Understanding cosmopolitanism: a morphological approach

Abstract

This article applies a morphological analytical framework to cosmopolitanism, an ideological tradition committed to universal moral equality and global forms of community. While this concept of global citizenship originated in ancient Greece, scholarly interest in the cosmopolitan tradition was in recent decades rekindled. But despite this, cosmopolitanism remains rudimentarily understood as ideology. This article therefore theorizes cosmopolitanism as a thin ideology distinguished by its normative engagement with empirical conditions characterized by ethnic, racial, national and similar forms of diversity. It is demonstrated that the commitment to the equal moral worth of all humans constitutes cosmopolitanism’s decontested core concept, which anchors adjacent concepts focused on society’s political, cultural and economic organization. This conceptual framework finds its embodiment in ideological subject positions, which are theorized as peripheral concepts through which the ideology is linked to socio-demographic identities. In conclusion, it is argued that rather than signalling the realization of this ideal, the recent era of globalization was an age of exceptional cosmopolitan influence that now is in decline.