ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitanism has deep historical roots and has come in various shapes. This chapter starts by providing a summary overview of the literature on cosmopolitanism’s different traditions and meanings with emphasis on the central role of moral universalism, cosmopolitanism as a distinct way of life, cosmopolitan democracy and cosmopolitanism’s relationship to patriotism, nationalism, and constitutionalism. The first section outlines how different analysts and traditions of thought understand cosmopolitanism and their proposals for shaping the world in accordance with cosmopolitan principles. In the second and final section, we zoom in on migration. In this section we, in effect, reverse the line of inquiry in that we start by outlining key issues in migration studies and examine where and in what sense cosmopolitanism can and should figure in this context. The second section’s sensitivity to context offers a more grounded perspective in contrast with the more prescriptive rendition of cosmopolitanism in the first section.
