Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginary

Daedalus

Volumn 137, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 105-114

  Calhoun, Craig ^a,b  

^a SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL   (United States)

^b NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 47749087809     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/daed.2008.137.3.105     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: Norton, 2006), xiii.
2. One of the several bartenders with claims to have invented the Cosmopolitan, Toby Ceccini of the Odeon in New York's Tribeca, entitled his autobiography Cosmopolitan : A Bartender's Story (New York : Broadway, 2004) - and the pun is intentional. Tribeca is the New York neighborhood most identified with the 1990s boom, but the boom was, in general, identified with the Silicon Valley - apt then that the blogging consensus gives San Francisco the strongest claim on inventing the drink of the decade. But only in New York did the relevant bartender write his autobiography. It was that sort of decade.
3. While cosmopolitan is the first category listed, the ads go on for many pages, organized also (for the less explicitly cosmopolitan) by caste, community, language, religion, profession, and previous marital status. International educational credentials are noted throughout, but only in the cosmopolitan section are alliances invited specifically in terms like "Cultured, Cosmopolitan, Westernized" or "Smart, Westernized, Cosmopolitan working for MNC."
4. U.K. Ministry for Trade and Investment, online at http://www. investoverseas.org/United_Kingdom/UK_Sectors/Food_and_ Drink.htm.
5. Examples can readily be multiplied from almost any market imaginable : "With a more cosmopolitan Britain driven by 'lifestyle' and 'design' home and garden television programmes..." (http ://hiddenwires.co.uk/ resourcesarticles2004/articles2004050305.html).
6. In Britain, as elsewhere, though, the years after 2001 marked a change. "Suddenly the celebration of postnational, cosmopolitan Britain has been eclipsed by the return of 'security and identity' issues," as David Goodheart put it in 2006 (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id= 3445).
7. Bob Ayling (Chief Executive Officer, British Airways), in British Airways News, June 10, 1997; see also http ://www.euran.com/BC/ art&BritishAirways.htm (accessed April 7, 2007).
8. See http ://www.jyanet.com/cap/0614fe1.htm (accessed January 15, 2007).
9. See Melissa Aronczyk, "Nations, New and Improved: Branding National Identity," in C. Calhoun and R. Sennett, eds., Practicing Culture (Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2007).
10. In this, as in other ways, cosmopolitanism echoes rather than transcends nationalism, emphasizing direct connection rather than institutional mediation; see Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
11. There are exceptions, including efforts to understand cosmopolitanism from within various scales of relationships across lines of difference rather than categorical similarity on a global scale. See Sheldon Pollock, "Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History," Public Culture 12 (3) (2000): 591-625.
12. Kimberly Yuracko, Perfectionism and Contemporary Feminist Values (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2003), 91.
13. Mahesh Krishnaswamy, http ://mahesh.sulekha.com/blog/post/2000/06/how-to- be-cosmopolitan.htm.
14. Craig Calhoun, "The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers : Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism," South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4) (2003) : 869-897.
15. For important and forceful recent statements of cosmopolitanism as universalism, see Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
16. and Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice : Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2006).
17. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Arendt's account of the creative capacity at the heart of being human is inspired largely by ancient Greek thought. Christians and Jews may also draw similar ideas from the biblical book of Genesis, where creative potential is part of what humans derive from being created in the image of God.