ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 shows that scholarly literature uses the word “cosmopolitanism” loosely. Claimed to have emerged in Ancient Greece when Diogenes labeled himself as “citizen of the world,”, arguably, it is Kant who is the modern father of the concept, and in his Perpetual Peace, scholars from different disciplines find epistemological, economic or commercial, legal, moral, ethico-theological, political and cultural cosmopolitanism. This chapter distinguishes the different kinds of cosmopolitanism and argues that the focus should be on legal cosmopolitanism of a particular kind; more accurately, that to acknowledge and understand the distinction between moral and legal cosmopolitanism is not enough. In addition to moral cosmopolitanism's limited embrace of state sovereignty and, consequently, legal pluralism, a broad understanding of legal cosmopolitanism would also not suffice. Accordingly, it is important to distinguish between two different kinds of legal cosmopolitanism: natural law cosmopolitanism and positive law cosmopolitanism. This monograph explores legal positivism in further detail, i.e., how the world state is not a necessary consequence of positive law cosmopolitanism and, therefore, other options are possible, such as one that accepts a pluralism of pluralisms and embraces legal systems of different natures.
