Cosmocitizens?

The cosmopolitan idea has the potential either to deflate the idea of citizenship or to enhance and extend its demands. Its origins were, it should be noted, decidedly deflating in their tendency. When the Greek ‘Cynic’ Diogenes used the term Kosmopolites – he is thought to have been the first to do so – he intended to debunk the idea that citizenship was of any real importance to us. He didn’t mean to say that the world, still less the Kosmos, was something like a city, he meant to say that all the value that we (mistakenly) attach to being a member of one city or another evaporates when we look at ourselves from a larger perspective – from a cosmic point of view, what, after all, does it matter that one is an Athenian or a Theban? The cosmopolitan idea’s most famous critics have certainly been alive to this debunking potential: cosmopolitans, Rousseau complained, ‘boast of loving the whole world’ – and perhaps the word ‘loving’ should be in quote marks here, in order to convey that nothing so abstract can really be loved – ‘in order to have the right to love no one’ (Rousseau 1962 [c.1761]: 553). And in the vocabulary of racial prejudice, ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ is, notoriously, a term reserved for (ethnoreligious) minorities who are alleged to have contempt for the ties of local citizenship.