Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Social Theory and Practice

Deen K. Chatterjee (ed.), Democracy in a Global World: Human Rights and Political Participation in the 21st Century.

Article Excerpt
Deen K. Chatterjee (ed.), Democracy in a Global World: Human Rights and Political Participation in the 21st Century (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), viii + 229 pp.

1. It has been over a decade since cosmopolitanism established itself as the dominant view in analytic political philosophy about world affairs. Liberal nationalists and John Rawls took issue with cosmopolitanism on a number of fronts, but they did little to dislodge the basic, compelling idea that political boundaries are not moral limits. Cosmopolitanism rose as the Berlin Wall fell and the idea took hold of a world without deep ideological disagreements that prevented cooperation. (1) But cosmopolitanism's full flowering required globalization, combined with the fundamental Rawlsian commitment, shared by most philosophical liberals, that the basic structure of society is the primary subject of justice. If there is a global basic structure, it follows that (moral) cosmopolitanism is true.

What a difference a decade makes. The Doha round is dead. Referenda on European unification routinely flop. The abundant cheap oil needed for trade and the stable benchmark currency needed for financial markets are both under threat; so the global basic structure seems more precarious than it was. Concomitantly, the new localism and agrarianism have provided novel arguments against the global basic structure. The global environment is screaming under our expanding ecological footprint.

The American "soft dominance" of a compliant world is gone. The velvet glove has come off, but the iron fist it revealed seems more rusty than anyone expected: China, Brazil, India, Iran, and Russia are newly ascendant. And so deep ideological disagreements about world order have resurfaced. Their implications for geopolitics and economics are anyone's guess.

If cosmopolitanism is to remain relevant it must countenance the new forms that globalization takes in the future. But apart from relatively abstract generalizations, it is hard to know just what those forms will be. It is into this state of flux that Deen Chatterjee has released this new volume of papers on democracy and human rights under globalization. Chatterjee's volume--his third standalone anthology on major questions of global ethics--cannot be said to have succeeded by its own lights, since its purpose is to ask what implications "a global world," understood as the world order of the foreseeable future, has for the theory and practice of democracy and human rights. And for this task the volume appears both too late and too early--too late for the erstwhile consensus about which questions were at the core of global justice, too early to have a clear sense of what the new questions will be. The old consensus animates the current volume.

Nonetheless, relatively few of the papers are genuinely dated. Despite the fact that many of the authors betray their antediluvian assumptions about the present and future of world order, the volume succeeds...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!