Good Europeans and Neo-liberal Cosmopolitans: Ethics and Politics in Late Victorian Cosmopolitanism and Beyond

Abstract

In a recent discussion of “Victorian Internationalisms,” the term cosmopolitan was used to designate the domain of individual feeling or ethics of toleration in contrast to the more geopolitical terminology of “inter-” or “trans-national.”1 For Goodlad and Wright, the tendency of cosmopolitanism to evoke individual ethos rather than cultural, social, or political process suggests the merits of exploring complementary terms (ibid. 15). They then go on to discuss authors with “more complicated subject positions than ‘European or American first’ ” serving other ends than conventional “European” hegemony.