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

Martha Nussbaum’s approach to ethical and political philosophy — unlike that of certain of her notable contemporaries — is neither ahistorical nor concerned with augmenting or refining the historical record. Rather, its aim is learning what the deepest philosophical minds of the past have proposed as the fairest organisation of society, in terms of a balance between autonomy for individuals and communities, and an equitable distribution of global resources. Whilst she argues fundamentally for cosmopolitanism — hence prioritises the latter — she struggles, in her later work, to accommodate the former within such a global socio-political model. I suggest this is because she presupposes that patriotism is antecedent to, and generative of, a cosmopolitan outlook, when in fact each of these political values is irreducible, and antithetical, to the other. Nussbaum supposes this, I propose, because her work focuses on the conceptual subtleties of intellectual history, which are sadly seldom mirrored in the brutal history of facts.