ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two recent, powerful attempts – by Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah– to make cosmopolitanism useful for political theory. In today's English, a "cosmopolitan" is the kind of person who knows where to find the good tapas bars in Barcelona, the graphic artists in Osaka, the most interesting khat-fueled salon conversation in Aden. The ultimate literal expression of cosmopolitanism would of course be a single world government with corresponding global citizenship. The practical limitations of contractarian cosmopolitanism opened the door to another trend in political theory: the attempt to bring something of the ideals of cosmopolitanism into relation with existing duties of citizenship. In presenting Stoic cosmopolitanism, Nussbaum emphasized the participatory aspects of the view over its self-alienating aspect. By injecting cosmopolitanism into practical prescriptions for political theory and insisting on cosmopolitanism with room for local, "patriotic" attachments, Nussbaum foreshadowed what would become a characteristic and often difficult feature of complex cosmopolitanism.
