Commercium

Since the fall of the Commnunist Bloc, there has been an explosion of discussion and debate around the idea of a 'postnational' or 'cosmopolitan' politics. Yet most existing theories of postnational politics operate at a high level of normative abstraction. They aim to tell us what an ideal world society ought to look like, based on high-flown principles of morality and justice, with less attention to how present-day world society is understood from the point of view of everyday participants. A critical theory, in contrast, must aspire to a politics that can be freely accepted, legitimated and internalized by those who would be participants in such a future order. This book argues that we need a more systematic approach to world politics, one that aims to reconstruct the normative problem of world order from the ground up. Drawing on the cosmopolitan writings of Kant and the critical theory of Habermas, Brian Milstein argues that, before we are members of nations or states, we are participants in a 'commercium' of global interaction who are able to negotiate for ourselves the terms on which we share the earth in common with one another. The book marshals a broad range of literature from philosophy, sociology and political science to show how the modern system of sovereign states destructively impedes, constrains and distorts these relations of global interaction.