Cosmopolitanism's sociology and sociology's cosmopolitanism: retelling the history of cosmopolitan theory from Stoicism to Durkheim and beyond

Abstract

Contemporary cosmopolitan thought is rich and diverse, encompassing a broad range of themes and issues. Like other intellectual fields, cosmopolitanism today is partly constructed through narrations of its history, which debate and define what is living and dead in previous forms of cosmopolitan thinking. A standard narration has emerged, which depicts Western cosmopolitan thought as being made up of several key periods: ancient Greek and Roman metaphysics, eighteenth-century political philosophy, post-1945 institutionalizations of cosmopolitan political structures, and the contemporary diversification in cosmopolitan thought, encompassing both political philosophy and the sociological/anthropological analysis of ‘really existing cosmopolitanisms’. Yet this standard narration threatens to become unquestioned truth, unhelpfully restricting how the field understands itself, and paradoxically encouraging parochial modes of thinking within cosmopolitan studies. Against this prevailing trend, this paper proposes a re-narration of the history of Western cosmopolitan thinking. It does so by two interconnected means: incorporating some figures and schools of thought not normally included within the established cosmopolitan canon, and focusing on hitherto under-examined, historiographical and sociological, dimensions of thinkers conventionally understood as central to cosmopolitan thought. The paper endeavors to depict some new vistas for the self-understanding both of the contemporary field of cosmopolitanism studies and of its constituent elements, in particular sociology and political philosophy.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitan
• cosmopolitanism
• Durkheim
• Kant
• political philosophy
• sociology
• Stoicism
• Tönnies

Notes on contributor

David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter. He writes in the areas of social theory and cultural sociology. He is founding editor of the journal Cultural Sociology, published by Sage.

Notes

1. See further the phraseology used to describe this condition of world-level moral condemnation at Kant ([1795] 1963, 103).

2. See e.g. Cheneval's (2000) critique of Hicks (1999).

3. See Turner (2002) for an attempted recuperation of the thought of Montaigne in this regard.

4. For a rare instance of Vitoria's inclusion in the standard narration, see Mignolo (2000).

5. For the Victorian combination, rather than opposition, of ‘nationalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, see Varouxakis (2006).