Cosmopolitan Mind: Nuances on the “Cosmopolitan Manifesto” of Beck

Abstract

Ulrich Beck proposes a “cosmopolitan manifesto.”  He states that it addresses the “decisive question” of “whether and how a consciousness of cosmopolitan solidarity can develop.” To help that development, I propose a political ontology that views society as a creative interplay among its constituent voices.  This multivoiced body affirms at once three political virtues:  solidarity, heterogeneity, and fecundity, that is, the ongoing production of new voices via the interplay among the others.  However, this dialogical body constantly faces the sorts of “risks” that Beck asks us, the flesh and blood enunciators of these voices, to resist as part of our solidarity.  These risks include voices that are raised to the level of the one true God, the pure race, the market fundamentalism of capitalism, and other “oracles” that present themselves as nonrevisable discourses and attempt to eliminate the creative interplay, the agonistic democracy, of the other voices. In this paper, I will concentrate on the basic political ontology, showing how these voices, this dynamic social body, provides us with our many identities and propels us to one after  another of our contestations about the proper meaning of the globe we inhabit together. I will then add a few words on how this ontology suggests a way to resist the risks, the oracles, without sacrificing the three political virtues in the process.