Citizens of the World: Cosmopolitanism and its Critics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The late 20th and early 21st centuries have witnessed the rise of left and right social movements across the Western world challenging the principles of freedom, toleration, and social progress at the heart of liberalism. Many of these movements contest liberalism’s focus on the atomistic individual as the primary unit of social and political life, positing that the particularistic identities of various social groupings—including those of family, religion, class, and nation—take precedence in political life. Such criticisms lie in sharp distinction to both Enlightenment-era optimism about the potential for a future world-state (cosmo-polis) and contemporary attempts to spread democracy and enact an international human rights regime. This course hopes to understand these contemporary nationalist movements by exploring the Enlightenment foundations of liberalism and its utopian emphasis on universal human rights and a future world-state. In this vein, we will read works by Immanuel Kant, Nicolas de Condorcet, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. To explore the opposition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the contemporary world, we will also consider works by Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Benedict Anderson, and Yoram Hazony.