The New Cosmopolitanism and the Eighteenth Century

This essay takes stock of the pivotal role played by the Enlightenment in efforts to theorize a new cosmopolitanism. Recent attempts to reframe the concept for the global age have purveyed facile associations of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism with imperialism and racism, while also strategically averting a substantive redefinition of cosmopolitanism. An analysis of the eighteenth-century figure of the cosmopolitan, which is marked by its situation in rhetorically charged but often hypothetical or fictive discourses, reveals an unrecognized tradition of elusiveness in the cosmopolitan which both informs and stalls its current revival.