Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings are members of a single community. Its adherents are known as cosmopolitan or cosmopolite. Cosmopolitanism is both prescriptive and aspirational, believing humans can and should be "world citizens" in a "universal community". The idea encompasses different dimensions and avenues of community, such as promoting universal moral standards, establishing global political structures, or developing a platform for mutual cultural expression and tolerance.

For example, Kwame Anthony Appiah articulates a cosmopolitan community where individuals from varying locations (physical, economic, etc.) enter relationships of mutual respect despite their differing beliefs (religious, political, etc.). In a looser but related sense, "cosmopolitan" is also used to describe places where people of various ethnic, cultural and/or religious backgrounds live together and interact with each other.

The word derives from the Ancient Greek: κοσμοπολίτης, or kosmopolitês, formed from "κόσμος", kosmos, i.e. "world", "universe", or "cosmos", and πολίτης, "politês", i.e. "citizen" or "[one] of a city". Contemporary usage defines the term as "citizen of the world".

Definitions of cosmopolitanism usually begin with the Greek etymology of "citizen of the world". However, as Appiah points out, "world" in the original sense meant "cosmos" or "universe", not earth or globe as current use assumes.

Kleingeld and Brown distinguish between moral, political, cultural and economic forms of cosmopolitanism. In the United States, two forms of cosmopolitanism have been established. For one, there is a political cosmopolitan nationalism that has defined and constructed other races.^{[clarification needed]} On the other hand, ethno-cultural cosmopolitanism that celebrates multiculturalism has benefited from an upswing in the United States after World War II. A definition of cosmopolitanism that handles this issue is given in a recent (2014) book on political globalization:

Cosmopolitanism can be defined as a global politics that, firstly, projects a sociality of common political engagement among all human beings across the globe, and, secondly, suggests that this sociality should be either ethically or organizationally privileged over other forms of sociality.

Cosmopolitanism can be traced back to Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412 B.C.), one of the founders of Cynicism in Ancient Greece. It was said that when Diogenes was "Asked where he came from, he answered: 'I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês)'". At the time, the broadest basis of social identity among Greeks was either the individual city-state or the culturally and linguistically homogeneous Hellenic group.

Stoicism, another Greek school of thought that was founded roughly a century later, built upon Diogenes' idea, with many of its thinkers and adherents stressing that each human being "dwells [...] in two communities – the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration". A common way to understand Stoic cosmopolitanism is through Hierocles' circle model of identity, which states that individuals should regard themselves as concentric circles: the first one around the self, followed by immediate family, extended family, local group, citizens, countrymen, humanity. Within these circles human beings feel a sense of "affinity" or "endearment" towards others, which the Stoics termed Oikeiôsis. The task of world citizens becomes then to "draw the circles somehow towards the centre, making all human beings more like our fellow city dwellers, and so forth".