The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theory

Abstract

Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be understood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self-problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities.

Cosmopolitanism as a Concept and a Social Phenomenon

“…Modern researchers distinguish different types of "contradictory cosmopolitanisms" (Hannerz, 2005), "high" and "low" cosmopolitanisms. In the opinion of G. Delanty (2006), modern cultural cosmopolitanism, unlike previous similar projects, is more characteristic not of high, but of mass culture.…”

“…If starting from antiquity and until recently, cosmopolitan ideas developed within the framework of moral and political theories, today cosmopolitanism is beginning to be considered not only as an "ideological construct", but also a phenomenon rooted in social reality itself (Delanty, 2006;Beck, 2003).…”

“…The same view is held also by G. Delanty who notes that the starting point of the critical cosmopolitan social theory is the recognition of many kinds of cosmopolitanism (2006). At the same time, researchers recognize as an important characteristic of the cosmopolitan idea the emphasis on "openness", pluralism of the modern world order formed as a result of the interaction between local and global entities, and between different cultures themselves (Beck, 2003;Delanty, 2006;Hannerz, 1990Hannerz, , 2005.…”

“…Within the framework of the post-universalist concept of cosmopolitanism, its content is the expression of tension between local and global, universal and particular, while multiculturalism is simply aimed at plurality (Delanty, 2006).…”

“…There are also distinguished such forms of cosmopolitanism as economic, political, moral, and cultural, but the most common is the approach within which moral, political and cultural aspects of cosmopolitanism are distinguished (Delanty, 2006).…”