ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitan ethics has returned. An ideal invented by the Cynics and the Stoics and pursued in the Enlightenment, it is serving widely today as a model of international affiliation. The contemporary philosophers and cultural theorists who elaborate this model often disagree about its applications, but they share in their differences, if not a singular “ethics,” a rhetoric of ethical urgency. Recent cosmopolitanisms seek to establish principles of interpretation and encounter in the context of cultural diversity and political conflict, yet these principles are often formulated within and through the interactions they serve to manage. Indeed, theorists regularly invoke works of literature and other cultural artifacts to exemplify ethical paradigms, even as these paradigms seek to make visible, if not suspect, such acts of exemplarity. It is this relation among ethics, literature, and cosmopolitanism that I wish to consider.
