There were many moments in my odyssey towards a cosmopolitan political theory beyond all grand narratives when I had the impression that I arrived at something new – an impression to be replaced by the awareness that it is only a new complication in approaching cosmopolitanism. Thus, at the beginning, I was enthusiastically going through an exercise of detecting a ‘hidden’ cosmopolitanism in the work of different authors who did not express a cosmopolitan viewpoint – an exercise which was at risk of becoming a theoretical distortion. This bizarre exercise stopped when I finally asked some ‘methodological’ questions: if a reading reveals the cosmopolitan potential of a political philosophy, then where was cosmopolitanism ‘hiding’ before revealing it? Was cosmopolitanism an excess of theory which I was detecting, or was it a lack in the theory which I was filling with my ‘reparative’ reading? How can a political philosophy be non-cosmopolitan if all political philosophies postulate principles of universality and generality? These questions were leading invariably to more ‘naive’ questions: if you are a political philosopher, why are you not cosmopolitan? and ‘what is political philosophy for?’

MORE OR LESS THAN UNIVERSAL?

In the year when I was studying national identity at one of the most enlightened places in the world (according to university rankings), a big attraction among not only students of political philosophy, but other students as well, was the lectures of G. A. Cohen – each lecture a standup philosophical performance, combining passionate commitment with intellectual rigour, and with an irreverence for everything, including himself. His lectures were wonderfully life-enhancing, disconcerting and somehow liberating. (From all his performances, one I remembered in every detail, and even tried to reproduce for some small audiences, was a pantomime showing the difference between analytical and continental philosophers.) One of G. A. Cohen's texts that I read at that time was entitled, ‘If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?’ (Cohen 2000), which starts from the evidence that many people, including many egalitarian political philosophers, profess a belief in equality while enjoying high incomes of which they devote very little to egalitarian purposes.