ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitanism has undergone a renaissance in recent years, however the sociological significance of this renaissance is easily missed. The cosmopolitan outlook is both the presupposition and the result of a conceptual reconfiguration of modes of perception. First, the author will call into question one of the most powerful convictions about society and politics, one which binds both social actors and social scientists: methodological nationalism. Second, the author proposes to draw an essential distinction between cosmopolitanism in a normative philosophical sense and cosmopolitization as a social scientific research programme. Methodological nationalism assumes that the nation, state and society are the ‘natural’ social and political forms of the modern world. Like climate change, most of the main impetuses for social and economic transformations in the new century do not differentially or exclusively apply to certain limited groups of nations. But sociology and political science are not the only disciplines under pressure, economics is too.
