Cosmopolitan liberalism and its limits

Craig Calhoun

pp. 105-125

in: Roland Robertson, Anne S. Krossa (eds), European cosmopolitanism in question, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Most versions of cosmopolitanism are contained within liberalism. They are grounded in thinking about individuals — their rights, tastes, and potential travels through the world, and indeed also their ethical obligations. They have much less to say about social transformations that would raise the opportunities and standards of living of the poor, or about collective struggles that might bring these about. In this they share something with nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism. Compared to the previous aristocratic closure of opportunities, it helped underwrite a new openness. But it offered much less to struggles to transform capitalist inequalities. And it was often actively hostile to attempts by craft workers and others to defend their traditional communities.¹ So it is today with those enthusiastic about a range of new technologies and willing to accept the economic relations that shape their distribution and use. There is a tension running through modern history between struggles to open new individual opportunities — for those with the resources to take them up — and struggles to transform social structures to benefit those much less well off. Both of these struggles are important, though they have proved hard to integrate.