Cosmopolitan trends across world regions

discerning a European exceptionalism

Victor Roudometof

William Haller

pp. 126-150

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

Abstract

Given the burgeoning literature on cosmopolitanism (as reviewed in Fine, 2007; and Beck and Szneider, 2006), it is clear that the cosmopolitan agenda is a major focus for scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. But a large part of the theoretical literature on cosmopolitanism is sometimes analytical and other times descriptive, while major proponents of the cosmopolitan agenda often intertwine analytical and descriptive modes of theorizing. In the analytical mode of theorizing, the goal is to articulate a conceptual framework, a paradigm or a meta-theory that provides a new "gaze" upon social reality (Mouzelis, 1995: 1). In this instance, the "cosmopolitan" is an attribute or a tool, and its heuristic validity is not subject to empirical verification. Such analytical categories stand apart from the sets of substantive statements that pertain to the social world as such. Normative and political cosmopolitanism are examples of such heuristic devices.