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Cosmopolitan Sociology

Why is There a Need for a Cosmopolitan Social and Political Theory?

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have to redefine and reinvent the social sciences and humanities for the global world. This is a double challenge: first, to discover and criticize how sociology, political science, history, and so forth are still prisoners of the nation-state and gave birth to a historically mistaken national imagination. Second, how to transnationally redefine the basic theoretical concepts and units of empirical research, such as politics, society, identity, state, history, class, law, democracy, community, solidarity, justice, mobility, military, and household, in a cosmopolitan perspective. This calls for a paradigm shift. This is also a “Cosmopolitan Manifesto for the Social Sciences,” not only to renew their scientific standing and public claims but also to bring the social sciences back on the public agenda.

The classics of sociology are so thoroughly pervaded with a spatially fixed understanding of culture that it is rarely remarked upon. It is a conception that goes back to sociology's birth amidst the nineteenth-century formation of nation-states. The territorial conception of culture and society, the idea of culture as “rooted” and “limited,” constituted through the opposition of the “We” and “Them,” was itself a reaction to the enormous changes that were going on as that century turned into the twentieth century. It was a conscious attempt to provide a solution to the uprooting of local cultures that the formation of nationstates necessarily involved. Sociology understood the new symbols and common values, above all, as means of integration into a new unity. The triumph of this national imagination can be seen in the way the nation-state has ceased to appear as a project and a construct and has become instead widely regarded as something natural. The opposition between national and international has become the internalized compass of the social sciences. A cosmopolitan sociology poses a challenge to this idea that binding history and borders tightly together is the only possible means of social and symbolic integration. This also means that sociological perspectives are geared to, and organized in terms of, the nation-state. All the traditional fields of the social sciences (such as the sociology of inequality, of the family, of politics, of mobility and migration, and so on) are still being researched in the nation-state tradition. The concept of “cosmopolitanization,” by contrast, is an explicit attempt to overcome this “methodological nationalism” and produce concepts capable of reflecting a newly transnational world. It consciously develops a new methodology: “methodological cosmopolitanism.”

What Does “Cosmopolitan” Mean in This Perspective?

From a national perspective, “cosmopolitan” or “cosmopolitanism” is viewed pejoratively, as an enemy image. “Cosmopolitan” refers to the “global player,” the “imperial capitalist,” or “middle-class intellectual without local roots” and as such is a loaded concept. It should not be confused with a global sociology trying to homogenize the world. It is a concept with a long tradition, but not in the social sciences. It goes back to ancient Greek thought, trying to express the transcendence of local limitations in thought and practice. Alexander the Great elevated cosmopolitanism to a political principle. Superseded by Christian Universalism, it became one of the basic concepts of the Enlightenment. With the formation of the nation-state, the concept disappeared from public discourse and was used mainly as a pejorative term. This is beginning to change.

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