Afterword

Summary

As all the essays in this volume demonstrate, cosmopolitanism can take many forms and has been understood in many different ways. Diogenes’ famous riposte to the citizens of Athens who asked him to what city he belonged – that he belonged to none, that he was a “citizen of the world”, cosmopolites – was intended as a rebuke. To be without a city meant in effect to be no one, possibly even, as Diogenes’ own outrageous behavior seemed to bear out, not to be really human at all. Diogenes was rejecting a view of the world that identified the person with a community.