Concept

Cosmopolitanism

Overview

Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings are members of a single community. Its adherents are known as cosmopolitan or cosmopolite. Cosmopolitanism is both prescriptive and aspirational, believing humans can and should be "world citizens" in a "universal community". The idea encompasses different dimensions and avenues of community, such as promoting universal moral standards, establishing global political structures, or developing a platform for mutual cultural expression and tolerance.

For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah articulates a cosmopolitan community where individuals from varying locations (physical, economic, etc.) enter relationships of mutual respect despite their differing beliefs (religious, political, etc.). In a looser but related sense, "cosmopolitan" is also used to describe places where people of various ethnic, cultural and/or religious backgrounds live together and interact with each other.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Cosmopolitanism is discussed.

What is to be desired is not cosmopolitanism, not the absence of all national characteristics that one associates with couriers, _wagon-lit_ attendants, and others, who have had everything distinctive obliterated by multiple and trivial contacts with men of every civilized country. Such cosmopolitanism is the result of loss, not gain. The international spirit which we should wish to see produced will be something…
Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
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The State is the concrete individual interposed between generic humanity and particular beings. In his words, the national folk is the channel of divine life as it pours into particular finite human beings. He says: "While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation…
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
states what it is; names the idea
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Aristotle[1] divides the blessings of life into three classes--those which come to us from without, those of the soul, and those of the body. Keeping nothing of this division but the number, I observe that the fundamental differences in human lot may be reduced to three distinct classes: (1) What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer
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Uninhabitable portions of the surface, ocean and desert, split up the human community, but in such a way that ships and camels—“the ship of the desert”—make it possible for men to come into touch with one another across these unappropriated regions and to take advantage of our common claim to the face of the earth with a view to a possible intercommunication. The inhospitality of the inhabitants of certain sea…
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace
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Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our british and american universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford. It is in the ascendent at my own university of…
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
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Cosmopolitanism

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Cosmopolitanism

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition