This article conceptualizes the lofty term of cosmopolitanism from people's historical experience. It attempts to find a bridge between theory and life. Many writers now maintain that cosmopolitanism is no longer a dream, but rather the substance of social reality - and that it is increasingly the nation-state and our particular identities that are figments of our imagination, clung to by our memories. The aim of this article is to concretize this argument and demonstrate how some of the Jewish intellectuals (...) who emerged from World War II and the Holocaust argued passionately about the status of their Jewishness and how this related to abstract and universal ideals of modernity and human rights. The article focuses on Hannah Arendt's responses to her critics instead of her vast theoretical work to illustrate this point. In responding to her critics, Arendt came closest to providing a formula for a concept of cosmopolitanism, which attempts to square the circle between the universal and the particular. (shrink)

This article addresses the character and potential of the radical cosmopolitanism 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 timeconsciousness that informs the cosmopolitan representation of modernity, in particular its projection of a rupturebetween 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 cosmopolitanism can be separated from its doctrinal shell. (shrink)