ABSTRACT
Thinking and writing about cosmopolitanism is a cross-disciplinary endeavor that permeates both intellectual and cultural history. At stake is the need (a) to understand how ideas of cosmopolitanism and a cosmopolitan world order have been legitimized or challenged; (b) to offer a hypothesis about the principal function of discourses of cosmopolitanism in modern European societies since the French Revolution; and c) to identify some of the discursive domains (artistic, scholarly, etc.) where ideas and sentiments of cosmopolitanism have been articulated. This is what I attempt to do in the following text. I begin by outlining some critical issues in the theory of legitimacy, to the extent to which this would help me construct a hypothesis about the historical function of discourses of cosmopolitanism. Once the dual nature of these discourses is elucidated, I offer some observations on their domains of articulation, limiting my examples to political philosophy and the history of comparative literature. The text retains the flavor of a public lecture, for this is how it was first conceived, and thus also its modest status of a mere invitation to explore further the questions I have just outlined.1
