Volume 2, Issue 1, Summer 2018: 92–99 © Journal of Legal Anthropology doi:10.3167/jla.2018.020106 ISSN 1558-6073 (Print) • ISSN 1558-5468 (Online) FORUM tv Cosmopolitan Politesse Goodness, Justice, Civil Society Nigel Rapport In an earlier work (Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology, 2012), I considered a solution to the ‘problem’ of society as identifed by Georg Simmel. The fact that we only come to know the interactional ‘Other’ by way of distortion, by virtue of the imposition of alien and alienating labels, categories and taxonomies, Simmel (1971) described as ‘tragic’ (cf. Rapport 2017). We distort the Other’s identity when we ‘know’ them in the conventional and collectivising terms of a symbolic classifcation of cultural reality. In response, I argued for a linguistic and behavioural style of public address and exchange, and an ethos of good manners, that I termed ‘cosmopolitan politesse’. This was an interactional code by which we presumed the common humanity and the distinct individuality of whomsoever we engaged with, but classi- fed the Other in no more substantive fashion than this. We accepted that in our social interactions we were engaging with an individual human other – ‘Anyone’ – and not with a representative of some more substantive class: ‘a woman’, ‘a Swede’, ‘a Jew’, someone ‘working class’, ‘primitive’ or ‘pious’, and so on. The logic underlying cosmopolitan politesse was that Anyone pos- sessed an intrinsic identity by virtue of their unique and fnite embodi- ment. Anyone inhabited a body that aforded them a unique perspective on the world, a unique capacity for interpreting an environing world and making it meaningful and a unique history and practice by which that perspective, interpretations and meanings were made gratifying and proper. This was the ontological reality of human individuality. Cosmopolitan politesse sought to accommodate this, give it its proper respect and so ‘emancipate’ Anyone socially from the ‘tragedy’ of being made subject to the arbitrary constructions, the ‘fctions’ of a merely cultural world-view. It was neither appropriate nor necessary to cate- gorise, massify, homogenise or stereotype Anyone as a member of this or that class – overwriting and overwhelming them through a general- ised, collective profle and label. Yes, Anyone entered the public space