Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Legacy of European Imperialism
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory, 7 (1):
3--22 (2000)Abstract
This article focuses on stoicism, cosmopolitanism, and the legacy of European imperialism. "Cosmopolitanism" is as historically specific and as culturally contingent a notion as "rights" or "democracy" or, indeed, as the conception of "the human" itself. That does not, of course, mean that those who see it as a resource from which it might be possible to resolve some of the dilemmas facing multicultural or immigrant societies are wrong to do so. Everyone has to stand somewhere, and it might well be that as Nussbaum's would-be cosmopolitan sets out in search of a politics that is "based upon reason rather than patriotism or group sentiment, a politics that is truly universal rather than communitarian." But it must be an error to suppose that "cosmopolitanism" can be detached from the history of European civilization, or the history of European philosophy, if only for the obvious reason that it has, in one guise or another, been for so long a feature of that history. To put it another way, it is an error to hope that one can ever achieve a truly cosmopolitan vision of the cosmopolis.