So far, the cosmopolitan turn has attracted more contributors
than skeptics, and the skeptics, upon closer inspection, are sympathetic to the aims of
cosmopolitanism to no small degree (the subject of this chapter turns out to be no
exception).
One significant contributor to contemporary political philosophy who has offered
a series of sustained criticisms of the cosmopolitan turn is David Miller. Miller takes the
challenge of global justice quite seriously, but insists that cosmopolitanism of any form is
not the answer to the challenge of global justice. This chapter will examine several lines
of reasoning in Miller’s recent work, and make two arguments in the process. I will argue
that Miller’s criticisms of cosmopolitanism, while at times both incisive and sobering,
suffer from an unnecessarily narrow understanding of the aims and purposes of the
cosmopolitan project. Furthermore, I will argue that other lines of reasoning from
Miller’s recent work—in particular, his work on responsibility—can be better understood
as a provisional, potential contribution to a cosmopolitan project than a criticism, and that
both cosmopolitanism and Miller’s theory of responsibility have much are potentially
strengthened by mutual engagement rather than opposition.
This essay will proceed in four sections. The first section reviews Miller’s critique
of cosmopolitanism and identifies its most important insights. This section will also
identify the value in Miller’s critical arguments about cosmopolitanism. The second
section examines some of the limits of Miller’s critique of cosmopolitanism. The third
section discusses how Miller’s insights can be used to construct a better theory of
cosmopolitanism. In the fourth and final section of this chapter, I’ll draw links between
2
This list doesn’t include a number of prominent political theorists who have devoted a great deal of
attention to questions concerning global justice over the course of their careers, such as David Held,
Charles Beitz, Thomas Pogge, Martha Nussbaum, Onora O’Neill, Amartya Sen, Richard Falk, and Andrew
Linklater, amongst others.
2
Convention