Cosmopolitanism: A Brief Definition

Jason D. Hill
Associate Professor of Philosophy
De Paul University

COSMOPOLITANISM: the notion that one’s identity is not determined solely nor primarily by any racial, national or ethnic background.

Diogenes and the ancient Cynics began the cosmopolitan tradition by forming the notion that an individual could have a primary identity apart from the one he or she inherited from the polis. In de-emphasizing the value of class, status, national origin and gender, the Cynics simultaneously placed great emphasis on the value of reason and moral purpose. Here is the revolutionary idea that the Cynics achieved which is a given in the Western concept of personality and its concomitant dependence on dignity: regardless of how much one is deprived of the concrete goods that are constitutive of social identity, one possesses a larger universal identity grounded in reason, moral purpose and above all human dignity. Today, when contemporary cosmopolitans speak in terms of a universal human identity that they share with others, they are invoking concepts bequeathed to them by the ancient Cynics.

The concept of world-citizenship in the sense of belonging to all of humankind gained ascendancy in the Hellenistic era. It is among the core features of Stoic thought, which, along with its great rival Epicureanism, were reactions to the gradual disappearance of the small city-state in an age of empire. (One of the reasons, it goes without saying, for the current upsurge in interest in cosmopolitanism, is our own relation to empire.) As Philip of Macedonia and then his son Alexander imposed an overarching monarchy on the Greeks and conquered new territories, not only did the poleis cease to be the sole seat of political authority for citizens, they were no longer insular safe havens in which local identities could be formed.

The cosmopolis, that vastly growing space beyond the insular polis, the place that heretofore had been the home of barbarians, was conceived of as a place where social and cultural distinctions were irrelevant compared to an essential sameness to all human beings, who are bound together, regardless of their backgrounds, by their subjection to natural law. Human beings may live in a multiplicity of ways, but there is a law that holds the variations in their actions and behaviors to a recognizably human model. The people in one village may live in an area populated with plants, some of which are poisonous and some of which are not; those of another may live off the meat of animals. In the first scenario someone has to learn how to detoxify plants and classify them and establish it as an art or science. In the second scenario, one has to establish procedures for effective hunting and so on. In both cases, each individual must live by the evidence of his or her senses. That is what is to be expected, as human beings are conceptual animals, and this shared nature provides the basis for a universal humanity. So goes the reasoning of the Stoics. Today, a contemporary cosmopolitan would point out that, for example, in no culture would you find mothers arbitrarily offering up their young to strangers, that individuals in all cultures have capacities for responding to shame and loss of dignity, and that such examples are just a few among several that are the shared core features that all human have and that override local particularity.

Cosmopolitanism stands in sharp contrast to two very important political categories in our contemporary world today: pluralism and multiculturalism. Pluralists defend the view that individual identity is to be configured within the parameters of a conceptually neat ethnic, national or racial paradigmatic prism. Pluralists are not separatists, but they do insist that the boundaries that make separate identities distinct (Italian, German, Native-American, for example) are protected and kept in place. Group solidarity and group identity, then, are the important values upheld by those in the pluralist camp. Multiculturalists are more likely than pluralists to acknowledge an overarching national or international community, but want to insist on the abstract nature of all such communities as well as critiquing the way one particular culture tends to pass itself off as pure, transparent or universal for the community in question. Multiculturalists also insist on recognizing the contributions of seemingly ‘marginal’ cultures to such allegedly pure cultures.
Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, in keeping with the pro-individual stance first evinced by Diogenes, are of the view that human socialization takes place in the world where human intercourse takes place: in the multiple spaces that we inhabit and among the myriad of human beings with whom we interact and exchange stories, experiences, values and norms. Strong cosmopolitanism repudiates the tendencies of cultural nationalism and racial ideologists to impute moral value to morally neutral features – accidents of birth such as skin pigmentation, national origin and ethnic background. Strong cosmopolitanism argues that there is no one fundamental culture to which any one individual is biologically constituted and leaves the question of identity entirely to the individual. That is, individuals ought to be able to cull their own identities based on the extent to which their experiences and their life roles have allowed them to experience themselves as the persons they take themselves to be, rather than the passive wearers of tribal labels assigned to them by their culture or by the society at large.

In the field of political philosophy, one must distinguish between cosmopolitan law and international law. Cosmopolitan law protects the rights of citizens of the world by making their relations to the state a concern of the world community, while international law pertains to the relations among sovereign and self-legislating states.

Moral cosmopolitanism draws the following conclusion from the above arguments: geographic demarcations among groups of peoples, and national, ethnical and racial differences among human beings, are irrelevant factors when determining moral obligations persons have towards each other. Moral cosmopolitanism further holds that tribalism hijacks our moral lives because it works according to a specious logic of false separatism. That is, tribalism takes the morally neutral markers of human beings such as their nationality, ethnicity and morphological markers - the latter codified into various racial categories - and imbues them with moral relevance, punishing and persecuting persons solely on the basis of characteristics which are accidents of birth and which tell us nothing about them as moral human beings.
J Hill [1048]