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to ask whose society it is. 42 Stiglitz certainly does not. Whereas he would
presumably condemn Chinese-style censorship, he can do so on no firmer
basis than personal predilection, as his principle that the cultural needs of
the national collective trump individual freedom is no less subject to au-
thoritarian abuse than was the far more emotionally compelling Romantic
nationalist thought of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In
Rousseau s stirring words from The Social Contract, In order then that the
social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the under-
taking . . . that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled
48 THE ANTI-PHILOSOPHY OF ANTI-GLOBALISM
to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be
forced to be free. . . . This alone legitimizes civil undertakings, which,
without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful
abuses. 43 Coercion is thus not truly coercion, in Rousseau s thinking, be-
cause one who desires other than what the social order allows him is at
best capricious and at worst a cultural subversive. The contrast between
Rousseau s conception of the social order and that of Smith, Stiglitz s tar-
get, could not be more stark. For Smith, the notion of men being forced
to be free, to conform to a general will, is a logical and moral mon-
strosity. Rather than bringing order to society, Rousseau s social compact
guarantees disorder. In Smith s words,
The man of system. . . is apt to be very wise in his own conceit,
and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own
ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest devia-
tion from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and
in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or
the strong prejudices which may oppose it: he seems to imagine
that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as
much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-
board; he does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board
have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand im-
presses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human so-
ciety, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own,
altogether different from that which the legislature might choose
to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the
same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and
harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they
are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the
society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.44
The practical distinction between Enlightenment and Romantic social
thought is of utmost political consequence. The logical ends of Romantic
thinking were graphically illustrated in the Nazi embrace of Hegel in the
1930s, wherein the state arrogated full powers to impose the social order
upon the basis of a new ethics, one deliberately divorced from that which
members of society applied to themselves.
THE ANTI-PHILOSOPHY OF ANTI-GLOBALISM 49
It is only the banality of Stiglitz s apology for restricting individual
choice on the basis of cultural externalities that masks its decidedly anti-
Enlightenment heritage. However unconsciously, it shares with the Ro-
mantic tradition the principle that underpinned the emergence of
twentieth-century reactionary nationalism and the ruthless persecution
of those labeled cultural outsiders.
It is critical to note that much economic, social, and political liberaliza-
tion in the developing world today is driven explicitly by a concern among
the elites in those countries that they will become marginalized by faster-
growing, high-trading nations. The backlash which then frequently
emerges from those in the population that lose traditional protections
against competition, domestic as well as foreign, is blamed on globaliza-
tion and a loss of sovereignty. The IMF, World Bank, and WTO become
particularly convenient targets in such cases. Yet reform is a sovereign
choice, and the fact that it may be motivated by what foreigners think or
do does not make it less so.
This phenomenon of dramatic liberalization being driven by foreign
developments is hardly a feature unique to modern globalization. The
early nineteenth-century Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, for ex-
ample, instituted a vast program of political, social, and economic liber-
alization under the express belief that more individual freedom was
essential to enabling the kingdom to withstand the challenge from
France. The entire feudal agrarian society was dismantled, the monop-
oly power of guilds broken, and economic and social restrictions on
Jews relaxed. After Napoleon s defeat at Waterloo, however, the exter-
nal stimulus was extinguished, and reactionary Romantic philosophers
such as Adam Müller provided the cultural arguments against social
change the depersonalization of human relations driven by the uni-
versal despotism of money which bolstered the aristocrats in their
opposition to the extension of the rule of law to all and to the separation
of private property from political power.45 This Prussian cultural drama
was every bit as disorienting as anything seen in the developing world
today, yet the birth of the globalization bogeyman was still nearly two
centuries away.
To conclude, today s cultural critique of globalization is misplaced along
three dimensions.
50 THE ANTI-PHILOSOPHY OF ANTI-GLOBALISM
First, whether indigenous traditional values are better or worse than
imported ones, they are not being changed by outside forces impinging
on the legal autonomy of states. Thus, this is not an issue of sovereignty.
Globalization critics lamenting alleged cultural homogenization, such as
Benjamin Barber,46 are wrong in pinning their arguments to the mast of
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