An Essay in Reconstruction

This article addresses the character and potential of the radical cosmo-politanism that is currently flourishing within the social sciences. I explore how cosmopolitanism is articulated in a number of disciplines – including international law, international relations, sociology and political philosophy – and how it conceives of its own age. I focus first of all on the time-consciousness that informs the cosmopolitan representation of modernity, in particular its projection of a rupture between the old ‘Westphalian ’ order of nation states and the advancing cosmopolitan order of the present, and, second, on the nature of cosmopolitan critiques of nationalism, socialism and ‘modernist ’ social and political thought in general. Behind this focus lie a question over the extent to which cosmopolitanism replicates in its own normative proposals the defects of that which it criticizes, and another question over the means by which the critical kernel of contemporary cosmo-politanism can be separated from its doctrinal shell. Key words cosmopolitan nationalism politics state universalism The Rise of a New Cosmopolitanism A human being counts as such because he is a human being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Italian, etc. This consciousness, which is the aim of thought, is of infinite importance, and it is inadequate only if it adopts a fixed position – for example, as cosmopolitanism – in opposition to the concrete life of the state. (Hegel, 1991: §209R) Perpetual peace is often demanded as an ideal to which mankind should approximate... But the state is an individual, and negation is an essential component o