Hardt And Negri Analysis

1. The biggest point of contention between Appiah and Hardt and Negri is that Appiah’s philosophy is one which primarily concerns itself with ethics and ethical influence on behaviors. Appiah largely makes arguments about what is considered right, or the different ways in which cultures should respond to certain practices. Hardt and Negri, on the other hand present an analysis which is, for the most part, amoral; it makes observations about habits and trends within shifting power in a political and economic analysis, though the analysis is suffused with disdain for the system as they currently see it. Appiah makes historical observations about cultural interaction, honor, and respect which he then extrapolates to the practices of a modern culture

In fact, given Appiah’s own assertion about the nature of globalization—that it is macroeconomic thesis rather than one about ethics or human behavior—it is not even necessarily so that these two philosophical approaches are in opposition. Hardt and Negri’s observations about the course of progress simultaneously do not remove the potential for cosmopolitan individuals, or even cosmopolitan change within honor worlds, even as they are brought closer together by the forces of Empire. Nor does the state of Empire preclude the kind of honor revolution which Appiah references in history, in which people within a dependent, hierarchical society realize that there is a policy or practice which demeans that they wish to

Despite the fact that the theories operate within different social spheres, in terms of individuals and honor peers or sovereign political and economic forces as a whole, they are actually predicated on a similar premise: that there are distinct hierarchies within established societies which creates differences in status and treatment. Within all three of the examples Appiah provides in The Honor Code, there are distinct class elements which influence the outcomes of his described moral revolutions. In the case of dueling, it was originally a facet of the “powerful class whose members could get away with a practice contrary to law” (Honor 46), and only lost favor when those not of the same class began to emulate it. Similarly, there were many arguments made to end the Atlantic slave trade, many either rational or moral in nature, but eventually, Appiah contends that one of the key factors which mobilized the working class was that “much more than the national honor” (Honor 118) was at stake in the case of perpetuating the slave trade; it was the honor of a particular class—the working class—which slavery demeaned because it associated the type of labor the working class did with an even lower class and the practice of forced labor, which implied that the labor of the working class was somehow less than the wok of other