Cosmopolitanism and nationalism†

Ernest Gellner was, among many other things, a cosmopolitan -both intuitively and by conscious commitment.He was also one of the great analysts of nationalism in our age.I hope my analysis of some problematic and promising relationships between these two clusters of ideas reflects appropriately the huge debt all students of these topics owe Gellner.But there is another sense in which Gellner is an apt exemplar.He was nearly equally philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist.And I want at least to suggest philosophical, anthropological, and sociological dimensions in contemporary cosmopolitan discourse and suggest that all three need to command our attention.We need to achieve a certain disciplinary cosmopolitanism, which, I would suggest, does not require us to give up nationalist attachments to our disciplines but does require us to reach beyond them and sometimes look critically at them.Cosmopolitanism has become an enormously popular rhetorical vehicle for claiming at once to be already global and to have the highest ethical aspirations for what globalisation can offer.It names a virtue of considerable importance.But, and these are my themes, it is not at all clear (a) that cosmopolitanism is quite so different from nationalism as sometimes supposed, (b) whether cosmopolitanism is really supplanting nationalism in global politics, and (c) whether cosmopolitanism is an ethical complement to politics, or in some usages a substitution of ethics for politics. Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginarySalman Rushdie (2000) writes that 'among the great struggles of man -good/ evil, reason/unreason, etc. -there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey'.Cosmopolitanism is a central way in which the modern era has organised 'the fantasy of Away'.The term is operative in culture and commerce, ethics and politics.Whether as the fashionable man of the world or the responsible (and gender neutral) citizen of the world, the cosmopolitan inhabits the world.