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زبان تخصصي :‌ ( بین الملل گرایی )  Cosmopolitanisms

1.1 Greek and Roman Cosmopolitanism

The political culture idealized in the writings of Plato and Aristotle is not cosmopolitan. In this culture, a man identifies himself first and foremost as a citizen of a particular polis or city, and in doing so, he signals which institutions and which body of people hold his allegiance. He would then be counted on for help in defending the city from attacks, sustaining its institutions of justice, and contributing to its common good. In this way, his own pursuit of a good life is inextricably bound to the fate of the city and to the similar pursuit carried out by other inhabitants of the city. By contrast, the good person would not be expected to share with or serve any foreigners who live outside the city. Any cosmopolitan expectations on a good Athenian extended only to concern for those foreigners who happen to reside in Athens.

It would, however, be wrong to assume that Classical Greek thought was uniformly anti-cosmopolitan. Actively excluding foreigners from any ethical consideration or actively targeting foreigners for mistreatment goes one step beyond focusing one's service and concern on compatriots, and in fact, the targeting of ‘barbarians’ is historically linked with the rise of panhellenism and not with the more narrow emphasis on the polis. It would be more accurate to call the Classical emphasis on the polis uncosmopolitan.

Yet even as Plato and Aristotle were writing, other Greeks were issuing cosmopolitan challenges. Perhaps the most obvious challenges came from the traveling intellectuals who insisted on the contrast between the conventional ties of politics and the natural ties of humanity. Notice, for example, the way Plato has the Sophist Hippias address the motley crew of Athenians and foreigners present at Callias' house in Plato's Protagoras (337c7-d3):

Socrates, too, it can be argued, was sensitive to this more cosmopolitan identification with human beings as such. At least as Plato characterizes him, Socrates avoids traditional political engagement as much as he can, in favor of an extraordinary career of examining himself and others, and he insists that these examinations are both genuinely political (Gorg 521d6-8) and extended to all, Athenians and foreigners alike (Apol 23b4-6). Of course, Socrates chose not to travel widely, but this decision could well have been consistent with cosmopolitan ideals, for he may have thought that his best bet for serving human beings generally lay in staying at home, on account, ironically, of Athens' superior freedom of speech (Gorg 461e1-3; cf. Apol 37c5-e2 and Meno 80b4-7). Whether Socrates was self-consciously cosmopolitan in this way or not, there is no doubt that his ideas accelerated the development of cosmopolitanism and that he was in later antiquity embraced as a citizen of the world. In fact, the first philosopher in the West to give perfectly explicit expression to cosmopolitanism was the Socratically inspired Cynic Diogenes in the fourth century bce. It is said that “when he was asked where he came from, he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolitês]’” (Diogenes Laertius VI 63). By identifying himself not as a citizen of Sinope but as a citizen of the world, Diogenes apparently refused to agree that he owed special service to Sinope and the Sinopeans. So understood, ‘I am a citizen of the cosmos’ is a negative claim, and we might wonder if there is any positive content to the Cynic's world-citizenship. The most natural suggestion would be that a world-citizen should serve the world-state, helping to bring it about in order to enable the later work of sustaining its institutions and contributing to its common good. But the historical record does not suggest that Diogenes the Cynic favored the introduction of a world-state. In fact, the historical record does not unambiguously provide Diogenes any positive commitments that we can readily understand as cosmopolitan. The best we can do to find positive cosmopolitanism in Diogenes is to insist that the whole Cynic way of life is supposed to be cosmopolitan: by living in accordance with nature and rejecting what is conventional, the Cynic sets an example of high-minded virtue for all other human beings.

A fuller exploration of positively committed philosophical cosmopolitanism arrives only with the Socratizing and Cynic-influenced Stoics of the third century CE. These Stoics are fond of saying that the cosmos is, as it were, a polis, because the cosmos is put in perfect order by law, which is right reason. They also embrace the negative implication of their high standards: conventional poleis do not, strictly speaking, deserve the name. But the Stoics do not believe that living in agreement with the cosmos — as a citizen of the cosmos — requires maintaining critical distance from conventional poleis. Rather, as the traces of Chrysippus' On Lives make clear, the Stoics believe that goodness requires serving other human beings as best one can, that serving all human beings equally well is impossible, and that the best service one can give typically requires political engagement. Of course, the Stoics recognize that political engagement will not be possible for everyone, and that some people will best be able to help other human beings as private teachers of virtue rather than as politicians. But in no case, the Stoics insist, is consideration of political engagement to be limited to one's own polis. The motivating idea is, after all, to help human beings as such, and sometimes the best way to do that is to serve as a teacher or as a political advisor in some foreign place. In this fashion, the Stoics introduce clear, practical content to their metaphor of the cosmopolis: a cosmopolitan considers moving away in order to serve, whereas a non-cosmopolitan does not.

This content admits of a strict and a more moderate interpretation. On the strict view, when one considers whether to emigrate, one recognizes prima facie no special or stronger reason to serve compatriots than to serve a set of human beings abroad. On the moderate view, one does introduce into one's deliberations extra reason to serve compatriots, although one might still, all things considered, make the best choice by emigrating. The evidence does not permit a decisive attribution of one or the other of these interpretations to any of the earliest Stoics. But if we think that Chrysippus was deeply attracted to the Cynics' rejection of what is merely conventional, then we will find it easy to think of him as a strict cosmopolitan.

Things are a bit different for at least some of the Stoics at Rome. On the one hand, the cosmopolis becomes less demanding. Whereas Chrysippus limits citizenship in the cosmos to those who in fact live in agreement with the cosmos and its law, Roman Stoics extend citizenship to all human beings by virtue of their rationality. On the other hand, local citizenship becomes more demanding. There is no doubt that the Stoicism of Cicero's De Officiis or of Seneca's varied corpus explicitly acknowledges obligations to Rome. This is a moderate Stoic cosmopolitanism, and empire made the doctrine very easy for many Romans by identifying the Roman patria with the cosmopolis itself. But neither imperialism nor a literal interpretation of world-citizenship is required for the philosophical point. The maximally committed cosmopolitan looks around to determine whom he can best help and how, knowing full well that he cannot help all people in just the same way, and his decision to help some people far more than others is justified by cosmopolitan lights if it is the best he can do to help human beings as such.

Stoic cosmopolitanism in its various guises was enormously persuasive throughout the Greco-Roman world. In part, this success can be explained by noting how cosmopolitan the world at that time was. Alexander the Great's conquests and the subsequent division of his empire into successor kingdoms sapped local cities of much of their traditional authority and fostered increased contacts between cities, and later, the rise of the Roman Empire united the whole of the Mediterranean under one political power. But it is wrong to say what has frequently been said, that cosmopolitanism arose as a response to the fall of the polis or to the rise of the Roman empire. First, the polis' fall has been greatly exaggerated. Under the successor kingdoms and even — though to a lesser degree — under Rome, there remained substantial room for important political engagement locally. Second, and more decisively, the cosmopolitanism that was so persuasive during the so-called Hellenistic Age and under the Roman Empire was in fact rooted in intellectual developments that predate Alexander's conquests. Still, there is no doubting that the empires under which Stoicism developed and flourished made many people more receptive to the cosmopolitan ideal and thus contributed greatly to the widespread influence of Stoic cosmopolitanism.

Nowhere was Stoic cosmopolitanism itself more influential than in early Christianity. Early Christians took the later Stoic recognition of two cities as independent sources of obligation and added a twist. For the Stoics, the citizens of the polis and the citizens of the cosmopolis do the same work: both aim to improve the lives of the citizens. The Christians respond to a different call: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's” (Matthew 22:21). On this view, the local city may have divine authority (John 19:11; cf. Romans 13:1,4,7), but the most important work for human goodness is removed from traditional politics, set aside in a sphere in which people of all nations can become “fellow-citizens with the saints” (Ephesians 2:20).

This development has two important and long-lasting consequences, which are canonized by Augustine. First, the cosmopolis again becomes a community for certain people only. Augustine makes this point most explicitly by limiting the citizenship in the city of God to those who love God. All others are relegated to the inferior — though still universal — earthly city by their love of self. These two cities of the world, which are doomed to coexist intertwined until the Final Judgment, divide the world's inhabitants. Second, the work of politics is severed from the task of building good human lives, lives of righteousness and justice. While Augustine can stress that this allows citizens in the city of God to obey local laws concerning “the necessaries for the maintenance of life,” he must also acknowledge that it sets up a potential conflict over the laws of religion and the concerns of righteousness and justice (e.g., Civitas Dei XIX 17).

For hundreds of years to come, debates in political philosophy would surround the relation between ‘temporal’ political authority and the ‘eternal Church.’ But emphasis on the cosmopolitan aspect of the Church waned, despite its ideal of a religious community comprising all humans. In a nutshell, the debate now opposed the secular and the religious, and not the local and the cosmopolitan. To be sure, this debate often had cosmopolitan ramifications, which are clear enough in Dante Alighieri's plea for a universal monarchy in De Monarchia (ca. 1314). But his case draws from Aristotle and Roman history, not explicitly from the ideal of a cosmopolis or of world-citizenship, and he remains deeply concerned to adjudicate between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor.