ABSTRACT
D’Alembert’s entry in the Encyclopédie notes that “cosmopolitan” derives from the Greek words for “world” (cosmos) and “city” (polis) and that it refers to “un homme qui n’a point de demeure fixe, ou bien un homme qui n’est étranger nulle part [a man without a fixed abode, or better, a man who is nowhere a stranger]” (Diderot and d’Alembert 1751-1765: 4, 297). The term’s philosophical usage to indicate a “citizen of the universe,” however, emphasizes that this intellectual ethos or spirit is not one of rootlessness. Instead, what is imagined is a universal circle of belonging that involves the transcendence of the particularistic and blindly given ties of kinship and country. The cosmopolitan therefore embodies the universality of philosophical reason itself, namely its power of transcending the particular and contingent. Hence, the popular view of cosmopolitanism as an elite form of rootlessness and a state of detachment and nomadic non-belonging is mistaken. The cosmopolitan’s universal circle of belonging embraces the whole of humanity. When cosmopolitanism is criticized for being a form of elitist detachment, the real point of dissatisfaction is that it is merely an intellectual ethos or perspective espoused by a select clerisy because the philosophers of the French Enlightenment could not envision feasible political structures for the regular and widespread institutionalization of mass-based cosmopolitan feeling. The bonds of humanity, whether they are predicated in terms of reason or moral sentiment, may be the strongest possible ties. But for various reasons, not many people are able to feel their pull. Rousseau lamented that in relations between different societies, the Law of Nature, or natural pity, the original root of social virtues such as clemency and humanity, has lost
almost all the force it had in the relations between one man and another, [and] lives on only in the few great Cosmopolitan Souls [grandes ames cosmopolites] who cross the imaginary boundaries that separate Peoples and, following the example of the sovereign being that created them, embrace the whole of Mankind in their benevolence. (1766: 174)
The true inaugurator of modern cosmopolitanism is Immanuel Kant. Kant retained the idea of membership to humanity as a whole by insisting on the importance of “knowledge of man as a citizen of the world [des Menschen als Weltbürgers]” in his writings on pragmatic anthropology and universal history (1968a: 400). However, Kant was primarily concerned with man as a practical being and actor in history, someone who not only knows the world as a spectator of a play but knows his way about the world as a participant (1968a: 400). A world-citizen acts from the pluralistic standpoint of humanity as a collective actor as opposed to that of an egoistic individual (Kant 1968a: 411). Accordingly, Kant articulated at least four different modalities of cosmopolitanism that would become the main topoi of contemporary discussions of the concept in normative international relations theory (including accounts of global civil society and the international public sphere), liberal political economy and theories of globalization. These different
modalities, which are part of a systemic whole, are: a world federation as the legal and political institutional basis for cosmopolitanism as a form of right; the historical basis of cosmopolitanism in world trade; the idea of a global public sphere; and the importance of cosmopolitan culture in instilling a sense of belonging to humanity.
