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The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory

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The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory The British Journal of Sociology 2006 Volume 57 Issue 1 The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theory Gerard Delanty Abstract Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be under- stood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self- problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities. Keywords: Culture; globalization; global publics; modernity; social transformation; society The idea of cosmopolitanism is most recognizable as a term of political gov- ernance but with a history that extends to the Enlightenment and to classical antiquity.1 Until recently it was not associated with social processes. With the separation of the social and the political that has been a feature of much of modern thought, cosmopolitanism has on the whole been seen as part of the Delanty (Department of Sociology, University of Liverpool) (Corresponding author email: [email protected]) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2006 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2006.00092.x 26 Gerard Delanty political. Although the origins of cosmopolitanism lie in an essentially moral view of the individual as having allegiances to the wider world, it was to acquire a political significance once it was linked to peoplehood. The main tra- dition in modern cosmopolitan thought, which derives from Immanuel Kant, sought to extend republican political philosophy into a wider and essentially legal framework beyond the relatively limited modern republic. With this came the vision of a world political community extending beyond the com- munity into which one is born or lives. Cosmopolitanism thus became linked with the universalism of modern western thought and with political designs aimed at world governance. Cosmopolitan political theory has been much dis- cussed in recent times and has tended to overshadow the contribution of social theory (Cohen 1996; Lu 2000; Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Tan 2004). The fact that social theory, and more specifically sociology, has been rela- tively absent from cosmopolitan theory is not entirely surprising.2 As previ- ously noted, the separation of the social from the political in the modern imagination had the implication that cosmopolitanism was equated with the political in opposition to the social. Cosmopolitanism thus reflected the revolt of the individual against the social world, for to be a ‘citizen of the world’ was to reject the immediately given and closed world of particularistic attachments. Not surprisingly it became associated with the revolt of the elites against the low culture of the masses. Sociological theory, which arose in the age of the nascent nation-state and industrial society, tended towards a view of the social as bounded and moreover was sceptical of notions of freedom that were asso- ciated with cosmopolitanism. The social world as territorially given, closed and bounded by the nation-state and the class structure of the industrial societies did not sit comfortably with the openness of the cosmopolitan idea, with its universalistic orientation. Moreover, since Auguste Comte, sociology as a pos- itive science was opposed to the cultural and political claims of the Enlight- enment intellectuals who were associated with a mode of critique not grounded in positively given facts. Whether Kantian political cosmopolitanism or the cultural cosmopolitanism of the intellectuals and elites, cosmopoli- tanism was thus marginalized by twentieth-century preoccupations. Few works captured the decline of the cosmopolitan idea more than Frederich Meinecke’s Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Meinecke 1970). In this influential work, published in 1909, the German historian documented the decline of the nineteenth-century cosmopolitan imagination with the rise of the national idea. Meinecke was reacting not merely to Kantian cosmopoli- tanism but to what he regarded as the impotent cultural cosmopolitanism of the German intellectuals who did not succeed in translating their lofty vision into a viable political order. So in place of the world republic or the republic of letters of the Enlightenment intellectuals was to be the modern national republic in which the cosmopolitan elites would have to find identity with the masses. This resulted in a certain repudiation of cosmopolitanism. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2006 British Journal of Sociology 57(1) The cosmopolitan imagination 27 Viewed from a different perspective – a broader vision of social theory as a critical reflection on modernity – the decline of the cosmopolitan imagina- tion associated with the Enlightenment and the rise of the nation-state could be seen as the beginning of a different kind of cosmopolitanism, one less premised on the assumptions of a world republic or on elites and also one less Eurocentric. In contrast to the dominant Enlightenment notion of cos- mopolitanism as a transnational republican order, current developments in social theory suggest a post-universalistic cosmopolitanism that takes as its point of departure different kinds of modernity and processes of societal trans- formation that do not presuppose the separation of the social from the polit- ical or postulate a single world culture. Current debates in political theory draw attention to the revival of the Kantian ideal, which it is argued is rele- vant in the present context of globalization, the alleged crisis of the nation- state and the need for global civil society (Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann 1997). It is not the aim of the present paper to argue against such normative posi- tions, but to highlight a different and more sociological approach to cos- mopolitanism which is relevant to a critical social theory of late modernity. Viewed in such terms the emphasis shifts to the very conceptualization of the social world as an open horizon in which new cultural models take shape. In this approach, which I term critical cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitan imag- ination occurs when and wherever new relations between self, other and world develop in moments of openness. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism and is also not reducible to the fact of pluralism. The point of departure for this kind of critical cosmopolitan social theory is the recognition that the very notion of cosmopolitanism compels the recog- nition of multiple kinds of cosmopolitanism, including earlier kinds of cos- mopolitanism, and which cannot be explained in terms of a single, western notion of modernity or in terms of globalization. Cosmopolitanism refers to the multiplicity of ways in which the social world is constructed in different modernities. Rather than see cosmopolitanism as a particular or singular con- dition that either exists or does not, a state or goal to be realized, it should instead be seen as a cultural medium of societal transformation that is based on the principle of world openness, which is associated with the notion of global publics. Today global publics are playing a critical role in such processes of transformation. In equating world openness rather than universalism as such with cosmopolitanism the basis for a more hermeneutic and critical cos- mopolitan sociology will hopefully be established. In sum, then, the argument of this paper is that a sociologically driven critical cosmopolitanism concerns the analysis of cultural modes of mediation by which the social world is shaped and where the emphasis is on moments of world openness created out of the encounter of the local with the global. British Journal of Sociology 57(1) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2006 28 Gerard Delanty The article proceeds as follows. The first section locates the notion of criti- cal cosmopolitanism within the cosmopolitan tradition through a critical reading of the different approaches, which are summed up under the headings of moral cosmopolitanism, political cosmopolitanism and cultural
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