Theory & Event

‘In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian; but man I have never met.’ De Maistre’s genteel snubbing of ‘man’ is still remembered often and with satisfaction. But its propriety has never seemed so open to doubt. Recent history has made it difficult to pretend that humanity, assumed to be vague and ungraspable, can be clearly contrasted to particular nationalities, assumed to be indisputably palpable and real. Those Frenchmen De Maistre has seen with his own eyes: are we sure they weren’t Alsatians or Occitanians of uncertain allegiance and identity? Could it be that his Russians were not really Russians at all, but Ukrainians or Georgians, Chechens or Abkhazians whose day of national recognition had not yet arrived— and would arrive only to be contested in turn? Nationality, it would appear, is also an artifice, a fragile historical generalization rather than a given fact of nature. And precisely because France and Russia must be acknowledged to be abstractions, it is harder and harder to avoid at least a nodding acquaintance with ‘man,’ who is nothing but a more unruly, less institutionally grounded abstraction.

This is not the logic that guides Martha Nussbaum in her gallant effort to revive a humanist cosmopolitanism. But I hope she will accept it as a gift from a sympathetic non-humanist. She’s going to need all the lines of defense she can get. The essays collected in For Love of Country offer surprising and dispiriting evidence of how much any would-be internationalist is up against, whether humanist or not.

To the rest of the world, American nationalism may seem indistinguishable from the know-no-borders capitalist/electronic globalism that hypes McDonald’s and MTV along with free markets and carefully selected human rights. But there are many American policy-makers and media pundits who no longer even bother to pretend that what’s good for us is good for the world. With a menacing modesty, they are now content to champion one national interest against all others. The mood is neo-medieval. Meanwhile, the flower of the national clerisy declares itself unwilling or incompetent to pass judgement on this melee from outside or above it. Repudiating Nussbaum’s strenuous inquiry into the limits of patriotism, her respondents inform us in effect that American patriotism has no limits.

Unlike Alain Finkielkraut in The Defeat of the Mind, Nussbaum does not set her cosmopolitan ideal against the perceived excesses of atavistic nationalists abroad or academic multiculturalists at home. What provokes her is the bland, unselfconscious nationalism that emanates from the very center of educated American opinion. For Love of Country began as an essay in the Boston Review in late 1994, entitled “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” that protested against recent statements by Sheldon Hackney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and public intellectual Richard Rorty. Hackney, speaking for the Clinton administration, had recently called for shared values and national unity to counter the threats of excessive pluralism. In a much-debated editorial in the New York Times entitled ‘The Unpatriotic Academy,’ Rorty had sternly cautioned left-wing multiculturalists to show more deference to ‘the emotion of national pride.’

Nussbaum, a distinguished philosopher and classical scholar, could hardly be confused with those (surely mythical) multiculturalists who refuse to teach Greeks and Germans. Indeed, her counterattack has nothing either multi- or cultural about it. ‘The accident of where one was born,’ she writes, ‘is just that, an accident.’ For many and perhaps most purposes, the culture one is born and raised in could hardly be deemed accidental. Whatever the controversy over when cultural diversity should matter, or how and how much, there is widespread agreement that in one way or other it does matter. But for Nussbaum, culture has nothing to do with ‘moral worth,’ hence it is ‘morally irrelevant.’ Her demand is not for greater reverence to the diversity of cultures. What she wants is proper respect for the universal...