ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitanism has undergone a renaissance in recent years, however the sociological significance of this renaissance is easily missed. As I hope to show, the point is that cosmopolitanism has ceased to be merely a controversial idea and ideal; in however distorted a form, it has left the realm of philosophical castles in the air and has entered reality. Indeed, it has become the defining feature of a new era, the era of reflexive modernity, in which the national gaze operating with an unproblematized assumption of neat correspondence between nation, territory, society, politics and culture is missing reality. Thus the word ‘cosmopolitan’ becomes indispensable for describing a situation in which ‘humanity’ and ‘world’ are not merely thinkable but unavoidable social, political and moral categories for the human condition. This is why a world that has become cosmopolitan urgently demands a new standpoint, the cosmopolitan outlook, from which we can grasp the social and political realities in which we live and act. The cosmopolitan outlook is both the presupposition and the result of a conceptual reconfiguration of our modes of perception.
