ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twenty-first century we have to redefine and reinvent the social sciences and humanities for the global world. This is double challenge: first to discover and criticize how sociology, political science, history and other fields are still prisoners of the nation state and give birth to a historically mistaken national imagination. Second, how to redefine trans-nationally the basic theoretical concepts and units of empirical research like politics, society, identity, state, history, class, law, democracy, community, solidarity, justice, mobility, military, household and other institutions in a cosmopolitan perspective. This calls for a paradigm shift. It is also a Cosmopolitan Manifesto for the Social Sciences not only to renew their scientific standing and public claims but bring the social sciences back on the public agenda. The classics of sociology are so thoroughly pervaded with a spatially fixed understanding of
culture that it is rarely remarked upon. It is a conception that goes back to sociology’s birth amidst the nineteenth-century formation of nation-states. The territorial conception of culture and society – the idea of culture as “rooted” and “limited,” constituted through the opposition of the “We” and “Them”– was itself a reaction to the enormous changes that were going on as that century turned into the twentieth. It was a conscious attempt to provide a solution to the uprooting of local cultures that the formation of nation states necessarily involved. Sociology understood the new symbols and common values above all as means of integration into a new unity. The triumph of this national imagination can be seen in the way the nation state has ceased to appear as a project and a construct and has become instead widely regarded as something natural and the opposition national and international the internalized compass of the social sciences. A cosmopolitan sociology is posing a challenge to this idea that binding history and borders tightly together is the only possible means of social and symbolic integration. This also means that sociological perspectives are geared to and organized in terms of the nation-state. All the traditional fields of the social sciences (such as the sociology of inequality,
of the family, of politics, of mobility and class and so on) are still being researched pretty much in the nation state (or international) tradition even though research concepts have changed over the last years. The concept of “cosmopolitanization,” by contrast, is an explicit attempt to overcome this “methodological (inter-)nationalism” and produce concepts capable of reflecting a newly transnational world. It consciously develops a new methodology: “methodological cosmopolitanism.” None of this will make ethno-nationalism go away, of course. It is here to exist and even if we as moral philosophers are more inclined to believe in cosmopolitan values than in group values, as social scientists we need to establish the reality of cosmopolitanization – not as dream but as empirical reality.
