Introduction

Cosmopolitanism is today one of the most important ways of making sense of the contemporary world and, as will be argued in this chapter, it has been an influential movement within modernity. However it is in fact a product of antiquity and can be said to be one of the oldest intellectual movements that have shaped the way we think about the world. In this chapter I want to outline and discuss the history of the cosmopolitan idea in order to provide a background for contemporary cosmopolitanism. I am making a distinction between classical and contemporary cosmopolitanism roughly in line with the re-emergence of a new kind of cosmopolitanism in the present day along with a notion of globality. The older cosmopolitanism, which I am calling classical cosmopolitanism, has been generally associated with a concern with universalism and can be contrasted to the post-universalism of contemporary forms of cosmopolitanism. Moreover, unlike cosmopolitanism today, classical cosmopolitanism from antiquity to the Enlightenment has had a more pronounced Western orientation, though as I shall argue it cannot be entirely dismissed as Eurocentric and it is possible to find non-European expressions of cosmopolitanism throughout history.

My aim in this chapter is to make two arguments, which in a sense are arguments about the double face of classical cosmopolitanism. The first is to show that while classical cosmopolitanism has indeed been a significant feature of the European cultural and political heritage, it is in fact less Eurocentric than is often assumed.