The body keeps us busy in thousand of ways because of its need for nurture. It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body. Only the body and its desires cause war, civil discord and battles, for all wars are due to the desire to acquire wealth, and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved.
Plato, Phaedo, 66, b-d, at 57.
It seems to me that there are three pleasures corresponding to the three parts of the soul, one peculiar to each part, and similarly with desires and kinds of rule . . . . The first, we say, is the part with which a person learns, and the second the part with which he gets angry. As for the third, we had no one special name for it, since it’s multiform, so we named it after the biggest and strongest thing in it. Hence we called it the appetitive part, because of the intensity of its appetites for food, drink, sex, and all the things associated with them, but we also called it the money-loving part, because such appetites are most easily satisfied by means of money.
Plato, Republic, 580, d-e, at 1188.
Westbrook’s City of Gold is not just a book; it is an act of faith. As St. Augustine was inspired to write his City of God after Alaric the Goth sacked the City of Rome and took away its sense of security;2 Westbrook’s City of Gold appears after Osama Bin Laden shocked the City of New York and took away our sense of security. In the end, St. Augustine is hopeful: God has a plan in which all suffering finds a purpose.3 Westbrook is resigned: it is possible to improve our life in the City of Gold if we accept that it is not –and never will be the City of God.4 We have to recognize that alienation, the hallmark of the City of Gold, is better than genocide.5 Westbrook reminds us that the world order constructed after the Second World War is the best that we could hope for against the violence that lurks in the human heart. The City of Gold is not necessarily admirable, but an imperative for keeping at bay Hitler-like phenomena. Yet, do not indulge yourself with lofty ideals; we are at war; and we live in a place that is willing to defend its order with atomic bombs.6 Nonetheless, this does not suffice. Beyond the truism ‘might makes right’, Westbrook tries to show that the City of Gold is “morally right.”7 The market across national boundaries -with all its inequalities and seemingly moral emptiness- cannot bring us happiness, but at least it can bring us a kind a peace. Westbrook knows that to justify the City of Gold, we need a way of recognizing evil, even when is our own; that we need an articulation of justice. He knows that “Kingdoms without justice are like criminal gangs.”8 Regardless of what we may think about his justification of our global order, Westbrook’s honest soul-searching shows that finances, its institutions, and the global culture that they have shaped have been necessary to avoid totalitarian evils. He opens the door to a political critique of the culture brought by global finances on its own terms, thereby avoiding making of it a fundamentalist gospel. For these reasons, international civil servants, bankers, diplomats, academics, politicians and cultural critics alike would profit from Westbrook’s book.
From all the talk about empire and defending globalization,9 Westbrook’s argument is refreshing because it brings political morality to a world order based on finances. It is also refreshing because Westbrook chooses the essays for presenting his apology. For his subject, a suitable form grows freely at the boundaries of scientific, philosophical, and literary expressions. Or as he puts it, close to experience, belief, and telling.10 The argument is organized in four main parts: Desire’s Constitution, Constitutional Critique, Exhausted Philosophies, and Toward Metropolitan Political Economy, trying to rethink globalization outside the mind setting of the nation-state. Westbrook concedes the inherent limits of any institutional ordering of human societies: any governance has irremediable biases. After the Holocaust, however, this is the best order that we have achieved so far. Westbrook aims to warn the demonstrators that roam around 700 19th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20431, that also our global financial institutions are preaching essential virtues. As Ms. Kruger, the acting managing director of the IMF quoting Socrates said, “We are, in a sense, preaching the rewards of virtue: . . . and [as Socrates said] I tell you that virtue does not come from money: but from virtue comes money and all other good things to man, both to the individual and to the state.”11
Westbrook begins with the obvious. He presents the global order as constitutional arrangement beyond/beneath/under/around/within nation-states. We live in a single virtual metropolis within a frame of references called by him supranational capitalism. This metropolis shares a common culture: notions about contract, property, money, history, and individual. This frame of reference is a virtual polity, a matrix. We are citizens of the world, but not a world of unity, justice, and peace. The City of Gold has been successful. It produces plentiful wealth. Nonetheless, it cannot have a sense of justice. Grass-roots organizations should not protest against Bretton Woods Institutions –at least not by making them scapegoats of all that is wrong with globalization- but against the “essential character of contemporary political life.”12
Westbrook dispelled some misunderstanding. Globalization is not a shift from governments to markets, making sovereignty irrelevant. It is the relationship between the market and the government that changed, although we have not yet developed the political categories to explain that shift.13 Therefore, Westbrook is more concerned with posing the following questions: Is our government true? Does it foster a just society? Do we live an admirable, virtuous life?14 To answer those questions, Westbrook takes some assumptions as valid. For instance, globalization is already complete. All societies, including developing countries, are conceived and defined by their position in a globalize network. Globalization is the “the success of modernity’s efforts to conquer space.”15 Again, globalization is not the end of the nation-state, but it makes it impossible to do and to think about politics confined to the nation-state. Also, recognizing that foreign investment of transnational companies is the most important form of competition, creating a single market context, he sees globalization as a homogenizing “process of cultural formation:”16 “A new world; a new culture is emerging”.17 A culture legitimatized by a faith in the institutions of money and property, and not in the nation-states.18
In the end, globalization’s purpose is a system to ward against the totalitarian danger posed by the nation-state.19 “The City of Gold is an answer to Leviathan’s claim of hegemony over social and economic life.”20 The Bretton Woods Institutions and latter the European Institutions are arrangements against this totalitarian danger. Nationalism could have destroyed the world; therefore, it had to be tamed, and rightly and morally so. Bretton Woods substituted Westphalia.21 After World War II, the victorious North Atlantic powers opted for economic integration because they saw that economic isolationism had provided incentives to warfare.22 The City of Gold was founded against Hitler, but it grew under Stalin.23 The City of Gold was in fact realized with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The world has chosen Madison over Marx: “We gave up on universal solidarity and founded the City of Gold.”24 Yet, Westbrook sees deeper reasons for founding the City of Gold.25 “Behind postwar international liberalism, whether economic or political expressions, yawns Auschwitz, and farther back, German breadlines and American soup kitchens, and farther still, Verdun, Passandale and the Battle of the Somme, the fear that civilization has limits, beyond which lie savagery.”26 The City of Gold needs educated citizens, but they also have to be sane. The archetype of good citizen is the shopper. In other words, the City has to be found on orderly markets, “the cycle of arousal and satisfaction of banal desires, rather than one constituted by ideas.”27 The City of Gold has to be first a City of Pigs: it has to be the “aggregation of desires regardless of political boundaries;”28 it has to prefer economic integration over ideology, individual satisfaction over political passion.29
The essential stuff of the City is money: a perpetual floating signifier of desire,30 “an accounting convention backed by legal conventions and the power of the sovereign.”31 Due to the nature of money, “the City of Gold is a polity of the future, and has no genuine present, is perpetually becoming but is incapable of simply being.”32 Securitization typifies its being best.33 But the City of Gold is founded in fear, in exclusion, in a struggle for status. Depreciating solidarity, the City “is founded on envy.”34 The City expects from their citizens to aim in creating and perpetuating inequalities: “To own more, to be free to do more.”35 Although the City of Gold is constituted with the sole purpose of allowing individuals to live lives with or without purpose, this avoids having explicit common ideas of justice and virtue, which are relegated to the private realm.
Nevertheless, Westbrook wants to find some morality and authenticity at the heart of the City. He thinks that even a kind of affection is possible here. To do this, we should understand that markets have their own moral, their own beauty, and their own myths. It is true that to inhabit this economic vast simulacrum impulse by desire means to be confronted with alienation, inauthenticity, and consumerism.36 “A polity that suggests its citizens might do without meaning cannot be loved, for the simple reason that there is nothing to love, to be the object of affection.”37 Yet, in comparison with the Holocaust, we do not have any other choices available. If we accept this, we may begin to see that even in this financial matrix that does not seek justice unswervingly; we could find sympathy to others, if not solidarity. For purposes of avoiding wars, this seems to be enough. “Sympathy is the best that we –whose leaders command smart bombs and credit –can hope for in order to justify the repressions which cannot escape.”38 In the end, the true bearers of our civilization are the bankers. They have taken over the insurmountable task of sublimating war and managing the constitutive contradictions of civilization.39 For our benefit, they manage the repetitious cycle of desires of capital making and unmaking itself to create the illusion of progress.40 The truth of the City of Gold is the muted confession that seeking truth, virtue, and justice in our human endeavors could conduce to our annihilation.
For citizens to live well in this city, we need only good faith and probably a private garden.41 The well to-do citizens of the City of Gold should behave as if they were participating in the politics of an ideal polis; they must become “citizens on the strength of what [they] see.”42 But also they should act surmising that if there are some traces of the City of God here on this earthly City, they exist only as “alien sojourner.”43 We should be resigned that as long as the man is in “this mortal body, he is a pilgrim in a foreign land”, walking “by faith, not by sight.”44 For most citizens who do not live well in this City of Gold,45 we need more than good faith and a private garden; we need justice. And here is when Westbrook’s critique longing for solidarity on the City of Gold should be a common enterprise of our times.
1. Review of the book by David A. Westbrook, City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent (Routledge ed., 2004).
2. G. R. Evans, Introduction to St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans ix (Henry Bettenson trans., Penguin Books, Reissued with a new Introduction, notes and chronology by G. R. Evans ed. 2003) (1467).
3. See id. and 449.
4. Westbrook, supra note 1, at 301 ("Although we can and should hope to build a better polity, the City of Gold is not, and never can be, the City of God.").
5. See, e.g., id. at 296 ("Technology, which makes it possible to exercise such power at such distances, precludes the possibility of small, intimate societies, at least without revolution. And alienation is better than slaughter. There it is: an apology for global capitalism.")
6. See id. at 9.
7. See id. at 303 ("I believe supranational capitalism is not only inevitable, it is morally right.").
8. St. Agustine, supra note 2, at 139.
9. See generally, e.g., Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic Books, 2003) (2002); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (2002).
10. Westbrook, supra note 1, at 304.
11. Acting Managing Director International Monetary Fund Anne O. Krueger, Address at the Money and Sovereignty Exhibit Opening, Washington, D.C., April 15, 2004 (available at http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2004/041504.htm).
12. Westbrook, supra note 1, at 3.
13. Id. at 5 ("Our political thought should start by understanding that markets do not make government unnecessary; markets are a type of government.").
14. Id.
15. Id. at 6. See also id. at 39 ("Markets are dematerializing; physical character of economic transactions is on the wane.").
16. Id. at 10.
17. Id. at 11.
18. See id. at 65 ("The homogenization that "globalization" is often correctly accused of is no accident. Homogenization stems, in great part, from the structure of finance, specifically, capital's antipathy towards uncertainty and fondness for the familiar.").
19. See id. at 14. See also id. at 25 ("Hitler is thus the dark prince against whom the metropolitan politics is organized.").
20. Id. at 12.
21. See id. at 20.
22. See id. at 21, 25.
23. See id. at 30, 31.
24. See id. at 32. See also id. at 38 The West talked about the head -the individual's liberty to think, speak, and act - and bet the constitution on the gut, the individual's ability to shop in a society organized by appetite. The East talked about the gut, the right to work and to a decent level of material wealth, but bet on the head, the individual's solidarity with a society organized by bureaucratic planning. After the mostly velvet revolutions that ended the Cold War, it is clear that we were right and they were wrong as a matter of constitutional practice, but now we in the City of Gold should ask to what extend we can conceive of a politics of the head.
25. See id. at 34-35 (There are reasons to suspect that "beyond certain point of sophistication, the mind becomes alien and unstable, prone to violent enthusiasm.").
26. Id. at 35. See also id. at 149 ("So violence, and better still, the necessity of managing violence, provide the first metropolitan experiences of authenticity.").
27. Id. at 37.
28. Id. at 38.
29. See id. at 37.
30. See id. at 43.
31. Id. at 49. See also id. at 56 ("The City of Gold thus came to be defined as the communicative space in which the legal conventions surrounding our instantiations of money hold sway.").
32. Id. at 68.
33. See id. at 72-73. For an explanation of securitization see generally Steven L. Schwarcz, Structure Finance, A guide to the Principles of Asset Securitization (3r. ed. 2003).
34. Id. at 88.
35. Id. at 89.
36. Id. at 125, 127.
37. Id. at 127.
38. Id. at 288.
39. See id. at 269-70.
40. See id. at 270.
41. See id. at 290.
42. Plato, Republic, 592, at 1199 (John M. Cooper, and D. S. Hutchinson, eds. Complete Works, 1997).
43. St. Augustine, supra note 2, at 761.
44. Id. at 873.
45. See The World Bank Group, World View (2004), http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2004/Section1-intro.pdf (indicating that more than one billion people remain in extreme poverty).
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