Afro-communitarianism or Cosmopolitanism
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Afro‑communitarianism or Cosmopolitanism Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani1 Accepted: 17 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Introduction Bernard Matolino argues that classical communitarians exaggerate the role of the community in its relationship with the individual, and for that reason, classical communitarianism is an ill-suited value foundation for designing modern African political systems. Matolino thus rejects communalism as a foundation for communitarianism, and pledges to construct a communitarian theory without communalism. He advocates what he terms Afro-communitarianism: an advocacy for respecting every citizen of the world irrespective of race, gender, religion, and other demographics. I argue that this new theory is more appropriately called cosmopolitanism, and I show that Matolino’s arguments coincide with the arguments of cosmopolitans. I question the “Afro” aspect of the titling of this advocacy as “Afro-communitarianism”. Matolino also argues that the debate about whether the community has primacy over the individual is inappropriate, and focuses instead on arguing only for the rights of the individual. I argue that this position robs Matolino’s theory of the appellation “communitarian”, which is an appellation due to any theory advocating the importance of some degree or the other of the community especially in relation to the individual. Matolino’s stray into cosmopolitanism is problematic because the reasons driving the communitarian and cosmopolitan debates are quite different. The communitarian debate is driven by concerns with the balance of rights between the community and the individual, and the cosmopolitan by concerns with the place, role and extent of the power of sovereign states in determining citizenship and tying people to societies. Matolino also does not succeed in divorcing communitarianism from communalism, and this robs him of the ability to make communitarianism a theory discussing world relations, by the standards of his conclusion that a communal-based communitarianism is unsuitable for contemporary multi-ethnic African societies. This article is divided into four sections. In Sect. 1, I present Matolino’s dissatisfaction with the communal foundations of classical communitarianism (which * Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani [email protected]; [email protected] http://www.ug.edu.gh 1
Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana
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involves the early socialists and nationalists, the radical communitarians, and supporters of consensual democracy). In Sect. 2, I present Matolino’s own version of what he calls Afro-communitarianism. In Sect. 3, I argue that there is nothing African about a universalist argument against racism at the world stage, and this calls into question Matolino’s decision to attach the “Afro” appellation to his theory. In Sect. 4, I argue that the issues driving the communitarian and cosmopolitan debates are quite different, and this makes a communitarian theory unfit as cosmopolitanism in spirit but especi
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