Cosmopolitanism and Weltliteratur

Summary

WITH THE DEMISE OF Soviet Communism and the concomitant intensification of cultural and economic globalization in the 1990s, the issue of cosmopolitanism has become a central topic in intellectual debates. There are many definitions of this concept, but common to all of them is a focus on the transcendence of national and regional perspectives. The cosmopolitan views the entire globe as her homeland, attempts to gain a purchase on ethical, artistic, political, and economic domains from an international rather than from a more localized vantage point. The cosmopolitan paradigm has existed at least since the advent of the Stoics, who viewed all humanity as children of Zeus and urged their followers to regard themselves as citizens of the world. While the Stoic ideal has found adherents throughout subsequent history, transnational forces have become so predominant that world citizenship has started to become a pervasive, often unwelcome feeling rather than a utopian construct. The circumstance that globalism is perceived by many as a reality rather than as a dream (or threat) is thus responsible for the contemporary renewal and enhancement of debate on the venerable cosmopolitan ideal. The vehemence of the discussions is evident in the attacks from both the right and the left political spectrums provoked by Martha Nussbaum's now well-known essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” which first appeared in the Boston Review in 1994. Drawing on the Stoics, Nussbaum argued that a truly cosmopolitan education would lead not only to greater international cooperation, interest in and respect for the citizens of the world who reside outside America's borders, but to deeper internal knowledge as Americans begin to see themselves through the perspective of foreign Others.