Nach der Natur. Das Artensterben und die Moderne Kultur by Ursula K. Heise, and: Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence by Bruce Robbins, and: The Cosmopolitanism Reader ed. by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, and: Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies ed. by Gerard Delanty, and: The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism ed. by Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka, and: After Cosmopolitanism ed. by Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette Blaagaard (review)

Hardly a new concept, cosmopolitanism reaches far beyond the conceptual. Properly speaking, it is not an “ism” either. As is well known, it has a long and somewhat contested history behind it. This is the multimillennial history of a highly complex, metaphysical, moral, and cosmological idea, of a set of sociocultural practices, and, lately, of a critical methodology with ethical, political, and anthropological ramifications. Notably, all these have been entangled with broader histories such as those of classical or more recent humanism, the Enlightenment, modernity, modernization, urbanization, colonization, decolonization, and globalization. With some of these or with darker episodes thereof like Nazism and Communism—Soviet- and Chinese-style alike, pre- and post-World War II—cosmopolitanism’s basic tenets have been openly and commendably at loggerheads. In other cases, however, one can pinpoint embarrassing, “culturocentric,” and so de facto ironically “provincializing” complicities, which no longer warrant an unqualified use of the term. Consequently, what distinguishes post-Cold War cosmopolitan criticism from an earlier scholarship centered around the notion is that the former has gone out of its way to “localize” and pluralize the cosmopolitan (we are talking about cosmopolitanisms these days), viz., to acknowledge its variations and contradictions across centuries and places but also to reenergize it politically through culturalist and postcolonial revisions. The cosmopolitan has thus proven eminently salvageable as a sort of post-postcolonial critical model coming about—or, more likely, getting a new lease on life—in the wake of the early 1990s, epoch-making, “global turn” in theory. Ambivalent as they may still feel about it, (neo)cosmopolitan scholars have found it quite empowering analytically at a time accelerated globalization, in spite of its notorious incongruities and disparities, provides a challenging environment for new cosmopolitan venues, sodalities, worldviews, and discourses. Having passed the test of critical genealogies for the most part beholden to postcolonial agendas sponsored by still incomplete national projects or by outright ethno-fundamentalist nostalgias, cosmopolitanism has spawned an entire academic industry: cosmopolitan studies.

If the titles succinctly reviewed here are any indication, this industry is in full swing. Now, as an industry, keen, that is, on supplying the necessary interpretive-pedagogical resources and reference tools (“readers,” “handbooks,” “companions,” etc.) and on staking out its territory in various disciplines, terminologies, and book markets, this has been, alongside other similar ventures in critical theory over the past few decades, a predominantly English-language phenomenon. Quintessentially comparative undertakings if done right, cosmopolitan inquiries have been led usually by U. S. and British critics, or by critics residing in North America and the UK, who are little known for research in languages and on cultures beyond the Anglophone world. While they have attended occasionally to the time-honored traditions of cosmopolitan thought, lifestyle, and association of other regions and idioms, they have rarely dealt with the texts at hand in the original, nor have they paid a lot of attention to the cosmopolitan literature (“secondary sources”) in those idioms, with major languages of comparative investigation such as French and German among them. For all the impatient rhetoric deployed around the...