ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to set out the case for the idea of critical cosmopolitanism as a distinctive kind of cosmopolitanism. The notion of critical cosmopolitanism suggests a particular approach to cosmopolitanism that highlights its primarily critical characteristics. The critical thrust of cosmopolitanism has not always been emphasized by theorists of cosmopolitanism who have instead stressed its normative aspirations. Cosmopolitanism is certainly an approach to social and political analysis that is strongly normative and while views differ as to the scope and nature of its normativity, a cosmopolitan approach will inevitably tend towards a critical as opposed to an affirmative view of current realities. I argue that cosmopolitanism suggests a critical attitude which can be contrasted to an interpretive or descriptive approach to the social world and which is also more than normative critique. The notion of critical cosmopolitanism that I argue for aims to retain the notion of normative critique, but to extend it in the direction of a deeper notion of critique as world disclosure.
