Being Cosmopolitan

Abstract What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? Typically, cosmopolitanism is understood as a moral orientation, involving commitment to global moral equality. On this understanding, to be cosmopolitan is simply to evidence that moral orientation oneself. By contrast, Being Cosmopolitan takes up a thoroughly political approach, asking what it might mean, and what it is like, to be political in a distinctly cosmopolitan form. In this regard, the book offers an account that is based upon the internalization of a particular kind of global ‘social imaginary’, involving the imagination of a global public to which certain issues—or global public affairs—are understood to pertain. After first elaborating upon this political understanding, the book goes on to distinguish its approach from both ‘mainstream’ and ‘contestatory’ approaches to cosmopolitan political theorizing. The book then uses the political perspective to make a series of interventions that are of significance for the prevailing moral understanding. It argues against the compatibility of cosmopolitical subjectivity and the global social imaginary of a world of self-determining peoples, as well as against the psychological viability of ‘pluralist’ visions of global order. Furthermore, it shows how a focus on cosmopolitical subjectivity can help us to understand the predicaments of real-world global politics. Not all political cosmopolitans are moral cosmopolitans. Therefore, a world of cosmopolitans is not a singular ‘moral community’. Indeed, even among those who do share the core moral cosmopolitan commitment to the moral equality of all, mutual unintelligibility can arise.