Cosmopolitics, the concept of a world politics based on shared democratic values, is in an increasingly fragile state.

Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal is an influential attempt by a European philosopher to transform the burdensome legacy of Western thought. Reconsidering her comprehensive engagement with the cosmology of the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, this article reveals two concepts as foundational to Stengers’ cosmopolitics: civilization and commerce. While not usually associated with a critical political theory, in her development of what we call a commercial political ontology, Stengers explores the modes of inheriting these ostracized notions. By tracing (...) the genealogy of this political ontology back to Pericles’ first explicit defense of persuasion as a requisite for civilization, we argue that Pericles’ famous funeral oration provides the structure for Whitehead’s cosmology, and, ultimately, Stengers’ cosmopolitics. As such, we understand her cosmopolitical proposal as a dress rehearsal of a funeral eulogy for bourgeois society. (shrink)

"Isabelle Stengers presents us with a new way of understanding a remarkably diverse range of sciences and their relation to a material and living world. Playing with a position both inside the practices that constitute and transform science and outside the sciences as their mode of conceptualization, Stengers explores the limits, constraints, and inventions that fuse modern science and contemporary society." Elizabeth Grosz --.

In 1795 Immanuel Kant proclaimed that the peoples of the earth have entered into a "universal community". Since Kant wrote this the processes of inter-connection between the peoples of the earth has grown even more pronounced and the notion of "cosmopolitics" has thus come to seem a defining one for the contemporary age. As such this volume makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates about international law, global ecology and economy and transnational synergies. The volume is inter-disciplinary and is (...) intended to be a contribution to a debate that crosses borders and disciplines. (shrink)

This introduction suggests a set of connections between the understanding of modernity and the opening up of a new understanding of politics as cosmopolitics. It argues that the modern understanding of the political has suffered a set of displacements both in regard to understanding cosmology and in the place of the human in relation to technology.

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful (...) common world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions. (shrink)

From Einstein’s quest for a unified field theory to Stephen Hawking’s belief that we “would know the mind of God” through such a theory, contemporary science—and physics in particular—has claimed that it alone possesses absolute knowledge of the universe. In a sweeping work of philosophical inquiry, originally published in French in seven volumes, Isabelle Stengers builds on her previous intellectual accomplishments to explore the role and authority of science in modern societies and to challenge its pretensions to objectivity, rationality, and (...) truth. For Stengers, science is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape them. She addresses conceptual themes crucial for modern science, such as the formation of physical-mathematical intelligibility, from Galilean mechanics and the origin of dynamics to quantum theory, the question of biological reductionism, and the power relations at work in the social and behavioral sciences. Focusing on the polemical and creative aspects of such themes, she argues for an ecology of practices that takes into account how scientific knowledge evolves, the constraints and obligations such practices impose, and the impact they have on the sciences and beyond. This perspective, which demands that competing practices and interests be taken seriously rather than merely tolerated, poses a profound political and ethical challenge. In place of both absolutism and tolerance, she proposes a cosmopolitics—modeled on the ideal scientific method that considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question—that reintegrates the natural and the social, the modern and the archaic, the scientific and the irrational. _Cosmopolitics I_ includes the first three volumes of the original work. _Cosmopolitics II_ will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in Spring 2011. (shrink)

This book explores cosmopolitanism's radical dynamic as expressed in the struggles from below, all over the world, against exclusion and domination, pointing to the horizon of another world that appears possible. It shows that cosmopolitanism emerges negatively through disaffiliation from the given forms of belonging and by questioning of the existing meanings and unjust practices. Through a radical critique, cosmopolitanism goes to the roots of the existing world order based on the nation-state, exposes its exclusionary structure, and brings instead the (...) idea of a World Republic where No One Is Illegal and where all are equal citizens of the world. Caraus captures this radical dynamic in a cluster of novel concepts, such as 'cosmopolitanism of dissent', 'post-foundational cosmopolitanism', 'cosmopolitan ontology', 'institution of critique', 'radical cosmopolitical love', all integrated into an approach of a militant and radical cosmopolitics that reclaims the legacy of the first cosmopolitan stance of the Ancient Cynics. (shrink)

This paper assesses Jurgen Habermas' reconstruction of Kant's cosmopolitan project suggesting ways in which this reconstruction creates new problems that were not part of Kant's endeavour as well as indicating critical appreciation of the idea of the project.

While supporting the cosmopolitan pursuit of a world that respects all rights and interests, James D. Ingram believes political theorists have, in their approach to this project, compromised its egalitarian and emancipatory principles. Focusing on recent debates without losing sight of cosmopolitanism's ancient and Enlightenment roots, Ingram confronts the philosophical difficulties of defending universal ideals and the implications for ethics and political theory. In morality as in politics, theorists have generally focused first on discovering universal values and second on their (...) implementation. Ingram argues that only by prioritizing the development and articulation of universal values through political action in the fight for freedom and equality can theorists do justice to these efforts and cosmopolitanism's universal vocation. Only by proceeding from the local to the global, from the bottom up rather than from the top down, on the basis of political practice rather than moral ideals, can we salvage moral and political universalism. In this book, Ingram provides the clearest, most systematic account yet of this schematic reversal and its radical possibilities. (shrink)

In light of recent attempts to determine the political role and status of corporations I discuss the normative implications of considering multinational corporations (MNCs) as political actors. I posit that corporations do indeed have a new political role in a connected world, in particular with respect to matters of human rights, social and environmental justice. We thus find a growing need for ethical and political knowledge to inform and guide the emerging political co-responsibility of MNCs. I draw on the rich (...) literature in cosmopolitanism to seek such guidance and discuss some of the implications that a cosmopolitan perspective implies. (shrink)

Scholars in multispecies ethnography, the ontological turn, new materialisms, science and technology studies (STS), assemblage urbanism and other movements within the posthumanities broadly considered often treat cosmopolitics, initially proposed by Isabelle Stengers and subsequently taken up by Bruno Latour, as a single coherent concept. However, Stengers’s cosmopolitics differs considerably from Latour’s. The difference is most clearly visible in their contrasting positions on the concept of universality. Even though their divergence on universality could be considered a minor philosophical dispute (...) among intellectual allies, it should not be underestimated. It determines what sort of political practice each of these philosophers envisions with cosmopolitics. Their visions of political practice are substantially different. This article will examine Latour’s and Stengers’s diverging positions on universality, delineate the two types of cosmopolitics, and, finally, analyze what sort of political practice each of these cosmopolitics implies. (shrink)

This article analyzes astrobiology as a cosmopolitical project—the ways in which astrobiological “sensemaking” practices do philosophical, political, cultural, ontological, and ethical work as much as they do scientific work. More specifically, this article argues that astrobiology is engaged in the crafting of a new “origin myth” that makes sense of humanity’s place in the universe during our transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. In doing so, this article traces the ways in which astrobiology employs scientific methodologies and engages with (...) popular culture in ways that do four kinds of major work commonly found in origin myths: telling the origin story, demarcating the boundaries between self and the other, giving normative guidance, and declaring a shared societal purpose. (shrink)

La mondialisation libère les uns et oppresse les autres. Et dans cette partition du monde, chacun est renvoyé à une identité prétendument essentielle et "vraie". D'où un véritable "piège identitaire", négation de l'autre et de sa subjectivité, parfois justifié par l'anthropologie - à l'opposé de sa vocation humaniste et critique. Face à ce défi, le regard contemporain sur le monde doit être repensé, en dépassant le relativisme culturel et ses "ontologies" identitaires. Dans ce livre, Michel Agier prend une position résolument (...) "décentrée", invitant le lecteur à reconsidérer les sens de la frontière : lieu de passage, instable et sans cesse négociée, elle nous fait humains en instituant la place et l'existence sociale de chacun tout en reconnaissant celles des autres. Le mur est son contraire : il incarne le piège identitaire contre l'altérité. Cette enquête sur l'état du monde et sa violence, sur les frontières et les murs, sur le sens des mots ("identité", "civilisation", "race", "culture") propose ainsi une réflexion originale sur la condition cosmopolite, figure à double face : d'un côté, l'étranger absolu, global et anonyme, que dessinent les politiques identitaires sous des traits effrayants ; de l'autre, le sujet-autre, celui qui, venant de l'extérieur de "mon identité", m'oblige à penser tout à la fois au monde, à moi et aux autres. En plaidant pour la validité de l'approche anthropologique, Michel Agier montre ici que pour dépasser le piège identitaire, d'autres manières de penser sont possibles. Réapprendre à passer les frontières où se trouve l'autre, à les reconnaître, est devenu l'un des enjeux majeurs de notre temps. (shrink)

Over the last decade, the Anthropocene has overrun the discourses of the humanities and social sciences. Remarkably, two of the most astute commentators, the cross-disciplinary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith and the unorthodox philosopher Isabelle Stengers, find inspiration for grappling with these issues in the same apparently odd place: the work of the Polish microbiologist and comparative epistemologist Ludwik Fleck. The first part of this essay explores the role of Fleck's radical constructivism in Smith's analyses of perplexing Anthropocene realities and Stengers's (...) arguments for slowing down science and learning to “compose with Gaia.” In conjunction, they generate a pattern of speculative, conceptual, practical, and political motifs for dealing with changing climates. The second half of the essay uses those insights to test a divergent series of proposals for how to conceive science, politics, theory, and environmental relations in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Following a controversy over the construction of a waste incinerator in the Fos-sur-Mer industrial area, residents pointed to the lack of knowledge of the industry’s cumulative impact on their health and environment. Under pressure, some of their elected representatives supported the creation of an independent scientific organization, the Ecocitizen Institute for Pollution Awareness. Its objective was to conduct localized scientific research on the effects of pollution and to lobby the administration to change its regulatory practices. This paper examines the efforts (...) made to ensure that the “undone science” gets done, by focusing on the specificities of this industrialized site. We look at a participatory biomonitoring experiment that aimed to document pollution in the Gulf of Fos where scientists working for the IECP accepted anglers’ requests and switched from an acknowledged sentinel species to another species. We tell the many stories that were shared with us about how conger qualified as a more suitable “cosmopolitical fish” in the study of pollution. Elaborating on actor–network theory and multispecies ethnographies, we discuss the appropriateness of congers as the newly appointed sentinel species. We argue that this demonstrates the importance of the “ecology of relations” in maintaining the livability of the area. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 2, Page 245-267, February 2022. The ancient Cynic Diogenes was the first to declare ‘I am a citizen of the world ’ and the other Cynics followed him. In The Courage of the Truth, Michel Foucault analyses the Cynic mode of parrhēsia and living in truth, however, his text expands the cosmopolitical amplitude of Cynics since the Cynics’ true life contains an inherent cosmopolitan logic. Identifying the core of the Cynic true life in (...) the care for the self that leads to the care for the others within the horizon of the possibility of another life and another world, Foucault shows how the Cynic establishes ‘an intense bond with the whole of humankind’, cares ‘for all mankind’ and for the whole world as a ‘functionary of humanity’ and, as ‘the scout of humanity’, the Cynic prefigures the future and exercises the ‘government of the universe’. This article argues that Foucault’s account on Cynics maps the very first moments of becoming cosmopolitan and offers an insightful perspective on the process of achieving a cosmopolitan subjectivity, a process displayed by different expressions of cosmopolitanism, and especially the ‘insurgent cosmopolitanism’ from the bottom up. (shrink)

This volume explores Kant's cosmopolitanism and its implications for a Kantian-inspired cosmopolitics. The contributors provide a definitive source and specification of key new areas in the field of Kantian cosmopolitanism and how it is integral to current debates in political theory, political philosophy and international relations.

This erratum is published as name was misspelt in references in original publication. “In James Malazita’s ‘Astrobiology’s Cosmopolitics and the Search for an Origin Myth for the Anthropocene’, Daniel Coren’s last name is misspelled as ‘Cohen’ in the references. The correct entry should be ‘Coren D Anthropocentric biocentrism in a hybrid. Ethics Environ 20:48–60’.”.

This article explores the bases of Kant’s cosmopolitanism in his more systematic writings on freedom, judgment, and community. My argument is that, if we peer beneath his more explicitly normative prescriptions for achieving “perpetual peace,” we find the tools not just of a cosmopolitan vision but what we might call a “cosmopolitical method.” While many assume Kant’s political thought descends directly from his moral philosophy, a look back at relevant passages in the first Critique reveals an alternative reading that points (...) toward his theory of reflective judgment, which combines practical freedom with judgments based on theoretical concepts. Of particular importance is Kant’s conception of community as commercium, through which Kant discerns all matters of right to concern the way free actors are constrained to share the earth in common. These considerations allow for a broader way of thinking about Kantian cosmopolitanism, one that is responsive to the reflective judgment of world citizens as they encounter new challenges. (shrink)

This paper decentres the predominance of statism and deliberation in ecological democracy scholarship. We use insights from eco-anarchism and cosmopolitics to identify democratic configurations beyond capitalism and its entanglement with the nation-state. These configurations are premised on the idea that sustainability transformation not only implies a move beyond capitalism and the nation-state, but might comprise their dismantling. We propose and apply an analytical framework encompassing the dimensions actors, praxis and processes and institution(s) to contrast these three political theories and (...) bring forward a diversity of democratic praxes that revolve around the generation of autonomy and the building of multispecies political communities. Finally, we discuss transformation possibilities from within the capitalist nation-state and propose research directions for post-statist, autonomous and diverse ecological democracies. (shrink)

In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that "cosmos" and "hearth" are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human.

Introduction: Staring into the abyss -- Situating the self in the abyss -- The mystical abyss: via negativa -- The dialectical abyss: the restless negative of Hegel -- The colonial abyss: groundlessness of being -- Creolizing cosmopolitics: poetics from the deep.

As a flashpoint for specific instances of conflict, Muslim sartorial practices have at times been seen as being antagonistic to “western” ideas of gender equality, secularity, and communicative practices. In light of this, I seek to highlight the ways in which such moments of antagonism actually might be understood on “cosmopolitical” terms, that is, through a framework informed by a critical and political approach to cosmopolitanism itself. Thus, through an “agonistic cosmopolitics” I here argue for a more robust political (...) understanding of what a cosmopolitan orientation to cultural difference can offer education. The paper moves from a focus on harmony to agonism and from cosmopolitanism to the cosmopolitical, and within each I discuss the questions of democracy and universality, respectively. Drawing on, the work of Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig, I discuss the basis upon which our agonistic interactions can inform education in promoting better ways of living together. This requires, in my view, nothing less than a clear understanding of the very difficulties of pluralism and a questioning of some of the ways we often reflect on the political dimension of these difficulties. I offer some reflections on what an agonistic cosmopolitics has to offer the debates surrounding the wearing of various forms of Muslim dress in schools in the conclusion. My overall claim is that cosmopolitanism as a set of ideas that seek more peaceful forms of living together on a global scale is in need of a theoretical framework that faces directly the difficulties of living in a dissonant world. (shrink)

This article explores the role of constitutional thought in Latour’s work on cosmopolitics. It will study his non-modern proposal in the Politics of Nature (2004) and argue for a constitutional rather than political understanding. To address criticisms of being too metaphysical or unpractical, we will work out the notion of a “constitutional ecology of practices” to highlight how different practices such as politics, science, organization, but also law, all contribute to the design of the stage and processes for composing (...) a common world. Special focus will here be placed on the role of “epigrams”: practical models for ordering contributions of different practices or modes in hierarchical relationships. This renders them identifiable, mobilizable, and contestable as cross-cutting models for shaping mutual relations in concrete collaborative settings. The case of the legal regulation of robots will be presented as an example of a cosmopolitical attempt to introduce non-human entities in the common collective. We will here observe the role that epigrams play in framing, ordering and contesting the epistemic contributions of the various practices involved in this innovation ecology. This case will be used to discuss Latour’s proposals and to study non-modern constitutionalism in action. (shrink)

The article explores the demands that the conflictual dimension of globalization poses for a cosmopolitan education. Such an emphasis seems necessary in times where the populations who undertake inter- and intra-national border crossings are increasingly those who are forced to: those trying to escape unbearable poverty, atrocious wars, the disenfranchised and victims of racist, sexist or religious persecution. Reflecting on the experiences articulated in the two graphic novels, Persepolis and American Born Chinese, the dimension of the globalizing world and its (...) impact and demands on its future world citizens which comes to the fore is one that highlights the necessity for learning how to take a critical and political stance rather than the search for how education can facilitate a smooth adaptation to a new mobile order. Stanley Cavell’s examination of the relationship between autobiography, philosophy, and the founding of a self-reliant voice will be reconsidered in light of its contribution to re-thinking the meaning of a cosmopolitan education between critical self-appropriation and developing a transformative political vision of a new societal order. (shrink)

This paper argues that historical research on late medieval and early modern craft guilds fails to escape teleological and anachronistic views, including when they are addressed as commons or ‘institutions for collective action’. These present-day conceptual lenses do not only create idealized views on guilds, but also of the contexts in which they operated, especially the state and the market. This is especially the case with neo-institutional views on the commons, which fall back on a transhistorical rational actor, who can (...) choose between three options for the allocation of resources and surpluses, namely the state, the market and the common. The paper shows that guilds were fundamentally entangled with both the state and the market and that their ethic implied a less utilitarian and instrumental attitude towards natural resources. The consequence of this is that the history of the guilds offers different lessons to present-day commoners than those implied by present-day research. With an eye at launching a reflection on that, I argue in favour of a cosmopolitical perspective, which invites to take fundamentally different worldviews seriously. This includes questioning our own conceptual and analytical abstractions like the state, the market and the individual, up to and including the very distinction between nature and society or nature and politics, which are at the very basis of modern science itself. (shrink)

This paper engages with the topic of hospitality in its reading of Kant as a thinker of ‘globality’; that is, as one who is keenly attuned to the various and complex ways humans strive to ‘hospitalize’ this planet in their attempts to transform it into a working and living environment. Despite having no illusions about actual international traders’ practices, who all too often perpetuate injustices and commit crimes, he sets out a project for a different conception of commercium as a (...) cultural practice which should remind us of the finite nature of our planet and its resources, and of our own vulnerable dependence on it. This account of a more enlightened ‘spirit of trade’, which is sensitive to cultural difference and environmental issues, is the product of a mobile way of thinking which would favour a more fluid communication with people on the move. (shrink)