Cosmopolitanism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Cosmopolitanism, a term derived from the Greek word kosmopolitês meaning “citizen of the world,” is used to refer to a variety of beliefs and attitudes about the relationship between the individual and humanity (or the world) as a whole.

From a Stoic point of view, the citizen of the world is indifferent to particular places and detached from particularistic commitments. In other words, the citizen of the world is at home nowhere, except perhaps in the realm of ideas, where goodness in its purist form is to be found and where justice reigns unchallenged by the ignorance and selfishness of humankind. In this light, cosmopolitanism has less to do with the transcendence of national boundaries than it does with an allegiance to the kosmos—meaning, the intelligible realm of forms—above and beyond the visible world of endless cruelty and conflict. This may be what Plutarch means when he attributes to Socrates the designation of citizen of the world in his essay “On Banishment.”

From a cultural point of view, the world citizen is world traveler who appreciates variety in culture, art, literature, cuisine, and so on, and who is open to different ideas and ways of life. From this perspective, articulated by Jeremy Waldron, the citizen of the world is at home everywhere, including the realm of contested truths and hybridized identity. Like Stoic cosmopolitanism, cultural cosmopolitanism requires a level of detachment from one’s own culture and context. But unlike Stoic cosmopolitanism, the wider world exists both to be appreciated and to be learned from by the world citizen, not to be renounced in its entirety in favor of a higher level of existence.

What is generally meant by political cosmopolitanism is the recognition that the activities of one’s own state affect the lives of people living in another state and the belief that these people are worthy of consideration and respect. It does not mean that an individual is devoted to all states (or peoples) equally or to the idea of a world state. Immanuel Kant, in “Perpetual Peace,” looked to humanity’s unsociable sociability as the engine that would drive the emergence of political cosmopolitan and an international federation of free nations. But there is nothing inevitable about the historical development of political cosmopolitanism—or cosmopolitanism of any kind, although imagining rationally self-interested states as the drivers of cosmopolitan change, as Kant did, does go against a utopian basis for such speculation.

Some contemporary philosophers, including Martha Nussbaum, argue that people should owe their primary allegiance to the world, not to any association more limited or local, while others, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, have argued more modestly for a rooted cosmopolitanism that allows individuals to preserve a special or prior obligation to a local or national community, rather than insisting on a potentially unlimited obligation to aid the worst off in the world. Another contemporary view of cosmopolitanism is offered by Seyla Benhabib, who recovers and expands upon the Kantian concept of hospitality, understood as a cosmopolitan right of individual members of a global civil society to be welcomed and protected by other nations. Since this right intersects with the sovereignty of states, Benhabib argues that citizens of democracies who are convinced of the validity of cosmopolitan norms must articulate it into positive law.

Critics of cosmopolitanism, including Richard Rorty, have argued that since the global moral community does not exist as an empirical reality, people cannot be morally attached to it or feel loyalty toward others as fellow members of it. Rorty goes further by arguing that cosmopolitan norms cannot emerge from anything like Kantian rationality, as Benhabib suggests, and that the only hope for the gradual emergence of a global moral community is for people to abandon the pretense of universality. Until that happens, citizens of more affluent, developed countries are unlikely to identify with or sacrifice their prosperity for the sake either of strangers living in a far corner of the world or strangers arriving on their shores.

Bibliography:

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
Benhabib, Seyla. Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Nussbaum, Martha. For Love of Country? Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.
Rorty, Richard. “Justice as a Larger Loyalty.” In Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Waldron, Jeremy. “What Is Cosmopolitan?” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 227–243.