Cosmopolitanism

The word cosmopolitan can be traced to the Greek Cynic philosophers Antisthenes (c. 445–365 B.C.E.) and his student Diogenes of Sinope (d. c. 320 B.C.E.). In the fourth century B.C.E., Diogenes likely responded to inquiry about his citizenship by boldly asserting, "I am a citizen of the world." His statement, though often used as a humanistic slogan, expressed a rather negative notion. Since he was not a citizen of any particular locale, he was not obligated to serve his particular city-state. He offered his allegiance to no single government. The Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium (c. 335–c. 263 B.C.E.) articulated a similar sentiment, but with more constructive implications. He imagined citizenship as a series of concentric circles. The self inhabited the innermost ring of this inclusive model, followed by family, city, region, and so on. Thus Zeno understood the individual as a part of all other affiliations.

Early Christianity also offered a unique notion of cosmopolitanism: The disciple obtained a new, spiritual citizenship that transcended the bonds of local government and regional identity through following the teachings of Jesus. St. Paul (c. 66) expressed this in an open letter to devotees in Colossi, proposing that "there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free" (Col. 3:11). This deconstruction of status and ethnicity represented a significant development in the cosmopolitanism as a concept, even if the established Christian church has often been a source of division.

Several humanist intellectuals advocated a cosmopolitan ideology during the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The philosophes imagined themselves as inhabitants in a republic of letters that transcended mere national boundaries. Believing in the preeminence of reason and scientific discovery, these men forged bonds of intellectual discourse throughout the North Atlantic. The ideas of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) were especially influential through the beginning of the twenty-first century. His writing advocated perpetual peace between nation-states during a time when nations were still being defined.

Contemporary scholars have implemented the cosmopolitanism of nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century Indians alongside that of Kant. Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) united the teachings of the Indian religious leader Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) with claims of scientific validity to increase awareness of the physical and spiritual practice of yoga. His contemporary, the poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), an undoubted anticolonial himself, chided the political and religious leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) for his penchant toward national self-reliance. Instead, Tagore pleaded for a transnational interdependency. The work of these men still exercises influence upon spiritual and political cosmopolitanism.

In each of these contexts, the ideal of cosmopolitanism sought to eclipse local or regional loyalties with the belief that humans share a bond free from provincial affiliations. Whether predicated on mysticism or reason, cosmopolitanism as an ideal locates the individual within a world community. However, those espousing the ideal have not always turned this admirable belief into a reality. Religious exclusion and ethnic nationalism have continued to flourish despite these recurrent appearances of a cosmopolitan ideal. However, this is not to say that cosmopolitanism has not been practiced in various times and locales.