ABSTRACT
Any approach that seeks to find regional variants of cosmopolitanism risks a certain contradiction. This is because a central notion that has shaped the cosmopolitan idea from the very beginning is that the moral organization of society is based on the principles of generosity, hospitality, and familiarity between peoples and therefore is not limited by the artificial frontiers of the geopolitical divisions of the world system. For instance, going back to Francisco de Vitoria and others Renaissance figures in the School of Salamanca in the sixteenth century, and later with Kant, such characteristics were in the mainstream of discussions related to the cosmopolitan imaginary. According to Roudometof (2005), any attempt to discuss cosmopolitanism today must take as its point of departure a manifested attitude in people’s moral orientations and one that is not constrained only by local contexts. While the classical thinkers also emphasized the moral dimensions of cosmopolitanism, there is a strong emphasis in recent thought on its political and economic aspects. As will be argued in this chapter, this worldly moral orientation is not something that could be encompassed in, what Charles Taylor calls, the ‘natural’ character of modern societies (Taylor 1989). The cosmopolitan perspective should rather be seen as a universal orientation which puts at the center of the human condition respect within and between peoples.
