A Pragmatic Approach to the Tobin Tax Campaign: The Politics of Sentimental Education

Abstract: The article provides a critical analysis of the campaign for a Tobin Tax. A popular view that global civil society can act as an agent for ethics is interrogated by appeal to the dilemmas and political contests which pervade the campaign. Problems with financial and institutional universalism undermine any unambiguous ethical appeal in the Tobin Tax by imposing a set of limits on thinkable avenues of reform. However, and drawing on the philosophical pragmatism of Richard Rorty, it is argued that the campaign can be celebrated for its role in ongoing practices of ‘sentimental education’. By illustrating the harm that financial markets cause, the Tobin Tax involves larger, more diverse, audiences in a conversation about global finance; technical and sentimental discourses blur. Moreover, those very contests that pervade the campaign can act to interrupt the totalizing aspects of the proposal, thus making alternatives thinkable. Engaging the ‘politics of sentimental education’, in this way, allows a contingent celebration of what is ethically useful in the Tobin Tax, while leaving an area of contest that is potentially antithetical. Rather than plump for an either/or position, the difficult, but ethical, challenge is to do both-and. The article concludes by suggesting how this ‘politics of sentimental education’ might bear upon existing knowledge about the theory and practice of global civil society