In Cosmopolitics Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah argue that nationalism is currently in disrepute both for its links with “right-wing racist ideologies” and with “colonialist discourse” (20–21). They suggest that because nationalism can be seen “as a particularistic mode of consciousness or even a private ethnic identity that disguises itself as a universalism, cosmopolitanism is the obvious choice as an intellectual ethic … that can better express or embody genuine universalism” (21). In their work on cosmopolitanism in Woolf, both Rebecca Walkowitz and Jessica Berman agree that Woolf too was disenchanted with nationalism and patriotism after World War I and turned to an ethic of cosmopolitanism instead. The kind of cosmopolitanism that Woolf embraces is not an uncritical universalism, however, but a specific kind, what Walkowitz calls “communities of friendship” (133) or Berman calls “the day-to-day play of affiliation” (122). Pheng Cheah describes this as a cosmopolitanism “from below” (21). It is from this stance that a cosmopolitan vision of London emerges in both Mrs. Dalloway (1925) where the affiliation follows the lines of gender politics and “Street Haunting” (1927) where the affiliation extends to those with disabilities.

Amanda Anderson outlines the characteristics of cosmopolitanism from below and connects it to David Hollinger's discussion of affiliation as a quality of post-ethnic identification and to James Clifford's anthropological concept of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” in “Traveling Cultures.” These new understandings of cosmopolitanism, Anderson concludes, share three key elements: a “reflective distance from one's cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity” (267). In spite of the criterion of a belief in universal humanity, Anderson emphasizes that these new cosmopolitanisms do not recreate the exclusionariness of the abstract universalism of the eighteenth century; rather these cosmopolitanisms from below are inclusionary and operate by “sympathetic imagination” (268). They include “an insistence on the plurality of situated cosmopolitanisms [Bruce Robbins’ term for cosmopolitanisms from below] … a vivid spectrum of diverse dialectics of detachment, displacement, and affiliation…. [and] a vigilant attentiveness to otherness, an ethical stance” (274).