Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 1994
ly, with humanity as a whole and to traffic with like-minded people. Wolff, Vattel, and k n t wer... more ly, with humanity as a whole and to traffic with like-minded people. Wolff, Vattel, and k n t were all cosmopolitan, both in this minimal sense and in Toulmin's sense. By Carr's reckoning, alllthree were utopian, though Vattel was certainly closer to Machiavelli's republicanism than the utopianism of Plato's Republic. We need a more discriminating and less pejorative term to identify what Wolff and Kant had in common with Plato. Following SheIdon Wolin, I prefer "architectonic." "An architectonic vision is one wherein the political imagination attempts to mould the totality of political phenomena to accord with some vision of the Good that lies outside the political order."l6 On one point, at least, Carr was right. Imagining republics is normative. More than this, however, the term "architectonic" suggests an abiding concern for the spatial organization of social life-the organization of social beings, their artifacts and relations as if they were outside of time and unaffected by contingency. Wolin thought Plato exemplified the "imaginative vision"-"a form of vision essentially archite~tonic."'~ In Plato's way of thinking, time itself is spatialized.Is Wolff, who brought Germany the "spirit of thoroughness," and Kant, who thought reason "by nature architectonic," systematically spelled out their imaginative visions in the name of universal reason.19 Within their systems, as R. B. J. Walker has said of Kant, "temporal possibilities are fixed within a metaphysics of homogeneous space.*O A review of the architectonic tradition in political thought may. help to explain the recurrence and appeal of imagined republics, de318 Imagined Republics spite Machiavelli's skepticism, and establish their relevance for later international thought. The next section of this essay starts with Plato as an exemplar of architectonic thinking and briefly considers how his republic might truly be said to exist. The same considerations frame an even briefer review of Stoicism. The essay then turns to Wolff and Kant, perhaps the m'ost architectonic minds of the Enlightenment. Kant's claims on behalf of an encompassing republic as the end point of human history evidently follow Wolffs conception of an encompassing republic but not Wolff s conviction that such a republic already actually exists. For Wolff, the "great republic" exists because a philosopher-Wolff himself-can document its nature and effects. Rejecting Wolff s republic as an unnecessary fiction, Vattel nevertheless thought Europe a republic of a different sort. Vattel's is an actual republic, though exiguous, founded on the balance of power and supported by law and practice, Ever since, Vattel's republic underlies the dominant, socalled liberal tradition of international thought and finds its clearest contemporary expression in Hedley Bull's pluralist conception of international society." Plato had suggested that his republic exists as a pattern that might be found within oneself. A powerful version of this theme is to be found in Kant's work. Because we can imagine an encompassing republic that nature makes necessary, we should act as if this republic were possible. By seeking to actualize the republic within us, we fulfill ourselves as autonomous moral beings, we make republics, and we make the world itself the republic of our destiny, A contemporary version of this process stops with the small communities that, practically speaking, only a few like-minded people can make: alternative republics in an ever more homogeneously liberal world.
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