Abstract
In the introductory chapter, I tackle some issues related to cosmopolitanism that indicate the purpose and scope of the book and place it within a broader interdisciplinary dialogue. The book is presented in its aspiration to provide perspectives on cosmopolitanism that complicate this ideal beyond facile, culturalist, exclusivist and anthropocentric accounts. After deploying the rationale of the book and its intervention in ongoing debates on cosmopolitanism and other -isms, I explain its structure and its prismatic and polycentric character. Each chapter is briefly reviewed and connected with its preceding and following chapters as well as with the aims of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
In my view, cosmopolitan issues should matter for purely normative reasons even if they do not affect us as a human community. But this claim cannot be unpacked here.
- 2.
Elsewhere I deploy this idea by reference to Chagos as a case in point (Papastephanou 2015).
- 3.
New cosmopolitans who consider themselves radical intellectuals ‘like to think of themselves as living in a critical moment of history and playing a pivotal role in its outcome’ (Fine 2003: 465).
- 4.
The much celebrated respect for diversity supposedly enhanced by multuculturalist structures or mindsets typically stops short when diversity escapes harmless and liberalized limits and, much worse, when the harkening to the other requires more than tolerance or verbal political correctness.
- 5.
Consider here again the case of Chagos (Papastephanou 2015). The claims of the Chagossians are mainly and primarily to return to their homes from which they were exiled by the UK and the USA, not to acquire citizenship rights away from home.
- 6.
By this, here I mean descriptions of particular modes of living, often privileged and elitist (or, to a lesser extent, of the marginalized and excluded), as cosmopolitan in a romanticized and idealized sense. As said above, such descriptions often single out the scholar, the exile, the immigrant or the traveller as the avatar of cosmopolitan selfhood.
- 7.
‘Critics of cosmopolitanism point to the particularistic cultural assumptions, national prejudices and power positions that remain intact behind its universalistic discourse and institutions. They reject cosmopolitanism either as an abstract ideal irrelevant to the real world or as a mask that the sole remaining superpower, America, uses to conceal its own political and financial interests. They depict the new cosmopolitanism as an ideology for a new state system under American dominance, arguing that its repudiation of the sovereignty of nation states when they violate human rights in their own territories and its defence of the legality of humanitarian intervention coincide with the interests of American hegemony and are invoked only when American interests are at stake. They maintain that cosmopolitanism perpetuates the illusion that the current global order is ruled by universal ideals and by a supranational body authorized to enforce these ideals, whereas in fact it is ruled by a hierarchy of co-operating and competing nation states – different from the Westphalian order only in the fact that never before has one nation dominated others as does the USA today (Fine 2003: 464). Many educational engagements with cosmopolitanism not only fail critically to respond to such challenges but even perform their theories as if such challenges have never been aired.
- 8.
Another solution that has been proposed in the amassed literature is the qualification of cosmopolitanism with adjectives such as ‘new’, ‘critical’, ‘vernacular’ and so on (for more on this, see my Coda in this volume).
- 9.
I am indebted to Springer’s anonymous reviewer for pointing out the need to deal with this question in the introduction.
- 10.
New cosmopolitans ‘too quickly discard the core concepts of the social sciences because of their national associations, too quickly overstate the crisis of the nation state and the newness of the present condition, too quickly stigmatize nationalism as one-sidedly negative and elevate cosmopolitanism into an ideal’ (Fine 2003: 465–6).
- 11.
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Papastephanou, M. (2016). Editor’s Introduction. In: Papastephanou, M. (eds) Cosmopolitanism: Educational, Philosophical and Historical Perspectives. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30430-4_1
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