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Stefan M Wheelock, Tempering Cosmopolitanism, American Literary History, Volume 32, Issue 4, Winter 2020, Pages 804–820, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa026
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The debates over the meanings and relevance of the idea of cosmopolitanism have only intensified in recent years. The figure of the “cosmopolitan” as “[b]elonging to all parts of the world [and] not restricted to any one country or its inhabitants” (“Cosmopolitan”) served as a bellwether during the move toward transnational and ethnic human awareness and cooperation and would be rhetorically deployed in the eighteenth century as a conspicuous signifier of modernity’s rise from barbarism. Across numerous works, especially The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) and Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), Immanuel Kant surmised that a loose federation of republics (he believed that republics were best predisposed to peace) might help resolve problems with rising competition over limited resources and prevent the impending prospects of war. According to Kant, the chief “end” to this universalizable order was, however, not merely political but moral. For Kant, republics could function both as incubators in which competing individual freedoms are harmonized under external and just laws and as spaces where morality, sympathy, and benevolence (in accordance with reason and right) could develop within and across nation-states and cultural borders. The teleological result would be a “moral cosmopolis.”1 Critics, of various disciplinary stripes, have mused (and continue to muse) over whether this ideal has ever been realizable. In considering the “cosmopolitan tradition,” the classicist and philosopher of ethics Martha Nussbaum has suggested that in a world where nation-states are increasingly competing for limited resources, where authoritarianisms (and the potential for a resurgent fascism) appear again to be on the rise, and where global capitalism and its uneven distributions of wealth have brought questions regarding human dignity and rights into sharp relief, one could conclude that the ideal of cosmopolitanism is noble, but faulty as a vision for human progress.2 Its arcaneness as a moral and political imperative seems all the more on display when critically evaluated against the historical backdrop of Atlantic modernity and its attendant histories of racial capitalism and terror.
