Cosmopolitanisms

Summary: Cosmopolitanism is less an ideal than a description. It merely assumes that wherever and whenever history has set peoples in motion across national boundaries, sometimes by force, many of them and their descendants will show signs of divided loyalties and a hybrid identity. Cosmopolitanism should no longer be conceived as singular - an overrriding loyalty to humanity as a whole-but plural. Instead of an unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction, we now have many blooming, fleshed-out particulars. How much do these variants have in common with each other? How much of the concept's old normative sense is preserved or transformed by these empirical particulars? What is it exactly that makes them interesting, makes them valuable?