Rooted Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Have I been shrinking? I was a citizen of the world. Social Justice in the Liberal State spoke to anybody who cared to listen.l It described the struggle for power haunting all earthlings. Not only Americans. Or even Westerners. But everybody. I knew I would fail. Lots of people would reject my effort to tame power through dialogue as philosophically shallow, impossibly ethnocentric, pathetically antiseptic. Still, I wasn't trying for exclusivity. My invitation to political dialogue recognized that others differed from me on fundamental questions. And yet, wasn't it possible for us to bracket these differences long enough to talk sensibly about the hard fact of scarcity-that the earth contains too few resources to satisfy our rival projects?