Years ago, in my grad student crowd, we had a little aesthetic rule: when you are tempted to boast about your own identity, religion, descent, or whatever, remember how tiresome this can be and that it is more amusing to criticize your own first. In this collection of literary studies, Bruce Robbins, who has written widely on the subject of cosmopolitanism and its imperatives, sounds very much like one of us. Robbins promotes blaming – that is, blaming one's own state before one considers blaming others – as he takes on a series of mostly kindred spirits who include Noam Chomsky, Todd Gitlin, Edward Said, Immanuel Wallerstein and Stefan Collini. His aim is usually to demonstrate the limits of their internationalism, while occasionally, as in the case of Said, applauding an effort to perfect it.

His negative point of departure is Carl Schmitt's thought that, since the political world is not a universe, but a pluriverse, one has only one's own country on whom to rely and to whom one must owe loyalty. Schmitt meant by this the obligation to sacrifice and even die for the nation, presumably under any leadership and in any cause. But he might have said simply that the pluriverse suggests that the idea of a national interest is no fiction. Even as a cosmopolitan, Robbins seems at times to consider that a Westphalian realism (not nationalism!) might not be entirely out of tune with his own internationalism.

But mostly he is concerned with the drawbacks of nationalism. He thinks his Columbia colleague Todd Gitlin wrong to suppose that the left's only alternative to marginality is a kind of liberal patriotism, although he endorses Gitlin's call for national solidarity in defense of the welfare state. Considering Wallerstein, he asks whether one can also blame systems. Perhaps this becomes a substitute for ethical ends and lubricant for disinterestedness. Wallerstein's world systems theory, for example, provides a narrative of a vast global injustice, with the system “sucking up all the blame in the vicinity” (87), but its very scope promotes the perspective of the extraterrestrial. The end of slavery, decolonization, the rise of socialism, all seem to be mere blips on the world historian's screen, none of which mean much to the world system of capitalism, despite our sense of the importance of these historical events. And can one blame a system from which one benefits? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak instead blames the Seattle protestors against child labor in Bangladesh for “blindly helping to protect northern jobs and markets” (111). Robbins treats this as unanswerable within the framework of a “First World standard of ethical rationality” (112).

Things go better when he considers Said's defense of the Enlightenment against the charge, stemming ironically from Orientalism, that it is in its way merely part of the historically specific cultural perspective of Christian civilization. Is secularism a parochial religious concept? Must one speak of science as divided into civilizational sectors in the cultural pluriverse? It is Carl Schmitt's point again about the international anarchy, this time in terms of civilizations rather than nations. Robbins seems mostly concerned to reconcile the two viewpoints and draw what he can from each.

Instead of “a rage for retribution” (188) that led to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public, Robbins thinks, needs a more fervent commitment to forgiveness. Americans must learn to blame their own nation. Long live shame. I encountered this mood in the studies for my book on the end of communism. The glasnost discussion on Soviet history reached the point where writers could say that the only appropriate end point to their extended confrontation with revelations about Stalin's crimes was a sense of national shame which the nation must repent. There followed a kind of decision by the intelligentsia to turn to the civilized nations for advice on how to live, which resulted in a catastrophic decade for the Russian people and the threat of partition, or repartition, of the country. After the rise of Putin, the public seemed to sober up and realize that it could not afford this thought.

And yet, despite some reservations about the limits of shame in international life, I feel that I have not done justice to this nicely argued, engaging volume. Those interested in the discussion of nationalism, internationalism, and ideas about war and ethics will find it rich with fascinating observations and insights.