Martha Nussbaum’s Flawed Humanism
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an>n her new book, Martha Nussbaum stitches together what she calls “the cosmopolitan tradition,” mines and judges it, then moves on to her own (better) thinking about the demands of justice and law. The four thinkers she studies—Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Hugo Grotius, and Adam Smith—share an attachment to a universal natural standard that can and should be applied to politics, both national and international. This natural standard combines a view of human nature, natural law, and (in Smith’s phrase) “natural liberty.” Humans are endowed by nature with freedom and normative guidance for its use. Where the tradition’s members fall short, Nussbaum believes, is in failing to see all the dictates of justice, as well as too narrowly construing its lodestar, dignity.
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