Martha Nussbaum on cosmopolitanism — and why I once again disagree with her

Martha Nussbaum is one of the most influential contemporary public philosophers. Her books, from Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities to The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, are must read for anyone who is interested in modern political philosophy, philosophy of justice, and their ancient Greco-Roman roots.

But she is persistently, surprisingly, wrong about some aspects of virtue ethics, and in particular Stoicism. I have already written an in-depth rebuttal of her general take on Stoicism, but more recently she has written about cosmopolitanism, a topic that is close to my heart not just as a Stoic, but as a fellow progressive liberal. So I’d like to take her criticisms of the cosmopolitan stance seriously, and explore what we can learn from them.

Her essay, published by the Institute of Art and Ideas, begins with an encomium of cosmopolitanism, particularly as expressed by the flamboyant Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (the guy that Plato referred to as “Socrates gone mad”). Almost immediately, however, Nussbaum appears to commit a double blunder: first, she attributes to Diogenes a political program centered on the notion of cosmopolitanism; second, she assumes that cosmopolitanism is a “Cynic/Stoic” idea, thereby making no distinction in this respect between the two philosophies.

As I have explained in a separate essay, scholar John Sellars has published a landmark paper on the differences between Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitanism, a paper that makes clear why Nussbaum is incorrect on the two points raised above.

First, the Cynics were absolutely not in the business of proposing political programs. Quite the contrary, Cynicism was a street protest kind of philosophy, which could never, and was never intended to, scale up to societal level. The role of the Cynic is that of a gadfly who keeps reminding people that they’ve got their priorities out of line. A philosophy that encourages its adherents not to own property, not to marry, not to have children, and so forth is simply not suited for any political program whatsoever.

Second, as Sellars explains, there is a continuum, as far as cosmopolitanism is concerned, linking the Cynics, the early…