the entire manuscript and provided insightful suggestions and guidance in steering it toward publication. To my former peers from the political science department at Louisiana State University I have a debt of gratitude for the many wonderful discussions about politics and philosophy, and so too more recently to my colleagues at the new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. Stephen Wrinn and the fine staff at University of Notre Dame Press, including my copy editor, Sheila Berg, made the publication process a pleasant, even pleasurable, one; more than enough to inspire a first-time author to want to repeat it anew in the future.
I should also like to thank four dear friends, Angelo Lupinetti, Aroop Bhattasali, Dr. Marc Ross, and Timothy Middlemiss, all of whom listened many times to my attempts at articulating what exactly I have been essaying to write herein and elsewhere. Though we may be geographically distant, we are ever close in spirit. Or, as once said by Montaigne, “I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other.”
Finally, I thank the woman who became my wife over the course of this project, morganne shelley, for encouragement and understanding on the final stretch of this homeward road: Θάλαττα! Θάλαττα!
ONE
Introduction
The drive to the universal and homogeneous state remains the dominant ethical “ideal” to which our contemporary society appeals for meaning in its activity.
— George Grant, Technology and Empire
Even if one were to bring the locations together into one, so that the city of the Megarians were fastened to that of the Corinthians by walls, it would still not be a single city.
— Aristotle, The Politics
The present appears to us riddled with paradox. Nostalgia and reactionary tendencies consume political opinion as much as measures of prosperity and progressive propensities impress it. 1 The longing to restore a lost harmonious past is as strong as the hope for greater concord yet to come. Desire thereby casts itself in apparently opposite directions. However, these two seemingly contrary movements have something fundamental in common, namely, the idea of unity—that we were somehow once whole, or we may yet become so. But so much depends on where the limits or boundary lines are drawn in so constituting genuine unification. Two answers of least resistance present themselves: unity is either best achieved on the plane of the singular individual, on the one hand, or at the level of the bulk of humanity, on the other—that is, at the levels of greatest particularity or universality, respectively. One finds endless examples today to suggest the self is of primary concern, and that focus is increasingly inward looking. So much has been diagnosed as “the culture of narcissism,” or even “the narcissism epidemic.” 2 Alongside this one notes the recent expansion of humanitarian efforts and internationalist intervention. What has been called an “empire of humanity,” or industry of aid, focuses exclusively on others elsewhere, on the “global other” or the human race at large. 3 And so, as the French say, les extrêmes se touchent— the extremes touch one another. We attend altogether to our particular selves as we stretch our attention widely to the species in general, as all the while an impending sense of unity beckons.
However, the fault lines of recent politics display greater friction, and unease regarding the simple particularism of the individual and the universalism of humanity is growing. The world is neither as “smooth” nor as “flat” as was suggested not so long ago. Neither the “I” or the “self” nor the “all” or the “everyone” seem to satisfy the desire for unity. People are once again defining “we” as somewhere between the individual and humanity and seeking solidarity elsewhere along the continuum. That there is a “we” to politics somewhere between the “I” and the “all” is unmistakable, as theorists of varying perspectives admit. 4 Thus, how the pronoun we is interpreted—how the unity of “we” is constituted—is again front and center in political life. Britain’s vote to circumscribe itself anew in contradistinction to the European Union is an obvious recent example. Brexit is unintelligible without considering it as a fight over competing definitions of proper political unity, European versus British—that is, according to the understanding determined by Brussels that claims to speak for all Europeans or legislated by the people of Britain according to national institutions. 5 The 2016 U.S. presidential election can also be seen as a contest between alternate perspectives on the importance and locus of unity, and where the lines of “we” ought to be drawn, say, to include the “deplorables” or not, to build a border wall or “shut down the border,” to enter broad-based international trade agreements, or to allow American courts to consider and cite foreign or international legal decisions as precedent; the examples are many. 6 While often considered in policy terms as matters of immigration, exchange, and the like, on a deeper level the partisans of either side of Brexit, the Trump election, and related events represent different understandings of unity—how it may be quantified and qualified, as it were.
This question of what unifies people, how and who can be readily unified, and to what extent unification can be manifest has become especially charged in a world that is “globalizing”—a word of simultaneously malleable and negligible meaning, so casually does it rest on all our lips and is uttered with ease, as though it were the most obvious fact of life. It is as complex a phenomenon as it is obscure. Whatever else globalization may be, it is most certainly an appeal to, and expression of, global unity, the underlying assumption being that it is perfectly natural for the peoples of the world to increasingly unify—politically, economically, culturally, and otherwise. 7 This assumption that is hidden in plain sight underlies so many of our contemporary debates and is at the heart of our present paradox. It is something of a “ ruling opinion.” 8 And while globalization is often considered economic in essence, the very assumption that all markets will be integrated by way of a single economic model is itself a commentary on politics; better to say, this economic assumption is a critique of the political. While economistic approaches commonly argue globalization is nothing more than a desire for the free movement of goods, capital, peoples, and services, they disregard—if not deny—the fact that the world is divided into different political bodies or communities with their own institutions and interests, ambitions, and traditions. Such an approach is at once either individualistic or cosmopolitan, and perhaps both, neglecting the complex political sphere in between the individual and the world, as well as considering individuals as more than producers and consumers but as citizens or even statesmen. 9 Thus, there are more complex political and cultural factors at play among particular peoples a