Cosmopolitanism in Modernity

At the close of the twentieth century, cosmopolitanism emerged as an important source of ideas for approaching the current challenges and opportunities of the intensifying global interconnections and socioeconomic disparities within and across borders. Anand Bertrand Commissiong analyzes the contributions of theorists seeking cosmopolitan solutions to struggles for human happiness and dignity. He focuses on the ways in which the ideal has been forced to adapt, by accepting its limitations, as it maintains its fundamental insistence on the potential of universal human community that simultaneously constitutively encompasses difference. He examines a combination of strategies specifically addressing individual, communal and intercommunal levels of human interaction that he argues are the most productive ways forward. Commissiong recommends non-imperialist, accountable, coalitional strategies that set the stage for a different understanding of human beings in our contemporary globalizing world by offering a broad approach that can form coalitions with ideals beyond Western traditions, such as satyagraha, in order to conceive of dynamic human individuality and community that stretches beyond local boundaries. Commissiong makes a powerful argument for a new type of cosmopolitanism that is vital to the establishment of a truly just human existence at institutional, communal, and individual levels.