ABSTRACT
Were I really to write a book about universality, ethics and global politics I wouldn’t write this one.1 Instead, this book confines itself primarily to being a collection of grammatical remarks about universality and its relationship to ethics as it appears within the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). It may seem tangential and strange to want to make remarks about grammar. After all, universality, ethics and global politics are supposed to be serious subjects and need to be engaged with, not stepped back from as though one were outlining rules on the use of interrogatives, the definite article, adjectives, reflexive pronouns, gerunds, tenses, and adverbs, for example. This book isn’t one of those kinds of grammar books but it is one about different sorts of grammars, how to read them and what happens when we do. Specifically, this book reads language games of international ethics as they appear in IR theory and the ‘things’ that each language game’s grammar produces. The most important ‘thing’ that gets produced, in this context, is universality but that is not all. Related to ethics and its purported universality, as we shall see, are notions of what it is to be human,2 what reason is and its role in a universalisable ethic3 and last, but not least, where such an ethic can, or should, take place.4
