ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses historically on the lifelong learner and the learning society as the cultural thesis of cosmopolitanism and its double gestures that both include and exclude. The hope of contemporary reforms embodied mutations of the hope of the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan citizen whose reason and rationality produced an emancipated humanity that included hospitality to ‘Others’. That hope of the universal was never universal but brought to bear a particular system of reason that differentiated and divided the cosmopolitan from those who were not as ‘civilized’. Today’s notions of the lifelong learner reassembles the cosmopolitan hope to unify the whole through universal values of reason that simultaneously express fears of the dangers and dangerous population to that cosmopolitan future.
