Cosmopolitanism in a Planetary Age

Cosmopolitanism is no longer in vogue. It is criticized for being the ideology of the ungrounded globalized elites, either too woke or too neoliberal. The crisis of cosmopolitanism is one symptom among many others of the exhaustion of globalization both as a material and as an intellectual process.

This lecture will argue, however, that the cosmopolitical tradition is worth being revived precisely today, at a time when the globe hits the planet, when the Earth has entered the political and historical scene of human conflicts. It will argue that the cosmopolitical tradition, through its various guises (ancient, modern, and postmodern), has provided concepts of identity, difference, space, and agency that are particularly suited to deal with the challenges of contemporary Earth politics. Indeed, the Earth is not something that unifies humanity over and above its political divisions; rather, it entangles distant territories to the extent that urban capitalist ways of inhabiting one territory necessarily overlap with many others. A decision made about public transportation in New York contributes to floods or drought in Bengal, for example.

Through cosmopolitical institutions providing political rights to entities (both human and other-than-human) foreign to itself, a political community could interiorize its contribution to the Earth futures. Far from being ungrounded, cosmopolitanism is the best chance that urban complex societies have to come, as Bruno Latour said, “down to Earth.”