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Within the past five years, a host of initiatives in critical and democratic theory have been launched under the old sign of cosmopolitanism. The symposium "Cosmopolitanism Then and Now" published in a recent issue of Constellations 1 is but one of a flurry of relevant happenings in the quarterlies. The Partisan Review and Dissent printed ringing cosmopolitan manifestos from two continental theorists, Pascal Bruckner and Ulrich Beck, 2 and American Literary History published a state-of-the-art essay on cultural theory declaring that cosmopolitanism was the concept now replacing multiculturalism in the work of the most methodologically up-to-date and ideologically self-aware of literary scholars. 3 Public Culture has announced its intention to devote an entire issue to cosmopolitanism. The movement has found strong voices in a number of disciplinary communities, as represented, for example, by Exactly why the new cosmopolitanism emerged with such force in the second half of the 1990s is an interesting question I will not try to answer here. 8 Instead, I want to attempt an analysis that seems to me more urgently needed. I want to indicate the most prominent features of the new cosmopolitanism, and, at the risk of rendering the movement more unified than it is, to explain how it is marking out a distinctive doctrinal position between what I believe is best called the 'universalism' of Nussbaum and the 'pluralism' of Will Kymlicka. In so doing, I will call attention to the relevance of the case of the United States to the development of a cosmopolitanism responsive to contemporary global conditions.

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