ABSTRACT
The political explosiveness of social inequalities has been seriously underestimated both by social sciences and politics.1 Why is this so? Because politics and social sciences frame (in one way or the other) inequalities in a nation-state perspective. The social sciences until now are still prisoners of the nation-state. In order to unravel and understand the political explosiveness of inequalities, we have to consider one of the fundamental beliefs about modern society and its class dynamics, namely ‘methodological nationalism’. I will develop my argument in six steps. I shall ask:
1 What does methodological nationalism mean? 2 What is wrong with methodological nationalism? 3 What does ‘cosmopolitization’ mean? 4 What are the consequences of the human rights regime for the de-legitimation of global
inequalities? 5 How can human rights be positioned in the current cosmopolitan conjuncture? 6 How are new cosmopolitan communities of global risk being imagined and realized?
