Three Theories of Globalization

Perhaps the least controversial thing one can say about globalization is that it is driven by market forces. National boundaries become increasingly irrelevant as individuals exploit the comparative advantages offered by trade; technological advances in shipping and communications generate vast markets and with them vast rewards for further advances; and thus, a “global marketplace” gradually comes into being.Footnote ¹¹ This account portrays individuals as economic agents—that is, as property owners and profit seekers—spinning mutually advantageous webs of exchange with (potentially) every other individual in the world. As individuals engage in economic activity across national borders they strengthen and spread this understanding of themselves, until the globe is no longer a patchwork of distinct and incompatible groups but a uniform plane upon which individuals can expect to encounter others more or less like themselves.

Alternatively, globalization can appear to be driven by moral rather than market forces; the word sometimes summons to mind the image of a “global community,” an all-inclusive group consisting of individuals morally bound to sacrifice for and protect one another. When we reflect rationally and dispassionately upon our duties to our fellow human beings, this account suggests, we come to recognize our placement in particular communities as a matter of chance. One could just as easily have been born on the other side of the world. We ought, therefore, to treat others equally and fairly without regard to the national boundaries that separate us, that is, without undue preference for those who happen to be close over those who are far away.Footnote ¹² To the extent that we strive to strengthen international political bodies like the United Nations to utilize international organizations and alliances for humanitarian ends and to enact cosmopolitan reforms in education and in our national political institutions, we realize via political action the conclusions we reach in moments of moral reflection. Humans are, in fact, more truly “citizens of the world” than of nations, and globalization, conceived along cosmopolitan lines, reflects that fact.

According to these first two accounts, “globalization” describes the emergence of a global market or a global community; either economic desires or moral obligations drive expansion beyond the horizons of the nation-state. On the third account of globalization, this expansion is driven by human pride. If we designate the first as a market account and the second as a cosmopolitan account, we might designate this third the “thumotic” account in order to recall Socrates's analysis of thumos (usually translated “spirit”) in Plato's Republic.Footnote ¹³ For Socrates, thumos is the part of an individual's soul that is concerned with his or her self-worth, particularly as it is reflected in the eyes of others. Thumos is therefore the source in the soul of our sensitivity to honor and shame, and it underlies a variety of related passions such as anger (when we feel that our self-worth is unjustly challenged) and a longing for honor (in Greek, philotimia) or for victory (philonikia) (when we aspire to increase others' estimate of our worth). There is, however, a certain ambivalence in Socrates's thumos: it is capable of fueling ambitious self-promotion, as when I seek an office that will win esteem for myself alone, but it is also capable of fueling risky self-endangerment, since it fuels identification with people (and objects) external to oneself, that is, those one considers “one's own.” Thumos, in other words, contains elements of both selfishness and service. And accounts of globalization rooted in thumos reflect its ambivalence. Some emphasize the pride of individuals (the selfish side of thumos); others, the identity individuals share with a group of other individuals (the service side).

The first account, originating in Alexandre Kojève's interpretation of Hegel, popularized by Francis Fukuyama, and recently reiterated by Alexander Wendt, conceives of individuals as driven by the “desire for recognition.”Footnote ¹⁴ Since individuals want to be recognized by not just one set of people, but by as many people as possible, their desire for recognition amounts to a desire for universal recognition. And since individuals want to be affirmed in their self-worth by not just anyone, but someone whom they deem worthy of respect, their desire for recognition amounts to a desire for equality. Ultimately, pride leads one to long for a “universal homogeneous state”—a political situation in which one's “eminent human reality and dignity” are respected by all humanity, all of whom are reciprocally recognized to be worthy of awarding recognition.Footnote ¹⁵ Human pride, then, demotes divisive national boundaries and promotes human rights; in short, when one starts from the selfish side of thumos, one ultimately arrives at a form of globalization rather similar to that of the cosmopolitan account.

If, however, one starts from the service side of thumos—the capacity of individuals to share an identity with one another, thereby seeing others as extensions of themselves—one arrives at a very different picture of globalization. Thinkers who start from the service side of thumos tend to be wary of claims that some shared human identity will replace extant particular identities; these identities are too durable and the desire to define oneself against an “other” too deep for any meaningful expansion of identity to occur. Some thinkers in this camp stress the permanence of nation-states; others expect identities larger than the nation but smaller than humanity to become more prevalent; but all expect particular identities to persist.Footnote ¹⁶ While this line of thought would seem to result in a denial of globalization rather than a theory of it, this is not necessarily the case. Globalization—understood as the promotion of global trade, international institutions, or even in certain cases the expansion of identity—need not be understood as a neutral process beneficial to all parties, but might instead serve as a strategy by which particular groups enhance their own power.Footnote ¹⁷ If this is so, processes that appear to foster or result from expansions of political identity may in fact serve to promote the interests generated by durable particular identities.

So far, we have considered three senses of the word “globalization” and the accounts to which each corresponds. It is important to note that these accounts are not mutually exclusive. Also, one might affirm or oppose globalization in any of the senses we have considered. But regardless of the desirability of globalization or the interrelation among these competing pictures of what it is, these three accounts—market, cosmopolitan, and thumotic (in its two variations, which I will refer to as universalist and particularist)—are the primary ones on offer, each reflecting a distinct meaning assigned to the same protean word, “globalization.”

Indeterminate Identification

Since I am primarily interested here in globalization as it influences political action, rather than its economic or ethical implications, I want to take up the third, thumotic, account. So far, we have considered two kinds of thumotic account, universalist and particularist; however, these two are not necessarily exhaustive. Pride need not favor either universality and equality or a stable particular identity; often it rests in between these two states for sustained periods of time. During these times identity is indeterminate. It is by focusing on this indeterminacy of identity, I believe, that we can develop a third kind of thumotic account that captures the political realities of globalization better than the other two. I want now to outline a model for doing this.

It will be helpful to begin on the level of individual psychology, before addressing political identity more broadly. In matters of individual identity, we are rarely certain of our commitments and seldom satisfied that our identities are truly our own, because our true allegiances tend to be revealed only retrospectively. It is possible to profess any number of commitments, but we are rightly suspicious of others' professions when they are expressed in words unsupported by deeds; likewise, it is in examining our own prior action that we can discern whether or not we live up to our obligations. And this is particularly so with respect to crises: national crises discover patriots, as distant civil wars and famines discover humanitarians. Since our identities, then, are always revealed post facto, we are always left in some degree of apprehension regarding our identities in the present and future. And our apprehension is compounded by the knowledge that even deeply felt allegiances change over time. One might debate, of course, just how “sticky” certain identities are—as we have seen, many theorists in the particularist thumotic camp assert national and religious identities to be particularly durable—but even those who assert the permanence of nation-states and religions must admit that these apparently permanent identities all came into being at some point in time. And we have sufficient experience of lesser alterations (rooting for a new sports team, say) to imagine by analogy how weightier identities might shift. On the micro level, in the moral lives of individuals, we therefore discern two elements of indeterminate identification: identities are always uncertain in the present and future, and this is especially so since we have experience of identities changing over time.

On the macro level, in the historical lives of political bodies, we discern similar ambivalences and alterations. I want to suggest that globalization is characterized by two types of indeterminacy, one involving the interaction of more and less inclusive identities (e.g., national and local identities), and the other involving identities approximately equal with respect to inclusiveness (e.g., two national identities).

First, let us consider the interaction of more and less inclusive identities. Since many of the processes associated with globalization seem driven by technological innovations (e.g., the invention of the steam engine) or moral attitudes that seem to have arisen at a definitive historical moment (e.g., the Christian revelation of human fraternity), it is common to think that global consciousness itself emerged at some definitive moment in history, that individuals were ignorant of their membership in “humanity” until some pivotal historical moment when they discovered their similarity to others beyond their borders. If this picture seems right in a certain sense—there are evidently periods in which identities change more rapidly than usual—it is also quite misleading in another sense. Humans seem always to have been conscious, however dimly, of at least three levels of identity: local (identity with an immediate, visible group), national (identity with an invisible or imaginary group distinct from other such groups), and universal (identity with the invisible or imaginary group consisting of all human beings).Footnote ¹⁸ When we speak of an epochal shift in identity—whether recent globalization or the “nationalization” of the nineteenth century and before—we should not envision these strata of identity coming into being or fading into nonexistence; rather, we should understand there to be a shift within the ranking of our allegiances, that is, the strengthening of one stratum relative to the others. This point is worth stressing, because it saves us not only from (what I take to be) the historical error of thinking a stratum of allegiance altogether new, but also from the more significant analytical error that results: when we recognize that strata of allegiance do not arise ex nihilo, we can ask how a previously diminished form of identity can gain in power. And our account of this process must recognize that new identities emerge always out of, and in relation to, older identities, which are not eliminated so much as demoted.Footnote ¹⁹ By extension, an account of globalization attuned to this form of indeterminacy should emphasize not the radical novelty of universal identity, but the relation of universal identity to national identity, since if global identity is in fact rising, it is necessarily doing so out of and in relation to national identity.

A second form of indeterminacy arises when our allegiance is divided between multiple localities or multiple nations. In this case, our identity extends past our particular political body to include another particular political body, but without necessarily arriving at a distinct, more universal, stratum of allegiance. An individual who identifies with two localities need not identify with a nation, any more than an individual with two national allegiances need identify with humanity. Just as it is important to keep in mind the national origins of the global—insofar as a global community imagined to have emerged ex nihilo is distinct from one imagined to have emerged from another stratum of allegiance—so it is important to recognize the effects on a given particular identity of coexistence with another such identity. An individual who identifies with two nations, for instance, does not experience either identity in exactly the same way as an individual who identifies only with one. With respect to globalization, this form of indeterminacy helps us to recognize that there are forms of expansion that do not necessarily entail the rise of a universal community. When a naturalized citizen longs for his or her homeland, he or she looks beyond his or her nation, to be sure, but only towards another nation, not towards a global community.

The indeterminacy of identity that arises from simultaneous allegiance to inclusive and exclusive groups, on the one hand, and to comparably exclusive groups, on the other, reflects the indeterminacy that we have found to be inherent in thumos itself. We have seen that thumos contains elements both of selfishness and service, and that each of the accounts of globalization with roots in thumos privileges one of these elements. Thus, the universalist thumotic account starts from the selfish side of thumos and arrives at a universal homogeneous state, while the particularist thumotic account starts from the service side of thumos and arrives at stable particular identities. Both accounts, in other words, solve the tension inherent in thumos by eliminating one of the elements that generate this tension. If, however, one insists on the irreducibility of the tension inherent in thumos, one will be more attuned to the difficulty of identifying any stable synthesis of individuals and their identities, whether universal or particular. On the level of theory, then, insisting on the indeterminacy of identity seems to render the consequences of the psychological premise of the thumotic account more accurately than the alternatives. On a more practical level, the concept of indeterminate identity allows us to articulate the tensions and contradictions inherent in our adherence to different strata of allegiance, as when we struggle with the propriety of privileging the welfare of fellow citizens over foreigners; and it enables us to express the ambiguities inherent in belonging to multiple nations or localities, an experience endemic to immigrant and diaspora communities. Thus, our concept of indeterminate identification helps us to elucidate the consequences of the tensions inherent in human pride, and to highlight aspects of globalization neglected in the three alternative accounts.

Alexander's Particularism

Entering into the intricacies of indeterminate identity is hardly avoidable when discussing Alexander the Great, because the Macedon he grew up in was at best ambiguously Greek. Located on the far-flung fringes of the Greek geographical region, Macedon was frequently grouped with Northern nations (ethnē) rather than Southern cities (poleis).Footnote ³⁵ As its political form, more nation than city, set it apart from the rest of Greece, so did its political regime: Macedon was ruled by a hereditary monarchy rather than the oligarchies and democracies of Greece proper.Footnote ³⁶ Macedon's enemies among the Greek cities eagerly exploited these differences to make Macedon appear foreign, even Persian. Herodotus's Spartans, for instance, claim that Macedon's political loyalties are influenced by its regime: “Do not let Alexander of Macedon persuade you with his smooth talk of Mardonius's speech. He has to do this—for, being a tyrant, he is hand-in-glove with a tyrant.”Footnote ³⁷ Demosthenes, likewise, never tired of draping royal robes on Alexander the Great's father, Phillip.Footnote ³⁸ Isocrates, however, thought the Macedonians sufficiently Greek to lead a pan-Hellenic expedition against the Persians, and Thucydides thought the Greekness of the Macedonians uncontroversial.Footnote ³⁹ All of which leaves one with the impression of a profound ambivalence surrounding the cultural status of Macedon.

This cultural indeterminacy will prove quite consequential in Alexander's upbringing and later career, but, as Plutarch tells the story, it is not the first thing that one notices about the young prince. Rather, the most striking feature of Plutarch's Alexander is his overweening philotimia. “Alexander's ambition (philotimia),” Plutarch says, “kept his spirit weighty and magnanimous beyond his years” (4.4–5).Footnote ⁴⁰ He passes his childhood wincing at every report of his father's success, haunted by the thought that he will inherit a realm in which all of the “ambitious enterprises” (philotimias) will have already been achieved (5.3). The young Alexander does not want to possess an empire so much as the fame of acquiring one, and he is largely unconcerned with casus belli; his ambition is simultaneously omnipotent and aimless. To the extent that the young Alexander's philotimia has a more definite orientation, it arises from the least Hellenic element of his upbringing—the fact that he grows up a crown prince. When he is asked to compete in the Olympic Games, he responds with haughty distaste: he would only race “with kings for competitors” (4.5). Since only Greeks were allowed to take part in the games, Macedon's inclusion provided vital support for its claims to Greek cultural membership; winning admission had been a decisive achievement of Alexander's ancestors.Footnote ⁴¹ By taking such fierce pride in the regime that sets Macedon apart from the Greeks, Alexander further attenuates an identity that, as we have seen, was already quite fragile.

Alexander's distinctly un-Hellenic disposition changes once his father sends abroad for Aristotle, the “most famous and learned of philosophers,” to tutor his son (7.2).Footnote ⁴² As we have seen, Aristotle is often understood to have stamped Alexander's character indelibly with the seal of Greek rationality, providing the breadth and generosity of political vision that subsequently enabled Alexander's pursuit of a world state. In his Life Plutarch describes Alexander's education rather differently.Footnote ⁴³ First, he tells us precious little about the content of Aristotle's instruction. Plutarch does not say whether Aristotle explained to the young prince the virtue of ruling and being ruled by turns, or the superiority of cities that can be taken in at a glance to the quasi-barbaric nations and tribes of the North.Footnote ⁴⁴ Instead, Plutarch describes the idyllic grove and shaded walks where Alexander was taught and informs us that Alexander received “secret and profound” (aporrētōn kai bathuterōn) doctrines, in addition to studying ethics and politics. Plutarch gives us a snapshot of the quad and a copy of the course catalogue without any transcripts of lectures. Alexander develops a fierce attachment to his tutor—he learns that there is at least one man without royal blood whose recognition matters to him—but that is about the extent of his philosophical development.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is not that he lacks opportunities for further study: he encounters more philosophers and a wider range of philosophies than any other subject of a Plutarchean Life.Footnote ⁴⁶ Alexander's relations with all of them, however, are ambiguous at best. On the one hand, he tells a companion that the next best thing to conquering the world would be philosophizing in the sun like Diogenes, and he rewards the Gymnosophists (a troupe of nudist intellectuals Alexander encounters in India) for exceptionally clever responses to questions he poses. On the other hand, he seems to admire the haughtiness and contemptuousness of Diogenes's character more than the content of his doctrines, and what saves the Gymnosophists is not the philosophical profundity of their answers so much as their calmness and wit under fire.Footnote ⁴⁷ What Alexander appreciates in each case is not philosophy per se, but rather a kind of free-spiritedness recognizable as much in a Theban widow and an indomitable horse as in philosophers (6, 12).Footnote ⁴⁸ In any event, the philosophers closest to Alexander do not end well. Alexander either orders Callisthenes killed or imprisons him in such dire conditions that his death follows as a matter of course. His relations with Aristotle decline steadily, to the point where Aristotle was thought by some to have been the mastermind behind Alexander's assassination (55.4–5, 77.2).Footnote ⁴⁹

If Alexander is not an impassioned devotee of the examined life, his passion for Greek culture—for tragedies, dithyrambs, epic, indeed for poetry generally, as opposed to philosophy—seems genuine and all but insatiable.Footnote ⁵⁰ The seeds of this passion were sown by Aristotle's predecessor as court tutor, Lysimachus, a rube who rises to prominence thanks not to his towering intellect so much as to his persistence in calling himself, Alexander, and Phillip by nicknames culled from Homer's poetry (5.5).Footnote ⁵¹ The odd appeal of Lysimachus highlights the importance of Homer in Macedon. Alexander understands himself to be related by blood to Achilles through his mother's line, and it comes quite naturally to him to conceive of not only his descent but also his present and future prospects in heroic terms (2.1). His education under Aristotle only fans these flames. While we hear in the “Fortune and Virtue of Alexander” that Alexander carried Aristotelian treatises with him into Asia, we find no evidence of it in the Life; in their place is a critical edition of the Iliad, prepared by Aristotle, that Alexander not only carries with him, but keeps under his pillow at night.Footnote ⁵² His knowledge of Homer is, not surprisingly, thorough and so immediate that lines come to mind easily in emergencies: after being shot by an arrow he shouts at his men, “My friends, this here is flowing blood, not ‘Ichor, which flows in the blessed gods’” (28.2).Footnote ⁵³ At Troy, Alexander anoints the grave of Achilles, holds games in his honor, and regrets wistfully that he cannot hold the lyre with which Achilles sang the glories of men (klea andrōn) (15.4–5). So intimately does Alexander relate to Homer that the poet visits him in his dreams, indicating the future site of Alexandria with a couplet from the Odyssey (26). And Alexander's interest in Greek culture is not limited to Homer. Countless spectacular dramatic contests—one featuring Cypriot kings as choregi, another including some three thousand Greek artists—accompany Alexander's conquests (29, 72). It is this respect for Greek culture, above all, that Alexander seems to have taken from his education under Aristotle. His dreams are vivid and Homeric, not abstract and Aristotelian.

This orientation toward Greek culture has a profound influence on Alexander's political action.Footnote ⁵⁴ Alexander shows more concern for Greek esteem than for that of any of his other subjects. After the Battle of Gaugamela he abolishes the Greek tyrannies and allows the cities to live under their own laws because he is “eager to be honored by the Greeks” (philotimoumenos pros tous Hellēnas) (34.1). And he is particularly eager to be honored by Athenians. During his invasion of Greece he is exceedingly merciful to the Athenians, even going so far as to offer the consolation that if his project fails they will inherit the rule of the mainland once again (13.2). On campaign, he wishes for the Athenians above all to understand how much of a success he is. After his first great victory over the Persians he wants the Greeks to share in his glory, so he sends three hundred shields to Athens; on the rest of the spoils he places a “most ambitious inscription” (philotimotatēn epigraphēn): “Alexander son of Phillip and the Greeks (except the Spartans), from Barbarians living in Asia” (16.8). Later, as the Battle of the Hydaspes begins in the depths of India, he spontaneously shouts, “O Athenians, can you believe what great dangers I face to win glory [eudoxias] from you?” (60.3). Although Alexander behaves quite properly toward Persian women and seems quite genuine in his conciliatory gestures toward the defeated Darius prior to Gaugamela, he never shows a concern to win their esteem comparable to his eager and unflagging pursuit of Athenian honor (21).

Alexander, then, is philotimoumenos pros tous Hellēnas; he seeks the honor of the Greeks. It is Alexander's concern for Greek esteem, rather than his philosophical education, that animates his initial political project, the conquest of the Persian empire. To see how, in the context of the Lives as a whole, this project can arise from Alexander's aspirational Hellenicity, it is necessary to trace briefly Plutarch's depiction of Greek interaction with Persia outside of the Life of Alexander.

Plutarch's Greek Lives often give the impression that the history of the Greek city-states is not a random succession of civil and foreign wars, but a structured series of events that has a beginning and ought to have an end as well. This story begins with the cultural unity of the different city-states, continues with the partial political realization of this unity while they fend off the Persian invasions, and would conclude were the Greeks to unify once again to conquer Persia.Footnote ⁵⁵ Plutarch's lives of figures active during the Persian War often frame the conflict with a view to a future retaliatory expedition by positing permanent enmity between Greek and barbarian.Footnote ⁵⁶ After the Persian Wars, when Cimon dies while trying to channel the Athenians' energy against the barbarians rather than their fellow Greeks, Plutarch laments the lost opportunity for a pan-Hellenic conquest of the East.Footnote ⁵⁷ Toward the end of the Peloponnesian War, the idea of a pan-Hellenic conquest of Persia is voiced again, and again Plutarch goes out of his way to endorse it.Footnote ⁵⁸ And when Agesilaus's campaigns in the East are diverted by Greek affairs, Plutarch is prompted to offer this sweeping view of Greek history:

What is most striking here is not Plutarch's argument for Greek unity—there really is not such an argument—but rather the assumption that Greece is a single entity, a unit one can speak of as being divided against itself. The conquest of Persia, on Plutarch's telling, would represent the final, crowning achievement of Greek civilization; it offers a potential avenue to unsurpassed honor among the Greeks. For Plutarch, Alexander's project of conquering Persia can thus arise from his orientation toward Greek esteem rather than through his adoption of a philosophically derived idea of human unity.

Alexander does not learn any set of doctrines, political or otherwise, from Aristotle, so much as his philotimia acquires a new orientation. Under Aristotle's tutelage Alexander is transformed from a boy with a future monarch's prejudices into a man who fiercely desires the honor of a civilization to which he belongs only imperfectly. To secure his honor among the Greeks, Alexander aims to bring Greek history to a close with the conquest of Persia. In the Alexander, then, we find not a “philosopher in arms” but a young man eager for glory and convinced he can prove himself a hero unsurpassed in Greek history, having slept many a night with a dog-eared copy of the Iliad, the most prized memento of his boyhood tutor, stowed safely under his pillow.

Alexander's Universalism

If Alexander's initial political project derives from Greek culture, the means he employs for achieving this goal—his readiness, as Kojève puts it, “to dissolve the whole of Macedonia and of Greece in the new political unit created by his conquest”—are his own. Were true Greeks such as Aristides and Cimon to conquer the barbarians they consider “natural enemies” (phusei polemoi), they could hardly institute anything more innovative than the timeworn model of imperial domination, with the Greeks rather than Persians doing the dominating.Footnote ⁶⁰ Alexander, however, does not seem to want merely to secure hegemony for his own people; rather, he seems to contemplate a mode of rule satisfying to both Persians and Greeks alike. I want to suggest in what follows that Alexander is particularly suited to develop this policy of cultural fusion owing both to his own cultural indeterminacy and to his abiding ambition. Just as we found Alexander's motives to be more limited than those posited by the universalist thumotic account, so we will find in his methods of rule a more expansive vision of politics than that allowed by the particularist thumotic account.

It is tempting to attribute Alexander's openness to foreign customs to his training under Aristotle; however, on Plutarch's account, these innovative cultural policies more closely resemble exercises in political prudence than philosophically inspired gambits.Footnote ⁶¹ After Darius has died and the Persian Empire has been entirely subdued, Alexander has completed (however fleetingly) the Greek story that runs through Plutarch's Lives, and it remains for him merely to consolidate and strengthen his rule. That, it seems, is what leads him to devise a clever, perhaps unprecedented, technique for maintaining a multicultural empire—the mixture of barbarian and Greek customs.Footnote ⁶² As Plutarch tells the story, Alexander begins by changing his clothes, adopting a style somewhere between that of the Persians and the Macedonians.Footnote ⁶³ The Macedonians' reaction is essentially the same as when Alexander, after visiting the oracle of Ammon in Egypt, first claimed Zeus as his father and adopted a divine persona (27–28).Footnote ⁶⁴ They are not particularly happy that their leader is putting on airs, but so long as his courage and generalship continue as before, they are willing to tolerate it. With his fellow Macedonians, Alexander demonstrates his preeminence and acquires his authority on the battlefield; if he likes to dress up, so be it. This attitude stands in marked contrast to that of Plutarch's Persians, who are portrayed as being civilized to the point of decadence and ready to obey the trappings of royalty regardless of whether the man beneath them merits obedience (20.5–21.1, 33.4–5). Plutarch's Macedonians obey a hero despite his tiara; his Persians, a tiara despite the cowardice it crowns. And Alexander has the prudence to spot the difference, adapting himself to what the Persians consider authoritative even while continuing to prove to the Macedonians that he, the first and most courageous among equals, deserves to rule. If Alexander's insight represents political wisdom, it is of a Herodotean variety, suggesting a profound sensitivity to cultural difference rather than an insistence, along Kojèvean lines, on human similarity. It is not for the sake of blending customs that Alexander undertakes his mission, but for the sake of the mission's success that he adopts the policy of blending customs.

What is it about Alexander that allows him to devise such a policy? His ambivalent Greekness—the fact that, for him, Greek culture is a possession not quite his own, something to aspire to and emulate (one might almost say, to conquer)—is partly responsible.Footnote ⁶⁵ This indeterminacy in Alexander's cultural identity is mimicked in the indeterminacy of nearly every other identity he adopts. Alexander calls some of his friends “lovers of Alexander” (philalexandros) and others “lovers of the king” (philobasilea), suggesting that “king” is a role Alexander plays. Quite often “Alexander” seems a role as well, something he can stand apart from and can step in and out of at will. After his encounter with Diogenes, for instance, he says, “If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes,” and when Parmenio declares he would accept Darius's terms for peace were he Alexander, Alexander quickly replies that he would too, were he Parmenio (14.3, 29.4). From his early childhood (thanks to his mother's forebears and his tutor's nicknames) Alexander orients himself by the story of Achilles, although this too is for him a role, an ideal he tries to realize but approximates only imperfectly. As an adolescent he does not feel secure in his patrimony, and he is even less secure in his paternity: Phillip is replaced by Aristotle, both of whom are replaced by Zeus Ammon after Alexander's visit to Egypt.Footnote ⁶⁶ Alexander has, then, a certain indeterminacy central to his character. He is a Greek, a hero, a prince, a god—but all not quite. It is fitting that one who has consciously had to earn his membership in a not-quite-foreign culture should prove adept at molding his and his subjects' cultural allegiances—and therefore should think Macedonians capable of Medizing and Medes capable of Macedonizing.

Because Alexander is none of the roles he fills, their jostling always leaves us wondering what is underneath all the robes, what Alexander looks like when he changes costumes between acts. For Plutarch, the close observer of philotimoi statesmen is always bedeviled with uncertainty as to what lurks behind such a statesman's public personae. Plutarch's Alcibiades, for instance, has “one particularly clever trick and technique for preying on men—to assimilate and sympathize with their customs and their ways of life, changing his ways faster than a chameleon.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Plutarch's philotimia always implies a certain distance between self and social role, leaving the philotimos man with the desire to prove himself to be something that he is only imperfectly in the present. And this sense of a loose-fitting, changeable self coincides with a certain attentiveness to others' values, if only to win their esteem. It is, therefore, fitting that Alexander in his ambition is capable both of assuming the viewpoint of newly acquired subjects to determine what they honor and of molding himself accordingly.

Alexander's philotimia is not—initially, at least—as protean and all-consuming as that of the chameleonlike Alcibiades; rather, it is the philotimia of a not-quite-Greek prince, capable of putting the insights garnered from his experience of having to prove himself Greek to work in completing the project that will win him Greek esteem. Alexander is not confined within Macedonian cultural horizons because these horizons open toward Greece; he adopts Greek horizons insofar as these expose the East to the hungry eyes of the would-be conqueror, and yet he sets out on his own path when he fuses Greek and barbarian so as to rule both more effectively. Alexander, then, is neither the founder of the first universal state, as the universalist thumotic account would have him, nor the founder of a more traditional empire, as the particularist account would suggest. Instead, I want to suggest that Plutarch's Alexander might serve as the founder of globalization, understood, as I have argued, as the process of political expansion that results from the interplay of the pursuit of esteem and the indeterminacy of identity.