Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

According to Eurocentric narratives the concept of cosmopolitanism has a rich lineage beginning its life with Diogenes’ (c. 412 BC – 323 BC) cry to be a “citizen of the world” and then being most commonly associated with the Stoics, Pauline Christianity, and Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). This expresses the core idea shared by some cosmopolitan thinkers that all human beings belong to a single community and the ultimate units of moral or theoretical concern are individual human beings, and not the state or particular forms of human association. However, critiques of Kant in particular note the limitations to who is included in, and excluded from, European understandings of humanity. Kant’s understanding of racial hierarchies excluded those he understood to be less than human from his moral frames and therefore from ethical treatment and cosmopolitan engagement (see Charles W. Mills 1997). (1)