Advancing Cosmopolitan Community Solidarity in Struggles for Economic Justice: Pragmatism and Liberatory-Prophetic Traditions

Abstract

In this essay, I offer a pragmatist phenomenology and genealogy of the emergence of norms and practices of cosmopolitan community solidarity and associated understandings of economic justice. Widely shared individual experiences of the need for personal liberation of various kinds may lead us to recognize others’ equally important though differing needs, and may thereby motivate us to develop caring, thoughtful, educative practices of cosmopolitan community solidarity in daily living that advance the actualization of these values, including episodes of conflict and the mutual shock of otherness. Such an interactive growth process can be greatly enhanced by gaining a historically realistic understanding of how cosmopolitan community solidarity has emerged as an ideal and how the meanings of social and economic justice have developed within differing earlier contexts. As valuable supplements to secular social and political histories, the liberatory and prophetic strands of various religious and spiritual traditions can function as both “outer” and “inner” histories of practices of caring for and with others amidst prolonged struggles for justice, including the wisdom gleaned from these struggles. These prophetic traditions offer a deep background for intelligently expanding the meaning of the ideals of liberty, equality, and community solidarity that have inspired democratic theorists and democratic movement activists toward democracy since the late eighteenth century. Such an intelligent expansion of shared ideal meanings can advance reasonable democratic agreement among diverse contemporary thinkers and actors about how to achieve cosmopolitan community solidarity and how to do justice in real-world contexts.