In liberal political philosophy, from Michel de Montaigne to Judith Shklar, cruelty – the wilful inflicting of pain on another in order to cause anguish and fear – has been singled out as ‘the most ...evil of all evils’ and as unjustifiable: the ultimate vice. An unconditional rejection and negation of cruelty is taken to be programmatic within a liberal paradigm. In this contribution, two anthropologists triangulate cruelty as a concept with torture (Stade) and with love (Rapport). Treating the capability to practise cruelty and the liability to suffer from cruelty as universal aspects of a human condition, Stade and Rapport aim to instantiate the precise enactment of cruelty, firstly, and secondly, to propose a process of its social negation. CIA training manuals and quotidian practice within the British National Health Service are employed as illustrative materials.
What follows is a set of paired articles, followed by a statement by both authors where they debate their distinct positions. Both articles treat irony, but while Rapport looks to it as a possible ...liberal virtue, a means of dealing with radical difference in a modern democracy, including the illiberal, Stade approaches irony from an ontological position that considers social relationships and cultural contingencies to be but one facet of human existence and irony and alienation to have an existential depth, the study of which can facilitate a rapprochement between sociocultural and philosophical anthropology. The paired articles are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, perhaps: irony as world-mocking as well as world-tolerant. Adapted from the source document.
Contemporary cosmopolitanism is difficult to conceive of without recent history. To a considerable extent it consists of a transvaluation of anti-cosmopolitan values. In particular, modern ...cosmopolitanism rejects various forms of social and political exclusion. this, one may say, is its cosmology: that citizenship rights should follow human rights, so that the institution of citizenship becomes truly universal. The polis can no longer be the private domain of propertied men, excluding women, immigrants, slaves, poor men, and so on. This does not necessarily contradict the principle that citizenship should be organized at a national level. As long as citizenship rights are not universally shared across the globe, however, national citizenship will inevitably create exclusion. Far from being an unbroken tradition, cosmopolitanism has always been an historically contingent concept.
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