ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the dominant approaches to Cosmopolitanism and their critical alternatives. It suggests that both ignore the structural interpretations of global politics and therefore greatly underestimate the power of the global market and its effects on the relationships within and outside its economic sphere of influence. More recently, Cosmopolitans have taken inspiration from the writings of the eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He proposed the idea of a global civil society and an international order composed of republics or democracies "operating under the rule of a Cosmopolitan law". Much like Liberalism, Kantian Cosmopolitanism aims to reconcile liberal notions of individualism with multiculturalism and respect for value pluralism. In historic accounts, a Cosmopolitan is often portrayed as a worldly person influenced by many cultures and committed to none. Thick Cosmopolitans believe that only global identities are valuable, moral and significant; local ones, as Nussbaum argues, are nonessential.
