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The paper explores the contrasts between two modes of universalism, one contemporary and one premodern. The present vision of globalisation posits a human community that rests on minimalist foundations: individual rights, economic self-interest, technocratic expertise, and a cultural hybridity that brackets truth claims in the name of respecting choice as such. Against this version of universalism, I shall explore the premodern universalisms of the great civilisations, Rome/Christendom, the Islamic world, India, and China. Those earlier universalisms arrived independently at parallel ideas about their place in the world and their connexion to humanity at large. Common themes included the civilised-barbarian frontier, a stratified notion of virtue, and the crystallisation of placeless truths in placebound cultural markers of sacred language and ritual propriety. I shall draw on both classical social thought and intellectual history to shed light on these similarities, and to extract lessons for an alternative approach to universalism in our own time. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, high-culture critics everywhere issued parallel indictments of liberal modernity. They charged it with a loss of ethical compass, a striving for mere gluttony, and the like. Outside the West, these critiques overlapped with hopes for civilisational revival, for a reversal of the disorder that Europe had wrought on the rest of the world because of its technological superiority. Three non-Western thinkers in particular typify this kind of challenge: Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, and Liang Shuming. In the name of India, Islam, and Confucianism respectively, they argued for what we might call a "countermodernity." While disdaining the rampant materialism of their time, they thought it possible to take advantage of modern technology while anchoring it in a renewed commitment to the truths of their own traditions. By looking at the writings and social experiments of these leading public intellectuals, this paper will map out the space that their alternative vision of development was supposed to occupy. It will also reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of that alternative, and its continuing relevance nearly a century later. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education for a cosmopolitan outlook is highly regarded in many circles. In practice, it is usually interpreted to mean cultivation of tolerance, self-distancing from any particular set of ethical or civic commitments, and the like. In both temper and social base, this kind of cosmopolitan educational agenda very much aligns with the prevailing tendencies of liberal globalisation. At the same time, many high-culture critics of liberal modernity are reacting against this loose cosmopolitanism, charging it with relativism and even nihilism. In contrast, they often reaffirm a particular tradition of classical and humanistic learning, such as the "great books" curricula that gained favour among many conservatives a decade ago. In this paper, I suggest space for an alternative approach to cosmopolitan self-cultivation. It would be unlike both the loose liberal cosmopolitanism that brackets or thins out ethical content, and the "great books" traditionalism that focuses on just one civilisation and neglects or disdains others. In short, it would resurrect the ethical truths that modernity has assaulted, and it would do so while bridging traditions. By exploring the universal temper that lay latent within all the major premodern civilisations, I suggest room for a vision of elite education that involves an integrated familiarity with the high-culture classics of the European, Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and other traditions. This approach urges a cosmopolitanism that takes seriously the ethical parallels across civilisations. Its practitioners would be impelled to view themselves as the successors of older elite culture-bearing strata: the mandarins, clerics, and literati. It also means embedding cosmopolitanism in a demanding pattern of self-cultivation on which the various strands of classical social thought can shed light. I close by suggesting that this kind of intellectual exploration and praxis is indispensable, if we are to forge a rich global political culture and a greater ethical sensitivity among the world’s governing strata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper brings together two themes that are usually treated in isolation from one another: critiques of liberalism as both an abstract theory and a cultural force, and emerging reflexions on the prospects of transnational political integration. Antiliberalism in recent decades has tended to be be placebound, even provincial. Whether in the intellectual guise of Anglo-American communitarianism, or the political energy of Islamists, Hindu nationalists, and the like, it has reaffirmed one or another local authenticity. Indeed, much of antiliberals’ critical energy is aimed at the uprooted cosmopolitanism of both liberal theories and their upper-middle class social base. A common assumption of these critics and movements, regardless of their idiom, is that thickening the moral content of a social space means building high walls around that space. Systems of meaning do not travel well. In this vein, antiliberals have often reacted against any cosmopolitan political trend that would dilute their claims on social space, or perhaps even lock in practices that they abhor. At the same time, much thinking about a liberal version of global progress has centred on crafting transnational institutions. Here, the cosmopolitan impulse goes hand in hand with protecting a liberal version of selfhood, and enabling that identity to percolate through all cultures. Liberals’ dominance in transnational networks and organisations gives them crucial leverage over the very settings in which "globalism" is shaped. While emerging transnational institutions do not yet override national sovereignty, they do form the kernel of a liberal world-state. It is reasonable to expect that, barring a major challenge, that liberal version of global political integration will continue advancing apace over coming decades. Both supporters and opponents of something like the world-state project take for granted that it would be founded upon and serve the liberal vision. This paper aims to challenge that assumption. I suggest that a revised, broader antiliberal critique could intersect with the world-state project and offer an alternative vision of its content. Indeed, I suspect that being able to meet liberalism on its own scale is crucial if antiliberal critics are not to remain on the defensive. Ecumenical thinking within European, Islamic, Indian, and Chinese political philosophy can offer a point of departure for an alternative version of the world-state project. This approach suggests some quite distinctive contours for a nonliberal political culture that centres not on a globe of mere interests and institutions, but on a world of common virtues and aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]