ABSTRACT
Liberal cosmopolitan thinkers identify individuality, universality and generality as their fundamental philosophical premises. Stoic, Cynic and Enlightenment cosmopolitanisms may have emerged in tandem with the spread of empires, partly because the ideas of universal moral community that they recommended seemed practicable in precisely those times and places where universal political communities were being constructed, and partly also because those ideas provided attractive justifications for projects of empire-building. Many liberal cosmopolitans are keen to minimize the importance of state sovereignty precisely because they see the postcolonial state as the primary locus of threat to human rights and the international as the source of remedies. The cosmopolitan literatures antipathy towards nationalism is indelibly marked by the Western experience of nationalism, in which a discourse that begins as a struggle to democratize absolutist states becomes yoked to those states in projects of imperialism and fascism.
