ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Weimar German cosmopolitan thought that can be seen as bearing on four main relevant areas of debate. Those are multiple pathways to liberal political modernity, intellectual voice in the public sphere, national and supranational identities, and European self-understanding in world history. Weimar cosmopolitan writers in social thought can be read today as seeking to reclaim positions of universal validity, of "universal history", from the starting-point of an always intensely reflective awareness of epistemic particularity and relativity. An unifying aspect of salience in Weimar cosmopolitan thought for contemporary concern centres on questions of the meaning of "Eurocentrism" in Western social science. Universal history both potentially endangered scholars in hubristic pretension and nevertheless awakened them to ever more insistently self-questioning perceptions of their own position in the totality of historical forms.
