The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal

From one of our preeminent philosophers—winner of the Berggruen Prize—a work that engages critically with important examples of the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient Greece and Rome to the present.

The cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought begins with the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, responded that he was a citizen of the world. Rather than declaring his lineage, city, social class, or gender, he defined himself as a human being, implicitly asserting ...