Alexander The Great And The History Of Globalization

Alexander the Great and the History
of Globalization
Hugh Liebert
Abstract: Alexander the Great is often understood to be the first statesman to attempt a
“universal state,” owing in large part to his philosophical education under Aristotle.
This picture of Alexander informs many of his depictions in popular culture, and
influences his appropriation in contemporary discourse on globalization. I argue
here that Plutarch’s Life of Alexander offers an alternative view of Alexander’s
political action, one that explains his imperial ambitions by focusing on his love of
honor (philotimia) and the cultural indeterminacy of his native Macedon, rather than
his exposure to philosophy. Plutarch’s portrayal of Alexander provides a useful
model for the study of globalization by showing how political expansion can arise
from and give rise to indeterminate political identities.
Since the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, every subsequent age has
seen in his figure its own heroes and villains writ large.1
For Rome, Alexander
was an exemplary imperialist and a “puffed-up beast”; in medieval Europe,
he became the chivalrous knight of the Alexander Romance and a “tyrant
given to blood and plunder,” damned by Dante to the seventh circle of
hell; later still, Alexander was a paragon of enlightened absolutism to
some, while to others he was a “universal murderer.”2
When our own
Versions of this paper were presented at the University of Chicago Political Theory
Workshop, the University of Richmond Jepson School Faculty Research Seminar, and
the Southern Political Science Association 81st Annual Meeting. I am grateful to
Nathan Tarcov, Ralph Lerner, Danielle Allen, Nicolas Matte, Thomas Keith, Daniel
Kapust, and the anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
1
I will refer to ancient texts following the abbreviations found in the Oxford Classical
Dictionary, 3rd ed., ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996). All translations from the Greek are my own, although I
have consulted the English translations that appear in the Loeb editions. Section
numbers of Plutarch’s works are given as they appear in the Loeb editions.
2
On the Roman reception of Alexander see especially Diana Spencer, The Roman
Alexander: Reading a Cultural Myth (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002); for
Alexander as “puffed-up beast” (tumidissimum animal), see Sen., Ben. 16.1–2. Dante
damns Alexander to the seventh circle of hell in his Inferno, trans. Robert Pinsky
(New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1994), 12.98–100. On Alexander’s reception
The Review of Politics 73 (2011), 533–560.
© University of Notre Dame
doi:10.1017/S0034670511003639
533

Alexander, then, appears as a multiculturalist, feminist, and corporate titan,
we should not be surprised.3
Nor should we be startled when historians
unearth a protototalitarian comparable to Hitler and Stalin.4
The only con-
stants in the Alexander myth would seem to be its ubiquity and malleability.
It is tempting to find in the dozens of Alexander books that have appeared
over the past decade or so—ranging from dry scholarly tracts to highbrow
historical fiction to children’s stories—yet another iteration of a well-worn
story, fueled this time, perhaps, by the passions of fans eager to admire celeb-
rities, be they ancient or modern.5
But something more serious is often at
in the middle ages more generally, see Claude Mossé, Alexander: Destiny and Myth,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 178–88.
Racine portrayed Alexander as an exemplary absolutist, prefacing his tragedy
Alexander the Great with a letter to Louis XIV in which he compared Alexander to
the French king; see Racine, Complete Plays, trans. Samuel Solomon (New York:
Modern Library, 1969), 1:70. Compare George C. Brauer Jr., “Alexander in England:
The Conqueror’s Reputation in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,”
Classical Journal 76 (Oct.–Nov. 1980): 35, 40; and Mossé, Alexander, 189–96. “Cato”
thought Alexander a “universal murderer” (John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon,
Cato’s Letters [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995], 2:662).
3
For Alexander as feminist and multiculturalist, see Guy MacLean Rogers,
Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness (New York: Random House, 2004), v. For
Alexander as corporate titan, see Partha Bose, Alexander the Great’s Art of Strategy:
The Timeless Leadership Lessons of History’s Greatest Empire Builder (New York:
Penguin Books, 2004); also see Steve Forbes and John Prevas, Power Ambition Glory
(New York: Random House, 2009).
4
For Alexander as protototalitarian, see Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture:
Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 89–90;
also see Ernst Badian, “Alexander the Great, 1948–67,” Classical World 65 (Oct. 1971):
45–46. Rogers discusses comparisons among Alexander, Hitler, and Stalin and
arrives at the conclusion that “Alexander was not a precursor of Stalin or Hitler”
(Rogers, Alexander, 280–83). I will suggest below that, according to Plutarch,
Macedon’s location on the periphery of Greece had a decisive influence on the for-
mation of Alexander’s political ambitions. If this claim is correct, it points to a parallel
between Alexander and many modern tyrants potentially more interesting than their
shared brutality: a portrait of Alexander that highlights his Macedonian origins may
deserve a place alongside portraits of the Corsican Napoleon, the Austrian Hitler,
and the Georgian Stalin.
5
The recent surge in Alexander studies has been noted by Brooke Allen, “Alexander
the Great—or the Terrible?,” Hudson Review 58 (Summer 2005): 220, and by J.M.
Alonso-Núñez, “The Universal State of Alexander the Great,” in Crossroads of
History: The Age of Alexander, ed. Waldemar Heckel and Lawrence Trittle
(Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2003), 175. I will cite many examples of scholarly
approaches to Alexander throughout this article. For historical fiction on Alexander,
see in particular the novels of Valerio Massimo Manfredi and Mary Renault. For chil-
dren’s books, see especially Vicky Shecter, Alexander the Great Rocks the World (Plain
534 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

stake in our appropriation of the ancient past, even when it occurs via
sword-and-sandals sagas, because ancient tropes figure in a larger political
discourse, where they frequently carry profound implications. In the wake
of the Cold War, for instance, intellectuals across the political spectrum
draped American statesmen in togas and tunics. While Rome provided the
metaphors of choice, the Macedonian empire figured alongside Rome in a cri-
tically received 2002 Pentagon study of how the United States might prolong
its military predominance.6
And given the prominence of Alexander in the
discourse of every imperial power to arise after his death, one might well
attribute our interest in him to the rise of the “American empire.” If this
were true, we might expect chastened American imperialists to trade their
togas and tunics for sackcloth and to appropriate Alexander as a cautionary
tale of expansive foreign policy fostering self-defeating hubris, while checking
any deeper interest in him at the border of the “post-American world.”
But to cast the Alexander myth merely as an anti-imperial fable would be to
misunderstand both our world and Alexander’s place in it. Alexander figures
as a rhetorical trope not only in discourse on empire but also in discourse on
the distinct and considerably murkier process we call “globalization.”
Whereas empire entails the conquest and domination of one political body
by another, “globalization” identifies a process of expansion divorced from
domination.7
The Alexander of globalization, accordingly, is not a harsh
tyrant eager to bring humanity to heel; rather, he is a humanist willing to
transcend his own boundaries of nation and cult, and eager to effect a
similar transformation in the spirits of his subjects. It is, perhaps, some intima-
tion of this globalizing Alexander that has made him seem such a compelling
subject for contemporary scholars, writers, and directors; but even if this were
City, OH: Darby Creek Publishing, 2006); Jacqueline Morley and David Antram, You
Wouldn’t Want to be in Alexander the Great’s Army! (Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts,
2005); and Katherine Roberts, I Am the Great Horse (Frome, Somerset: Chicken
House, 2007), which begins: “My name is Bucephalus, and you should know right
away that I’m no Black Beauty.”
6
For a survey of parallels between Roman and contemporary politics that discusses
Rome’s role in American political discourse, see Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? The Fall
of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). For the Pentagon
study of Alexander’s empire, see Office of the Secretary of Defense for Net Assessment,
Military Advantage in History (Washington, DC: OSD-NA, 2002). The Macedonian case
is ultimately a negative example: “[Alexander the Great] led his army to innumerable
tactical and operational victories, but his leadership was based more on a ‘cult of per-
sonality’ than on a sustainable institutional structure” (80).
7
This distinction is denied, of course, by scholars who consider the discourse of “glo-
balization” a rhetorical fig leaf over imperial realities. See, for instance, Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND GLOBALIZATION 535

not the case, it is arguably with respect to globalization that Alexander’s
example still has something to teach us.8
In what follows I want to argue that Alexander can be understood as the
founder of globalization. I will make this case in two stages. First, I will
explain what I understand globalization to entail. I will summarize accounts
of globalization that focus on markets, moral obligations, and political iden-
tities, before offering an alternative account—one that focuses on what I refer
to as “indeterminate identification.” Then, in the second stage of the argu-
ment, I will offer an interpretation of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, which I
treat as a case study in globalization driven by indeterminate identification.
I will then conclude by suggesting that the stories we tell ourselves about
the ancient world amount to something more than mere case studies. In
short, there is something important at stake in how we understand the
history of globalization, and particularly how we understand its origins. In
this (perhaps unlikely) area, the ancients—and Plutarch’s Alexander in par-
ticular—might be appropriated not merely as historical data, nor as edifying
exemplars, but as the original authors of an ongoing political process; in other
words, they can serve as founders.
Globalization
The word “globalization” is as ubiquitous as it is imprecise.9
For the past
twenty years or so, virtually every political analyst has felt compelled to
use the term, yet owing to its wide usage, “globalization” signifies so much
that it fails to signify much of anything with analytical precision. It will be
helpful, then, to delineate three distinct meanings that the word “globaliza-
tion” carries before focusing on the sense of the word that I mean to use.
These three senses of the word correspond to what I take to be the leading
accounts of globalization on offer, each of which is rooted in a claim about
the psychological forces that fuel expansion. With “globalization,” one can
refer to the expansion of markets, driven by economic desires; to the expan-
sion of moral commitments, driven by reflection on our obligations to
8
Paul Cartledge has suggested such an account of Alexander in his recent Alexander
the Great (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), which concludes: “Perhaps, then, this is the
time for all of us—of whatever religious persuasion, or none—to recover an Alexander
who can symbolize peaceful, multi-ethnic coexistence” (266; see also 217). For a discus-
sion of Alexander’s appeal for movie directors, consider Cartledge and Fiona
Greenland, eds., Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander: Film, History, and Cultural
Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).
9
It seems to be a firmly established norm that every study of globalization begin
with a ritual lamentation of the word’s imprecision. See, for instance, A. G.
Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); see
also Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004),
13–16.

humankind; or to the expansion of the arena within which we seek others’
esteem, a process driven by human pride.10
After describing each of these
approaches to globalization, I want to present an alternative approach that
highlights the relation between expansion and political identity. I will argue
that globalization entails not only an expansion but also an obfuscation of
identities: a blurring both of exclusive and inclusive identities, as when
national and human allegiances become intertwined, and of multiple exclu-
sive identities, as when distinct national identities overlap. It is this form of
globalization, I suggest, that best accounts for the varied political ramifica-
tions of expansion; and it is this form of globalization that can be traced
not only to the last twenty years or so of political history, but ultimately to
the ancient world.
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 irrele-
vant as individuals exploit the comparative advantages offered by trade; tech-
nological advances in shipping and communications generate vast markets
and with them vast rewards for further advances; and thus, a “global market-
place” gradually comes into being.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 indi-
vidual in the world. As individuals engage in economic activity across
national borders they strengthen and spread this understanding of them-
selves, 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 com-
munities 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
10
I adopt this tripartite division from Plato’s Republic (4.435a–441c), where the soul is
divided into desire (to epithumētikon), spirit (to thumoeides), and reason (to logistikon).
11
This market account can be found in many mainstream books on globalization.
See, for instance, Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Strauss,
and Giroux, 2005), 8–11; also see Wolf, Why Globalization Works, esp. 19 and 40–57.

away.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 con-
clusions we reach in moments of moral reflection. Humans are, in fact,
more truly “citizens of the world” than of nations, and globalization, con-
ceived along cosmopolitan lines, reflects that fact.
According to these first two accounts, “globalization” describes the emer-
gence 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 cosmo-
politan 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.13
For Socrates, thumos is the part of an individual’s soul that is con-
cerned 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
12
In other words, we apply John Rawls’s “original position” on a global, rather than
a national, scale. Much of the literature on cosmopolitanism is rooted in a critique of
Rawls for failing to apply the structures of A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1971) in his later work on international law (Rawls, The
Law of Peoples [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999]). See in particular
Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), and
World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). Martha Nussbaum
echoes this critique of Rawls and suggests that on these grounds it is necessary to
make a break from his thought altogether (Nussbaum, “Beyond the Social Contract:
Capabilities and Global Justice,” in The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, ed.
Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005]). See also Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), esp. ix, 148, 150–95.
13
Pl., Resp. 4.439e–441c. The literature on thumos in Plato is vast, but one can profit-
ably consult two recent studies: Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially chaps. 1–2 and 9; and Linda Rabieh,
Plato and the Virtue of Courage (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006), chap. 4. For analyses of contemporary politics in light of Plato’s thumos, see in
particular Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon
Books, 1992), xvi–xvii, 181–91; more recently, see Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), x–xi and chap. 7, and his 2007
Jefferson Lecture, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to
Science,” reprinted in First Things 175 (Aug./Sept. 2007): 41–47. My summary
account of thumos is particularly indebted to Fukuyama’s lucid treatment of this
concept in The End of History and the Last Man. I follow these analysts of contemporary
politics in using “thumotic” as the adjectival form of thumos, rather than the more
authentically Greek and more cumbersome “thumoeidetic.”

(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 ambiva-
lence 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.”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.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 globaliza-
tion rather similar to that of the cosmopolitan account.
If, however, one starts from the service side of thumos—the capacity of indi-
viduals to share an identity with one another, thereby seeing others as exten-
sions 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 identi-
ties; 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.16
While this line of
14
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James Nichols Jr.
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); Fukuyama, The End of History and the
Last Man; Alexander Wendt, “Why a World State Is Inevitable,” European Journal of
International Relations 9, no. 4 (2003): 491–542.
15
See Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 3–30, 95–96; and Fukuyama, The
End of History and the Last Man, 162–91, 199–208.
16
The persistence of national identity is a common theme in realist theories of inter-
national relations. See in particular John Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability

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 pro-
motion of global trade, international institutions, or even in certain cases
the expansion of identity—need not be understood as a neutral process ben-
eficial to all parties, but might instead serve as a strategy by which particular
groups enhance their own power.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 globa-
lization in any of the senses we have considered. But regardless of the desir-
ability 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
in Europe after the Cold War,” International Security 15 (Summer 1990): 5–56. Samuel
Huntington has predicted the persistence of particular identities more inclusive than
nations but more exclusive than humanity (“The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign
Affairs 72, no. 3 [Summer 1993]: 22–49).
17
Realist theorists of international relations claim that states seek relative, rather
than absolute, gains from cooperation with other states, whether via trade or inter-
national institutions. See John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
(New York: Norton, 2001), 36, 51–53, 401–2; see also Joseph Grieco, “Anarchy
and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal
Institutionalism,” International Organization 42, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 485–507. For an
argument linking expansion of identity (in this case, from local to national) to gains
in relative power, see Barry Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military
Power,” International Security 18, no. 2 (1993): 80–124. Carl Schmitt analyzes humani-
tarian internationalism as a surreptitious pursuit of power; critics of economic globa-
lization often echo his insights. See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George
Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54, 74–79.

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 iden-
tities 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 par-
ticularly 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 inclusive-
ness (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).18
When we speak of an epochal shift in identity—whether recent glo-
balization 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.19
By extension, an account of globalization attuned to
this form of indeterminacy should emphasize not the radical novelty of uni-
versal 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 politi-
cal body, but without necessarily arriving at a distinct, more universal,
stratum of allegiance. An individual who identifies with two localities need
18
For this threefold division of levels of identity, see Pierre Manent’s discussion of
the three “political forms”: city, nation, and empire (Manent, A World Beyond
Politics?, trans. Marc LePain [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006], chap. 4;
and Democracy Without Nations?, trans. Paul Seaton [Wilmington, DE: ISI Books,
2007], esp. “Appendix B: What Is a Nation?”).
19
The dominance of a particular stratum of allegiance is normally signified and soli-
dified by its serving as the decisive political grouping. Nationality becomes most
firmly entrenched as a marker of identity once it is tied to a state; by contrast, the inde-
finiteness of globalization has much to do with its as yet modest political institutiona-
lization. For an exemplary depiction of the emergence of the nation-state out of and in
relation to preexisting strata of allegiance, consider Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation:
Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which
argues that modern national identity originates in the powerful “exclusionary cohe-
sion” of preexisting religious sects (that is, their ability to command the loyalty of
members of an in-group by identifying and discriminating against an out-group).
Marx’s account differs from histories of national identity that emphasize the novelty
of modern nations and attribute their rise to the influence of some exogenous variable
such as the emergence of capitalism; along these lines, see Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), and Ernest Gellner, Nations and
Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).

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 ima-
gined 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 indetermi-
nacy 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 univer-
sal 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 iden-
tities, whether universal or particular. On the level of theory, then, insisting on
the indeterminacy of identity seems to render the consequences of the psycho-
logical 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 differ-
ent 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 experi-
ence endemic to immigrant and diaspora communities. Thus, our concept of
indeterminate identification helps us to elucidate the consequences of the ten-
sions inherent in human pride, and to highlight aspects of globalization neg-
lected in the three alternative accounts.
Plutarch’s Life of Alexander
Each of the three approaches to globalization that we have considered above
might claim Alexander for its own. Political economists have found in

Alexander’s explorations by sea and his strengthening of preexisting overland
trade routes intimations of the modern global marketplace.20
And cosmopo-
litan theorists have seized on Alexander’s humanity toward non-Greeks and
his willingness to mix Macedonian customs with those of the foreigners he
encountered; according to one such thinker, Alexander “proclaimed for the
first time the unity and brotherhood of mankind.”21
Both the universalist
and particularist versions of the thumotic account have also found an
Alexander to call their own. On the one hand, there is Kojève’s Alexander,
a statesman who ardently desires recognition from all mankind, thanks to
the expansive teachings imparted to him during his philosophical training
under Aristotle.22
On the other hand, one finds an Alexander stubbornly
ensconced within the narrow horizons of some decidedly nonuniversal iden-
tity. This parochial Alexander is either a fiercely Macedonian despot capable
of both genocidal murder and humanitarian propaganda in pursuit of his
(and his compatriots’) interests, or a Greek crusader eager to empower his
civilization by Hellenizing the world—at spear point, if necessary.23
Each of
these accounts marshals proof texts aplenty.
In the following section, I want to claim Plutarch’s Life of Alexander as a
proof text of my own, for it presents an Alexander consistent with the
account of globalization that I have proposed. I do not, however, want to
suggest that Plutarch’s Alexander is the definitive account of its protagonist,
nor that it is historically accurate in every detail. Plutarch’s Lives, after all,
20
The economic analysis of Alexander’s conquests enjoys a venerable pedigree,
reaching back to Montesquieu. “One cannot doubt,” Montesquieu says, “that
[Alexander’s] design was to engage in commerce with the Indies through Babylon
and the Persian Gulf” (Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler et al. [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989)], 367). Compare Rogers, Alexander, 220; see also
W. W. Tarn, Alexander the Great (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 145.
21
Tarn, Alexander the Great, 147. Tarn is the most influential recent exponent of this
approach to Alexander; one can detect Tarn’s influence in Robin Lane Fox’s widely
read Alexander the Great, as Badian notes in a critical review of this book (Journal of
Hellenic Studies, no. 96 [1976]: 229–30).
22
Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in On Tyranny, by Leo Strauss, rev. ed., ed. Victor
Gourevitch and Michael Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 170–71.
Kojève claims that Alexander’s state would be universal but not homogeneous; it
would not do away with classes, even though it would eliminate races (172–73).
Compare John Dillon, “Plutarch and the End of History,” in Plutarch and His
Intellectual World, ed. Judith Mossman (London: Duckworth, 1997).
23
Critics of the once-conventional cosmopolitan Alexander emphasize Alexander’s
ruthless pursuit of his self-interest. See in particular Ernst Badian, “Alexander the
Great and the Unity of Mankind,” Historia 7 (Oct. 1958): 425–44; more recently, see
John Grainger, Alexander the Great Failure: The Collapse of the Macedonian Empire
(London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007). Alexander’s service to the Macedonians in
particular (as opposed to the other inhabitants of his empire) is stressed in Arrian’s
version of Alexander’s speech at Opis (Arr., Anab. 7.9–10).

were composed some four centuries after Alexander’s death, and in the intro-
duction to the Alexander Plutarch himself stresses that he intends to write a
life—a study of moral character—rather than a history.24
I also do not want
to suggest that the appearance of an account of expansive political action
comparable to the account of globalization I have given above amounts to
irrefutable evidence that contemporary globalization is best understood
along the lines I have suggested. As I have mentioned, it is quite possible
that globalization is “overdetermined”—that the phenomenon in question
arises from multiple sources simultaneously—and in any event one might
accept that globalization driven by indeterminate identity existed in the
ancient world while still questioning whether it remains so driven today.
Even if one doubts the historicity of Plutarch’s Alexander or questions the evi-
dentiary power of this ancient example with respect to the modern world, one
might nevertheless accept this text as a paradigm for an account of political
action motivated by indeterminate identity. Once this paradigm has been ela-
borated, we can then turn to consider the status of the proof it provides.
That one can locate such a paradigm in the works of Plutarch in particular
is ﬁtting, for Plutarch himself seems to have had ample personal experience of
what I have called the indeterminacy of identity. Culturally, Plutarch was a
native Greek at ease in the larger Roman world; politically, Plutarch was an
active citizen of his local polis with excellent connections among the Roman
ruling elite.25
His overlapping political and cultural allegiances surely
helped to fashion the literary form of his most famous work, the Parallel
Lives, in which biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen are presented in
tandem and then compared with one another.26
These Lives are often read as though Plutarch’s intent were to facilitate a
harmonious fusion of Greek and Roman culture. Indeed, on several occasions
Plutarch praises statesmen who manage to reconcile alien peoples to political
coexistence.27
Plutarch even presents Alexander as just such a statesman in a
work of rather overwrought oratory, “On the Fortune or the Virtue of
Alexander,” contained within the collection of essays, dialogues, and miscel-
lany we know as the Moralia. In this speech, Alexander is praised for
24
Plut., Alex. 1.2.
25
On Plutarch’s ties to the Roman elite, see C. P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1971). Plutarch discusses the importance of having friends in high places
at Pol. Praec. 814c–d. He describes his active involvement in his native city of
Chaeroneia at ibid., 811b–c and 816d.
26
There is an extensive bibliography on Plutarch’s comparative method of compos-
ing Lives. One should see in particular C. B. R. Pelling, Plutarch and History (London:
Duckworth, 2002), chap. 16; see also Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and
Vice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), chaps. 8–9.
27
See, for instance, Plut., Num. 17; Lyc.-Num. 4.8; and Rom. 19, where Plutarch’s vivid
recital of the Sabine women’s speech to two warring peoples demonstrates that not
only statesmen deserve praise for feats of cultural reconciliation.

“bringing together men from all over into one group, and mixing in a loving-
cup, as it were, their lives, customs, marriages, and ways of life.”28
This
Alexander is a hero of syncretism—a fitting inspiration, one might think,
for an author attempting to achieve in speech a feat similar to that which
Alexander himself achieved in practice.
Whatever one makes of individual essays in the Moralia, however, it is mis-
leading to portray the Parallel Lives as the “loving-cup” in which Greeks and
Romans are mixed; such a reading neglects the ardent agonism inherent in the
literary form Plutarch employs. Each set of paired Lives is better viewed as a
heated contest, in which the reader (aided by Plutarch’s expert commentary)
must judge the victor. The Lives’s literary form itself illuminates two broad
themes that run throughout the work. First, there is the theme of fraught cul-
tural interchange. Plutarch makes Greece vs. Rome—rather than, say, few vs.
many, or old vs. new—the animating opposition of his Lives. Given that
Plutarch wrote partly as a Greek under Roman hegemony, at a time when
he could, on occasion, portray Greece’s subjection to Rome as enslavement,
penning contests between the leading historical figures of each culture was
not an idle decision.29
The matter of the Lives frequently corresponds to
their form in this respect, as Plutarch often selects stories that reveal his inter-
est in the tensions between empires and cities and between different cultural
groups.30
Second, there is the theme of political ambition, philotimia in Greek
(literally translated, “love of honor”). The same passion for victory and
esteem with which the literary form of the Parallel Lives imbues its protago-
nists also figures prominently in Plutarch’s depiction of politics. While, for
Plutarch, philotimia is a distinctly protean passion—it can lead one to fund
choruses, conquer neighboring nations, or undertake daring works of
28
Plut., De fort. Alex. 329c, 330d. Compare Plut., Ant. 6.3.
29
For Plutarch’s depiction of the harshness of Roman rule, see Pol. Praec. 813e, 814e–f.
The extent to which Greek subordination to Rome influenced Plutarch’s composition
of the Lives is a matter of considerable debate. Jones’s Plutarch and Rome, for instance,
portrays Plutarch as quite content with Roman rule: “Plutarch is only one of many
[Greeks] who sympathized with Rome, consorted with powerful Romans, and
preached a lesson to eastern cities that converged with Roman interests” (129).
While it seems clear, as Alan Wardman, Plutarch’s Lives (London: Elek Books, 1974),
104, says, that “the Lives were not intended to be a textbook of revolution against
Rome,” one might still argue, contra Jones, that Plutarch’s concern to preserve what
remained of Greek autonomy (see, e.g., Pol. Praec. 814e–f) did not arise from his alle-
giance to Rome but from his allegiance to Greece and his native city of Chaeroneia. The
passages from the Pol. Praec. cited above, along with numerous episodes from the
Lives, suggest that, however ardently one might wish for concord, simultaneous alle-
giance to Greece and Rome could not always be maintained.
30
On tensions between cities and empires, consider the Life of Demosthenes in particu-
lar. Cultural pluralism is a central concern of the Numa and, as we shall see, the
Alexander. The pair composed of Philopoemen and Flamininus speaks to both themes.

scholarship—it lies at the root of political action in particular.31
It is philotimia
that fuels the Spartans’exemplary civic virtue, Alcibiades’s outsized machina-
tions, and Caesar’s rise to power.32
The literary form of Plutarch’s Lives, then,
foregrounds individual competitiveness and cultural identity, and in doing so
reflects the indeterminate elements of thumos, selfishness and service, that we
have considered above.
Both of these themes—fraught cultural interchange and political ambition—
figure more prominently in the Life of Alexander than they do in Plutarch’s
“Fortune and Virtue of Alexander.”33
In the following section, I will argue
that the Life of Alexander, in its concern with the interplay of multiple cultures
and the pursuit of honor, presents a thumotic account of political expansion
rooted in indeterminate identity. I want to make this case in two stages.
First, I will show that the political action of Alexander in Plutarch’s Life is
not explained by the universalist thumotic account; in other words,
Alexander does not pursue universal recognition within a world state
thanks to his exposure to Greek philosophy (à la Kojève’s Alexander).
Second, I will show that Alexander’s political action is equally inexplicable
according to the particularist thumotic account; in other words, his horizons
are not radically constrained by national or civilizational allegiances. Instead,
in the Life of Alexander, expansive political action arises out of the indetermi-
nate identity native to Alexander’s Macedon, a political entity neither nation
nor city, neither Greek nor barbarian. It is the desire for esteem within a
culture to which Alexander only partially belongs that sparks his initial con-
quests, and his own personal experience of indeterminate identity that
enables Alexander to devise that campaign’s most distinctive stratagem, the
fusion of Macedonian and Persian customs.34
31
For the funding of choruses, see Plut., Arist. 1.4–5; Per. 13.6; for daring scholarship,
Sol. 32; Num. 22.4.
32
On Spartan philotimia, see Plut., Lyc. 25.3; Lys. 2.1–2; Ages. 5.3; on Alcibiades, see
especially Alc. 23; on Caesar, see Caes. 3.2, 6.1, 6.3, 7.2, 17.1–2, 54.4, 58.4.
33
The difference between the “Fortune and Virtue of Alexander” and the Life has
been noted frequently by scholars of Plutarch. See, for instance, Alan Wardman,
“Plutarch and Alexander,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 5, no. 1/2 (1955): 100; Badian,
“Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,” 437; J. R. Hamilton, Plutarch:
Alexander (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), xxxvii–xxxix; and Tim Whitmarsh,
“Alexander’s Hellenism and Plutarch’s Textualism,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 52, no. 1
(2002): 174–92, 179–80. Further complicating any comparison between the two
works is the fact that the De fort. Alex. was evidently divided into two contrasting
halves, of which only the second remains. It seems that in the first half, Plutarch
argued that fortune was responsible for Alexander’s success; in the second, that
Alexander’s virtue bore more responsibility than fortune. On this point I follow
Hamilton, Plutarch: Alexander, xxxvi, esp. note 3, against Wardman, “Plutarch and
Alexander,” 100n5.
34
I focus primarily on Alexander’s initial campaign against the Persian empire,
rather than his extension of the campaign towards India. Once Alexander decides to

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).35
As its political
form, more nation than city, set it apart from the rest of Greece, so did its pol-
itical regime: Macedon was ruled by a hereditary monarchy rather than the
oligarchies and democracies of Greece proper.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.”37
Demosthenes, likewise, never tired of draping royal robes on
march past Persia, Plutarch’s Life becomes increasingly tragic, and is marred by contro-
versies, conspiracies, and murders. This change in the tone of the Life is consistent with
the interpretation of Alexander’s character that I will propose. Whereas the conquest of
Persia makes a kind of cultural sense to the Greeks whose esteem Alexander seeks
(even if the methods he uses to rule the Persians are unfamiliar), the extension of
the campaign does not. Alexander’s initial, broadly laudable motives are progressively
replaced by a rather brutal libido dominandi; he escapes the orbit of Greek esteem, and
grows increasingly barbaric (in every sense of the word) as a result.
35
Whitmarsh puts this point nicely: “For all that Herodotus presents Macedonians
as victors in the struggle for Greek identity, he also reveals that there was a struggle
to be waged. On the margins between the world of the Greek poleis and the
non-Greek North, and hence on the imaginary boundaries between Hellenism and
barbarism, Macedonia constitutes an intellectual testing-ground for ideas of
Greekness. The history of Macedonia throughout antiquity shows the persistence of
this ambiguity” (“Alexander’s Hellenism and Plutarch’s Textualism,” 175).
Macedon’s ambiguous Greekness is a central theme in Cartledge, Alexander the
Great; see, for instance, 45, 49–50, 64, 106, 124, 132–33, 136, and 152–53. Compare
Jonathan Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), 154–56 and 220–21.
36
I borrow the term “political form” from the work of Pierre Manent, who uses it to
conceptualize the influence of the size of a political body on political life. See Manent,
A World Beyond Politics? and Democracy Without Nations?
37
Hdt. 8.142 (the phrase “hand-in-glove” is taken from David Grene’s translation of
Herodotus). Cf. 9.45, where Alexander I, the Macedonian king during the Persian
Wars, solemnly swears, “I myself am an old-line Greek, and I would not want to
see Greece enslaved rather than free.” He says this, however, while fighting alongside
the Persians.

Alexander the Great’s father, Phillip.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.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 magnani-
mous beyond his years” (4.4–5).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 upbring-
ing—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.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).42
As we have seen, Aristotle is often understood to
38
See, for instance, Dem., Third Phil. 25.
39
Isoc., Phil.; Ad. Phil.; Thuc. 2.99.
40
From this point forward I refer parenthetically to Plutarch’s Alexander.
41
See Hdt. 5.22 for Herodotus’s account of Macedon’s inclusion in the games.
42
It was once thought that the characters of Plutarch’s protagonists were altogether
fixed and therefore not capable of change; accordingly, Plutarch was thought to select
stories to illustrate the static characters of his subjects, rather than to depict their devel-
opment. A number of more recent studies, however, have complicated this picture.
There are, in fact, several instances in Plutarch’s Lives of character development.
One should see, most recently, Tim Duff, “Models of Education in Plutarch,” Journal
of Hellenistic Studies, no. 128 (2008): 1–26, as well as Christopher Gill, “The Question
of Character-Development: Plutarch and Tacitus,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 33, no. 2
(1983): 469–87; Simon Swain, “Character Change in Plutarch,” Phoenix 43, no. 1
(1989): 62–68; and Pelling, Plutarch and History, chap. 14. Duff argues that passages

have stamped Alexander’s character indelibly with the seal of Greek ration-
ality, providing the breadth and generosity of political vision that sub-
sequently enabled Alexander’s pursuit of a world state. In his Life Plutarch
describes Alexander’s education rather differently.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.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.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.46
Alexander’s relations with all of them,
depicting character development in the Lives are associated with philosophical edu-
cation and are generally signaled by some allusion to Platonic texts (“Models of
Education,” 22). Although Duff detects an allusion to Plato’s Phaedrus in Plutarch’s
use of the Bucephalus story to introduce his description of Alexander’s education
under Aristotle, he does not discuss the Alexander as an example of character develop-
ment (“Models of Education,” 10n42, 19). The opposition between static and develop-
mental approaches to character can be overdrawn, however, since even a static
character may have traits that exist in tension with one another, the balance of
which might shift over time (as many of the scholars cited above note). In the case
of the Alexander, for instance, it is clear that Alexander becomes increasingly immode-
rate and superstitious as his career progresses (e.g., Alex. 75); the departure from his
earlier moderation and piety is hardly less significant for having been anticipated
somewhat earlier in the Life (e.g., Alex. 2.5–6, 4.3–4).
43
It is important to note that in the “Fortune and Virtue of Alexander,” Alexander
acts against Aristotle’s advice to treat non-Greeks “as though they were animals or
plants.” The philosophical model Plutarch uses to comprehend Alexander’s universal-
ism comes from Zeno rather than Aristotle. Nevertheless, in this essay, Alexander is
said to have been deeply influenced by Aristotle in other respects; Plutarch claims
that Alexander received the most valuable equipment for his eastern campaigns
from his boyhood tutor, in the form of “a discourse of philosophy and memoranda
on fearlessness, courage, moderation, and magnanimity” (De fort. Alex. 328a, 329a–d,
331e).
44
Arist., Pol. 3.3.1276a26–30, 7.3.1325b5–10, 7.4.1326b1–8, 7.7.1327b19–1328a15.
45
See in particular Plut., Alex. 7.3–5.
46
The only Lives in which philosophy might seem a more prominent theme than in
the Alexander are the Dion/Brutus, which are explicitly devoted to depicting Platonists

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 philo-
sophical profundity of their answers so much as their calmness and wit under
fire.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).48
In any event, the philo-
sophers 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 master-
mind behind Alexander’s assassination (55.4–5, 77.2).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 insa-
tiable.50
The seeds of this passion were sown by Aristotle’s predecessor as
in political life, and the Lycurgus/Numa, which, as I argue elsewhere (“Plutarch’s
Critique of Plato’s Best Regime,” History of Political Thought 30, no. 2 [2009]: 251–71),
amount to Plutarch’s reflection on the “best regime” of Plato’s Republic.
47
Alexander is said to wonder at Diogenes’s contempt (kataphronēthenta) for him, his
arrogance (huperopsian), and the greatness (megethos) of the man (Plut., Alex. 14.3). The
Gymnosophists had been accused of stirring up revolt in a city subject to Alexander.
Rather than execute them outright, Alexander decides to ask them difficult questions,
“saying he would kill the first to answer incorrectly, and then the others one by one in
the same manner” (64.1). After hearing them answer, however, Alexander pardons
them and sends them home with gifts.
48
This free-spiritedness is also, incidentally, what the young men at court find so
compelling about the court philosopher Callisthenes. According to two of his detrac-
tors, “the young men gathered around Callisthenes and looked up to him as if he were
the only free man among so many thousands” (55.1).
49
Plut., Alex. 55.4–55.55, 78.2. Although even in the Life Plutarch sometimes ampli-
fies Alexander’s intellectual interests (see, e.g., Alex. 8), Alexander’s deeds tend to belie
his claims, at least as they relate to philosophy. (We shall see that for Alexander poetry
is another matter entirely.) Arrian also expresses skepticism regarding Alexander’s
commitment to philosophy: “Alexander was not entirely without understanding
of superior goods, but he was nevertheless mastered terribly by the desire for glory
[ek doxēs gar deinōs ekrateito]” (Anab. 7.2).
50
Mossman, “Tragedy and Epic in Plutarch’s Alexander,” Journal of Hellenic Studies,
no. 108 (1988): 83–93, notes the prevalence of poetry in the Alexander, and suggests
that Plutarch uses techniques redolent of tragic and epic poetry to craft a Life

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).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.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).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, indicat-
ing 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 spec-
tacular dramatic contests—one featuring Cypriot kings as choregi, another
including some three thousand Greek artists—accompany Alexander’s con-
quests (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.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
“which is one of the most memorable he ever wrote, rich in ambiguity, contradiction
and irony and thus magnificently real” (93). See also Mossman, “Plutarch, Pyrrhus,
and Alexander,” in Plutarch and the Historical Tradition, ed. Phillip Stadter (London:
Routledge, 1992), 90–93.
51
Alexander, naturally, is cast as Achilles. See also Plut., Alex. 24.6–8.
52
Plut., De fort. Alex. 328a; Alex. 8.2. See also Alex. 26.1.
53
Hom., Il. 5.340.
54
Alexander’s admiration of Greek culture is evident even in his most grisly actions
toward the Greeks. Before setting out on his eastern campaign Alexander defeats the
Greeks soundly and destroys Thebes, expecting this atrocity to quiet the Greek cities.
Six thousand Thebans are killed, and the remainder (more than thirty thousand) are
sold into slavery, but among those spared are the descendants of Pindar (Plut., Alex.
11.5–6).

under their own laws because he is “eager to be honored by the Greeks” (phi-
lotimoumenos pros tous Hellēnas) (34.1). And he is particularly eager to be
honored by Athenians. During his invasion of Greece he is exceedingly merci-
ful 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 cam-
paign, 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 com-
parable 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 philo-
sophical 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 struc-
tured 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, con-
tinues 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.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.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
55
This narrative of Greek history is present long before Plutarch writes his Lives—
one finds it expressed with particular clarity in Isocrates’s writings (e.g., Phil., Ad
Phil., and Paneg.). On Plutarch’s debt to Isocrates, with an emphasis on Plutarch’s
Lycurgus and Numa, see L. de Blois and J. A. E. Bons, “Platonic Philosophy and
Isocratean Virtues in Plutarch’s Numa,” Ancient Society 23 (1992): 159–88; see also de
Blois and Bons, “Platonic and Isocratean Political Concepts in Plutarch’s Lycurgus,”
in Teoria e Prassi Politica nelle Opere di Plutarco, ed. I. Gallo and B. Scardigli (Napoli:
M. D’Auria, 1995), 99–106.
56
Plut., Arist. 16.3; Them. 6.3.

opportunity for a pan-Hellenic conquest of the East.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.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:
[The Greeks] arrested fortune on the ascent, and once again turned against
themselves the arms that had been directed against the barbarians, as well
as war, which had only recently been banished from Greece. I at any rate
do not agree with Demaratus the Corinthian when he says that those
Greeks were deprived of a great pleasure who did not behold
Alexander seated on Darius’s throne. On the contrary, I think those
Greeks probably would have wept, when they considered that this
achievement had been left to Alexander and the Macedonians by those
who squandered the Greek generals at Leuctra, Coroneia, Corinth, and
Arcadia.59
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 con-
quest 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 mon-
arch’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 unsur-
passed 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
57
Plut., Cim. 18–19.
58
Plut., Lys. 6.
59
Plut., Ages. 15.2–3. Notice that Plutarch implicitly contrasts the Greeks to the
Macedonians here.

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.60
Alexander, however, does not seem to
want merely to secure hegemony for his own people; rather, he seems to con-
template 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 cul-
tural policies more closely resemble exercises in political prudence than phi-
losophically inspired gambits.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 multi-
cultural empire—the mixture of barbarian and Greek customs.62
As Plutarch
tells the story, Alexander begins by changing his clothes, adopting a style
somewhere between that of the Persians and the Macedonians.63
60
Compare Sulochana Asirvatham, “Classicism and Romanitas in Plutarch’s De
Alexandri Fortuna aut Virtute,” American Journal of Philology 126 (2005): 107–25, 116–
17, which argues that the universalism Plutarch ascribes to Alexander’s empire
cannot have arisen from Greek sources, and suggests that Plutarch must have pro-
jected onto Alexander an idea he encountered in Roman philosophy and
historiography.
61
For an elaboration of this point with respect to sources outside of Plutarch, see
A. B. Bosworth, “Alexander and the Iranians,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, no. 100
(1980): 1–21.
62
Alexander’s empire is, of course, not unique in its inclusion of multiple cultures.
The Persian empire, which Alexander conquered and the satrapal administrative
structure of which he by and large adopted, had developed forms of indirect rule—
such as the co-option of native, non-Persian oligarchs—that allowed it to dominate
foreign nations without excessive (and needlessly offensive) intervention.
Alexander’s novelty lies in his effort to blend native and nonnative customs so as to
preclude, at least potentially, the necessity of indirect rule along the lines of his imper-
ial predecessor.
63
Clothing is not the only issue at stake—even more significant are the proskunēsis, a
kind of ritual prostration commonly performed before the Persian king but anathema
to more egalitarian Greeks (see Plut., Alex. 45.1, 51.3, 54–55.1, 74.1), and membership

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).64
They are not particularly happy that
their leader is putting on airs, but so long as his courage and generalship con-
tinue 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 con-
trast 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 rep-
resents 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.65
This indeterminacy in Alexander’s
cultural identity is mimicked in the indeterminacy of nearly every other iden-
tity he adopts. Alexander calls some of his friends “lovers of Alexander” (phi-
lalexandros) 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.
in the army (see in particular the thirty thousand Persians Alexander has educated in
Greek and trained in Macedonian arms; Alex. 47.3, 71.1). Clothing, however, seems to
function metonymically for other disputed customs in Plutarch’s narrative.
64
Alexander has already discovered that proclaiming his divine birth, whether or
not he believes it, allows him to rule over barbarians more effectively. He does not,
however, let his newfound divinity change his treatment of Greeks; as Plutarch says
bluntly, “Alexander himself neither suffered from delusions nor grew arrogant;
others, however, he rendered servile (katadouloumenos) through the opinion of his divi-
nity” (28.3).
65
Alexander’s relation to Greek culture resembles what Rémi Brague, in Eccentric
Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, trans. Samuel Lester (South Bend, IN:
St. Augustine’s Press, 2002), has called “secondarity” or “Romanity,” a manner of pos-
sessing culture distinct from that of the originators of the culture and their direct
descendants.

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 child-
hood (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 pater-
nity: Phillip is replaced by Aristotle, both of whom are replaced by Zeus
Ammon after Alexander’s visit to Egypt.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.”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 assum-
ing 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
66
See Plut., Alex. 9.4–5, for the dispute over Alexander’s patrimony. For disputes
over Alexander’s paternity, see 8.3 and 50.6, where Cleitus shouts at Alexander, “it
is by Macedonian blood and by these wounds that you have become so great as to
make yourself Ammon’s son and forsake Phillip.”
67
Plut., Alc. 23.

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.
The Founder of Globalization
Writing as a partly Romanized Greek for partly Hellenized Romans, Plutarch
discovered in Alexander an ancient forebear of the indeterminate identity that
characterized his own world. The Romans Plutarch portrays in his Lives,
however, do not understand Alexander in this light; instead, they consider
Alexander an outstanding general and an exemplary imperialist, albeit one
whose reach exceeded his heirs’ grasp.68
This Roman Alexander, Plutarch
suggests, is the Alexander of histories, an outsized hero of “battles with thou-
sands of dead, great arrays, and sieges of cities” (1.2). To such a brash carica-
ture, Plutarch opposes the Alexander of his life, a detailed character portrait
drawn in the subtle shades of anecdotes and idiosyncrasies rather than the
bold strokes of battlefield heroics and bombastic rhetoric. This Alexander’s
political and military hegemony is as awesome and fleeting as the Romans
acknowledge, but the psychological roots and cultural consequences of his
political action are more complicated than the Romans allow. Alexander
did not Hellenize so much as he “Macedonized” the world; he propagated
not Greek philosophy or civilization so much as a mode of relating to a
culture only partly one’s own. Insofar as the cultural influence of
Alexander’s Macedon prefigured the world’s subsequent Romanization, it
is to Alexander’s indeterminate identification that one might trace the
tangled roots of the Romans’ own universalism. For Plutarch’s readers,
then, to contemplate the Life of Alexander is in some measure to contemplate
themselves.
Like Plutarch’s Romans, we are accustomed to contemplating certain fea-
tures of our own political life in light of ancient founding moments, but we
also resemble Plutarch’s Romans in our reluctance to recognize the range
and depth of our debts. While contemporary democratic theorists regularly
return to Athens as the “first democracy,” and realist theorists of international
relations adopt Thucydides as their founding father, when it comes to the
study of globalization we tend to think ourselves engaged in something
68
For the Roman understanding of Alexander in the Lives, see in particular Plut.,
Aem. 27.4, 31.5; Flam. 7.3, 21.3; Pomp. 2.1–2, 34.5, 46.1–2; Caes. 11.3; Ant. 80.1.

relatively new.69
When globalization is understood as an economic or a moral
phenomenon, its lineage is normally traced back no more than a few decades
or, at most, a few centuries.70
On the rare occasion that accounts of globaliza-
tion place its origins in the ancient world—as does Kojève’s universalist thu-
motic account—it is owing primarily to the universalism implicit in ancient
philosophy. I have suggested, however, that it is not the political realization
of some philosophical vision of human universality that distinguishes
69
Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),
has shown how Athens acquired its prominence within democratic theory, thanks
largely to the work of the historian George Grote and John Stuart Mill. Josiah Ober
has written extensively on the relevance of ancient examples to modern democratic
practice; see in particular his Athenian Legacies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2005), chaps. 2–3. Thucydides’s prominence within realist international relations
theory is discussed (and criticized) in David Welch, “Why International Relations
Theorists Should Stop Reading Thucydides,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 3
(2003): 301–19. Also see Michael Clark, “Realism Ancient and Modern: Thucydides
and International Relations,” PS: Political Science and Politics 26, no. 3 (1993): 491–94,
and Laurie Bagby, “The Use and Abuse of Thucydides in International Relations,”
International Organization 48, no. 1 (1994): 131–53.
70
The market account of globalization generally identifies its origins with the first
emergence of a global market—and this did not occur within Alexander’s lifetime.
When a global market first came into view, however, is a matter of some debate.
For a global market originating with the discovery of the new world, see Dennis
Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Globalization Began in 1571,” in Globalization and
Global History, ed. Barry Gills and William Thompson (London: Routledge, 2006),
235. For globalization originating with durable commercial ties between East and
West forged during the middle ages, see Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works, 100;
see also Jack Weatherford’s recent bestselling history of Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan
and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers, 2004), 267.
According to cosmopolitan theorists, globalization begins once individuals are
capable of bracketing their particular allegiances and envisioning their moral obli-
gations towards mankind as a whole. This orientation is most evident in the relatively
recent emergence of widespread concern for universal human rights; however, one
might also trace this development to the rise of the “world religions” of Christianity
and Islam. And if one considers the universalism of Christianity to owe something,
at least, to that of the empire within which it arose, it becomes possible to look for
sources of global identity within the pagan world. Recent scholars of “ancient cosmo-
politanism” have buttressed this approach to the history of Christianity by stressing
the universality implicit in Roman political practice and often quite explicit in
Roman philosophy and historiography (see, for instance, Roland Robertson and
David Inglis, “The Global Animus: In the Tracks of World Consciousness,” in
Globalization and Global History, ed. Barry Gills and William Thompson [London:
Routledge, 2006], 34, and the works of Nussbaum I have cited above). These scholars
trace the intellectual roots of this body of thought to the ancient Stoics, whose cosmo-
politanism is sometimes figured as an intellectual response to the universal empire of
Alexander the Great.

ancient globalization or, for that matter, our own; rather, ancient and modern
forms of globalization arise from, and give rise to, the indeterminacy of iden-
tity. While indeterminacy seems to be a permanent feature of human identity,
it nevertheless becomes salient under certain political and cultural conditions.
And the ﬁrst time in our own history that indeterminate identity emerged as a
decisive inﬂuence on political action seems to have been in Alexander’s
not-quite-Greek Macedon.
Globalization, as lived and experienced in lives rather than thought in the-
ories, is not merely a matter of economic expansion or moral crusades, but of
more inclusive identities acquired always, and necessarily, through the more
particular identities that shape our pursuit of esteem.71
It is a process of
expansion driven as much by the thrill of thinking oneself a “master of the
universe” or a hero to one’s people as by avarice or reason. But individuals
are rarely alone over against the universe, or unwaveringly secure in their
particular allegiances. Often, as Plutarch’s Alexander helps us to recognize,
the indeterminacy of identity is both a cause and a result of the expansive pol-
itical processes we call globalization.
71
The argument I am making here might be taken to be the equivalent, within thu-
motic accounts, of Joseph Stiglitz’s claim regarding market accounts of globalization:
“there is not just one market model. There are striking differences between the
Japanese version of the market system and the German, Swedish, and American ver-
sions” (Globalization and its Discontents [New York: W. W. Norton, 2002], 217). Also see
Peter Berger and Samuel Huntington, eds., Many Globalizations (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), particularly 3, 9, and 14, where a parallel between contempor-
ary cultural globalization and the Hellenistic age is suggested.

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