Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights

by Cheah

Globalization promises to bring people around the world together, to unite them as members of the human community. To such sanguine expectations, Pheng Cheah responds deftly with a sobering account of how the "inhuman" imperatives of capitalism and technology are transforming our understanding of humanity and its prerogatives. Through an examination of debates about cosmopolitanism and human rights, Inhuman Conditions questions key ideas about what it means to be human that underwrite our understanding of globalization. Cheah asks whether the contemporary international division of labor so irreparably compromises and mars global solidarities and our sense of human belonging that we must radically rethink cherished ideas about humankind as the bearer of dignity and freedom or culture as a power of transcendence. Cheah links influential arguments about the new cosmopolitanism drawn from the humanities, the social sciences, and cultural studies to a perceptive examination of the older cosmopolitanism of Kant and Marx, and juxtaposes them with proliferating formations of collective culture to reveal the flaws in claims about the imminent decline of the nation-state and the obsolescence of popular nationalism. Cheah also proposes a radical rethinking of the normative force of human rights in light of how Asian values challenge human rights universalism.

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Aditya Adhikari · Rating 5 out of 5]

The basic idea in this book is simple: philosophical conceptions that prioritize cosmopolitanism and universal human rights ignore the ways in which such discourses are operationalized within highly unequal conditions created by capitalism. As such, universalizing discourses of this kind often serve to camouflage the hegemony of the powerful (or North) over the weak (the South). Through the course of his argument Pheng Cheah demolishes the arguments of proponents of universal deliberative democracy such as Habermas, as well as superficial post-colonial scholars who seek liberation in "hybridity" such as Homi Bhabha. Pheng Cheah argues that the rights of most people in the weaker areas of the world can only be secured as part of national structures. It is refreshing to read a scholar who rehabilitates the idea of nationalism as liberatory, especially since it is currently fashionable to think that all nationalisms are necessarily oppressive.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read the chapters recommended by my professor. We discussed this book in class. By and large, human rights discourse has been so far complicit with the capitalist mode of production and thrived because of the global capital. Nevertheless, tainted origin should not determine a doomed future. Let's all remember that life was not better in whatever sense before the capital, nostalgia will not get us to where we want to be. We need to locate moral and ethical potential of current human rights discourse, thoroughly examine all claims of violation of human rights and their connection to global capital. Only then can we start to live up the promises of the Enlightenment project and think of ways to improve further.

[Germz · Rating 5 out of 5]

how to rethink human rights not simply as a tool for liberation but also to both accept the inherent violence of human rights logics and discourses, while also recognizing that it is the only way to obtain a freedom that can also paradoxically threaten to dissolute the very freedoms that human rights purportedly seek. Also fantastic chapters on what it means to (re)think the 'cosmopolitical.'

[N. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hogs a good title for 350+ numbing pages. What a bloated object this is.