UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLGY

M.A SOCIOLOGY- SEMESTER IV

SL-551 POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY

INTERNAL ASSESMENT-II

A review of the book

Critical Theory and World Politics: Citizenship, Sovereignty and Humanity

By Andrew Linklater

First Published in 2007 by Routledge Group

Madison Ave, New York

Indian Reprint 2008

By Manohar Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi.

Submitted by:

ANANDH JOSE

13IAMH14
INTRODUCTION

Andrew Linklater is Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University of

Wales Aberystwyth. His main publications and research interests have been concerned with the
changing nature of political community, the significance of critical theory for international
relations and the problem of harm in world politics.

Andrew Linklater has been a standout amongst the most imaginative scholars in international
relations, who brought basic and moral components into the discipline. This forced the scholars
of IR to reconsider a large number of its essential assumptions. This book expands on this group
of work to build up a radical new hypothesis that requires a cosmopolitan way to deal with
universal relations. The important subjects canvassed in the book are of great interest to a student
of social sciences, especially sociology. They include the ideas of citizenship and humanity,
critical theory and political community, the problem of harm and the sociology of states systems.

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

This book, titled Critical Theory and World Politics: Citizenship, Sovereignty and Humanity
brings together arguments from his previous books and articles in an attempt to trying to
accommodate a basic hypothetical viewpoint on critical theoretical outlook and moral
approaches to the politics practiced at the international level.

What is critical theory? This is an essential knowledge that is required to understand the basics of
this book. Critical theory describes the neo-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which
was developed in Germany in the 1930s. Max Horkheimer, a German philosopher and
sociologist, is well-known for his work in developing critical theory. As a member of the
'Frankfurt faculty' of social research, he drew on the critical methods of Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud. Critical theory argues that ideology is the essential impediment to human liberation.

The theory follows from Horkheimer's definition that a critical theory is good enough only if it
meets three criteria: it has to be explanatory, realistic, and normative, all on the same time. In
other words, it must give an explanation for what is inaccurate with contemporary social truth,
pick out the actors to change it, and provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable
practical goals for social transformation.
This book is a collection of Andrew Linklater’s most noted papers written between 1982 and
2007. It is divided into three distinct parts. The problem of community is discussed first, the
problem of citizenship comes second and the problem of harm is discussed in the final part. An
excellent deconstruction of the idea of universal morality and global citizenship is given
throughout this book.

The nexus between moral obligations and political community forms the crux of the first part of
this book. These are probably the most well-known aspects of Linklater’s thought. The chapters
in the first part identify a range of philosophical, sociological and practical questions about the
problem of community in the modern states system. The main purpose, as the author says, is to
suggest some new directions for a critical theory of international relations. This would include
new models of political theory that consider the obligation between the individual and humanity
alongside traditional philosophical reflections upon the obligation that can bind citizens to the
state. Four main achievements of critical theory have also been discussed in the last chapter of
Part I.

Part II offers a survey of Linklater’s concept on citizenship, mainly the notions of detaching
citizenship from the state, and transforming the bounds of political network to what Linklater has
referred to as the post-Westphalian state. Here we see Linklater's worry with the good
international citizen ' and the premise of his dialogic group in Habermasian discourse ethics. He
also talks about political communities that are more universalistic and sensitive to cultural
differences than their predecessors and calls them ‘remarkable’ models. The author says that one
of the fundamental responsibilities of the good international citizen is to attempt to resolve the
tensions between legalism and progressivism in a new constitutional framework that alters the
traditional relationship between order and justice, citizenship and humanity, and sovereign and
human rights in the world affairs. In the chapter that deals with Cosmopolitan Citizenship the
author says that the shifts in the nature of world politics, including growing expectations that
global economic and political institutions should comply with democratic principles of
legitimacy, offer some support to those who make the case for Cosmopolitan Citizenship.

The discussion on the problem of harm and the sociology of state systems is the main theme of
Part III. It is one of the most thought provoking sections of this book. The two main types of
harm that underlie the analysis are concrete and abstract harm. Concrete harm is defined as “the
harm that particular human agents intentionally inflict on specific others who are placed outside
the formers’ moral community because of religious, racial or other supposedly morally decisive
characteristics.” Abstract harm on the other hand, is the harm unintentionally inflicted upon
persons, groups, or the global commons (such as economic or environmental harm). This
typology of harm can be used in studying the development of Cosmopolitan Harm Conventions
(CHCs). The past sociological investigations of harm are driven by the examination of present
day types of harm made by the way that state groups claim sovereignty to hurt others outside the
group and even to hurt those inside their own groups. In that capacity these examinations don't
give appropriate thought to understand the types of harm. Linklater proposes a move toward the
discussion of a truly cosmopolitan (global) humanity by breaking away from notions of bounded
state communities.

ANALYSIS & CONCLUSION

These essays provide a unique approach to the issues regarding state, citizenship and humanity. I
personally liked the emphasis given by the author in the third chapter to highlight the need to
create mechanisms that can protect all people from unnecessary suffering. However, the
language used in this book seemed complicated to me as it was not an easy task to comprehend
the differing aspects of the ideas discussed herein.

The chapters in this book, as the author puts it, are ‘united by a particular interest in the ties that
bind together the members of political community and simultaneously separate them from the
remainder of the human race.’ We see the author worrying about the unrivalled destructiveness
of the modern instruments of violence and the need to control global linkages that place
vulnerable people at the mercy of global economic superpowers .This book is a must read for
anyone who is concerned about the future of the world politics and the ethical prospects of
humanity. I am grateful to my professor Annavaram for giving me this opportunity to go through
this book and to write a review of it.