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Cosmopolitanisms

Online ISBN:
9781479839681
Print ISBN:
9781479829682
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Cosmopolitanisms

Bruce Robbins (ed.),
Bruce Robbins
(ed.)
Columbia University
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Paulo Lemos Horta (ed.),
Paulo Lemos Horta
(ed.)
New York University Abu Dhabi
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Kwame Anthony Appiah (ed.)
Kwame Anthony Appiah
(ed.)
New York University
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Published online:
18 January 2018
Published in print:
18 July 2017
Online ISBN:
9781479839681
Print ISBN:
9781479829682
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism is less an ideal than a description. It merely assumes that wherever and whenever history has set peoples in motion across national boundaries, sometimes by force, many of them and their descendants will show signs of divided loyalties and a hybrid identity. Cosmopolitanism should no longer be conceived as singular—an overrriding loyalty to humanity as a whole—but plural. Instead of an unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction, we now have many blooming, fleshed-out particulars. How much do these variants have in common with each other? How much of the concept’s old normative sense is preserved or transformed by these empirical particulars? What is it exactly that makes them interesting, makes them valuable? Cosmopolitanism can now be defined as any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. There are more kinds of cosmopolitanism out there to be explored and observed. Social scientists, cultural critics, and historians can stake claims to a concept that had largely belonged to philosophers and political theorists. No longer a badge of privilege, it is now possible to speak of the cosmopolitanism of the poor.

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