In View: Cosmopolitanism

Diogenes by John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Diogenes of Sinope, the memorable cynic philosopher who made a ceramic jar his home and who masturbated in public, once called himself a kosmopolitês—a citizen of the world. Today’s cosmopolitans are better-behaved but they won’t object to the original meaning of their label. The cosmopolitan strives for community among all of humanity, without regard for social or political affiliations. This universal community can take on many shapes. It can be political, with global institutions like the United Nations, or economic, with global markets and corporations. It can be a moral community where global justice and fairness are achieved by going beyond borders and beyond basic human rights. Or it can be based around a global culture with a common medium of expression and communication, like the internet. As a worldview, we can characterise cosmopolitanism as a sense of duty towards others regardless of one’s particular community. The native community, then, holds no specially relevant relation to the cosmopolitan on the basis of a shared sense of being in the world shaped by a common experience; ancestry and heritage are respected but not endowed with special moral status. 

Cosmopolitanism is a social and political worldview fragment, meaning it is always supplemented by other fragments to form a total worldview.¹ Such social and political fragments are lived fragments—we feel cosmopolitan or not. A reasoned account, based on moral or other arguments, generally comes after the feeling. Cosmopolitanism is also a relatively widely held worldview fragment. Identifying it as the fragment of a particular collective, however, would be rather paradoxical, though it is no secret that it is more popular among elites and the well-off and well-educated. There are several other fragments that can be consistent with cosmopolitanism but contradictory with one another, like progressivism and libertarianism or ecologism and (economic) globalism. Multiculturalism and pluralism are natural friends of cosmopolitanism, and postmodernism shares its aversion to exclusion based on arbitrary association. It also goes together with individualism, as there is no actual collective to be a part of. Opposite worldviews go under several names, like nativism, communitarianism, or nationalism, which all hold that there is a special relation between members of a particular community; this relation then ought to determine our moral and social norms and judgments and our political institutions. 

According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, an influential philosopher who has written on the subject, cosmopolitanism should combine a sense of universality with a respect for difference. Universality because there is a common core to all human beings, and difference because we all add something of our own to that core humanity. We need to respect that difference firstly because each of us needs freedom and autonomy to pursue our own idea of the good. Secondly, because we can always be wrong about our conception of the good. Cosmopolitanism in this sense takes the epistemological position of fallibilism—knowledge is fallible and we should therefore learn from others what they know and teach others what we know. According to Appiah, it is then not merely a moral stance but a pragmatic one as well. 

The narrative that sustains cosmopolitanism is one of ever expanding spheres of community and scales of cooperation. Especially since the rise of the nation state and more recently with international institutions such as the U.N. and integration efforts like the African Union and especially the European Union. Such cross-border cooperation helps address issues too big for a single nation to tackle, like climate change. But it should be understood that the ideal is global cooperation, not world government. What shape this cooperation would or should take is unclear. Often, though, this ideal is joined by ideas about the absence of borders and far-reaching distributive justice (e.g. redistribution of wealth between countries), because one’s place of birth and relative wealth ought not to determine one’s opportunities in life. 

While cosmopolitanism is of all ages, only in the modern age has it become a feasible ideal. The globalisation of economics, culture, science and technology have intertwined societies around the world. Trade made us interdependent and we have invested in each other’s economic development. Science and technology homogenised beliefs and practices to a large extent—we all share the same ideas about the solar system and the atom, and build bridges and cars in fundamentally the same way. The internet made global communication and culture possible. The idea of democracy has won the battle of ideas as even dictators appeal to democratic values to legitimise their rule. We even have the same problems, like climate change, pandemics, global financial instability, and so on. What remains, the cosmopolitan could argue, are relatively surface level things like customs, habits, and cultural expressions like stories, music, food, and art, as well as abstract metaphysical beliefs too deep to be immediately relevant to the everyday. The cosmopolitan worldview would be universal, they may claim, if only we were conscious of our shared situation. 

However, worldviews also engender identities, and identity is often the cause of strife. This is because they are usually defined in opposition to other identities. Religious worldviews are especially potent generators of identity but so are others given the right circumstances. When a group finds itself in a difficult or unjust situation, a shared interpretation provided by the worldview can give that group an identity to rally around. For example, when in the 19th century factory workers started to interpret their predicament as worker exploitation through the upcoming socialist and Marxist worldviews, they formed an identity in opposition to the “bourgeoisie”, allowing them to organise and fight for better conditions. Identity is especially problematic for the cosmopolitan because it must be overcome in order to found a global community. Cosmopolitanism cannot supplant these identities as it is near impossible to build an identity without an opposite. Merely “being human” is not an identity, it rallies no one. So, despite great similarities between groups, nations, and cultures around the world, entrenched identities are difficult to overcome for the cosmopolitan. 

Many cosmopolitan thinkers have therefore come to emphasise hospitality as an essential cosmopolitan value and the right way to deal with difference.² It does not try to undo or assimilate difference but accepts the Other as is. It is solidarity without identity—a possible, be it unlikely, basis to form a global society of individuals without common roots or worldviews. More broadly speaking, that respect for the Other, the human being that is non-identical to us and whose presence is irreducibly different from the self, is perhaps the central value of the cosmopolitan. Exclusion or oppression of such difference is the worst offence. As a result, the cosmopolitan does not (cannot) claim any universal values except the recognition of the Other, hospitality, and cosmopolitanism itself. 

In closing, in a world with increasingly global problems a worldview to unite the tribes of humankind may prove to be a necessity, despite the cards being stacked against it. And while we need not applaud Diogenes for all his habits and opinions, his idea of world citizenship surely deserves our praise. 

Further Reading

• Cosmopolitanism (2006) by Kwame Anthony Appiah. 

• Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch by Immanuel Kant. 

• The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry on cosmopolitanism

1. See our definition in the “about” section or the article on the worldview concept for a more detailed account on this terminology.

2. Immanuel Kant thought of universal hospitality as the right to be welcomed upon arrival in foreign territory; Jacques Derrida considered hospitality the core of ethics itself.