Cosmopolitan Vision Research Articles

“EMPIRE WITHOUT END”: CHARLOTTE SMITH AT THE LIMITS OF COSMOPOLITANISM

Charlotte Smith's recurring fantasy of becoming a “female Prospero” opens up her cosmopolitan imagination to encountering its limits, and its Others, whether internal or external. Focusing on two of Smith's later texts, the Italian novel Montalbert (1795) and the Jamaican narrative “The Story of Henrietta” (1800), this essay explores the borderlands of late eighteenth-century Europe and its colonies to examine the intersections of cosmopolitanism, nationalism and race. Exploring how a committed cosmopolitan, Europhile and feminist like Charlotte Smith imagines the borders of Europe and its empires can contribute to the unfolding understanding of how “Europe's” internal fissures extended toward its colonies (not only from them) in Romantic literature, and how revolution-era feminist cosmopolitanism coped with its contradictions and exclusions, whether sexual, racial or religious. Beginning with Montalbert and its displacement of The Aeneid's imperial vision of transnational romance, and moving to “Henrietta”'s troubled vision of the intersection of colonial and gender oppression, the essay considers how Smith's interrogation of gender and national ideologies reveals at once the ideals of her feminist cosmopolitanism and its limits.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS: RADICALISM IN A GLOBAL AGE

Abstract: The cosmopolitan imagination constructs a world order in which the idea of human rights is an operative principle of justice. Does it also construct an idealisation of human rights? The radicality of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, as developed by Kant, lay in its analysis of the roots of organised violence in the modern world and its visionary programme for changing the world. Today, the temptation that faces the cosmopolitan imagination is to turn itself into an endorsement of the existing order of human rights without a corresponding critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence. Is the critical idealism associated with Kantian cosmopolitanism at risk of transmutation into an uncritical positivism? We find two prevailing approaches: either the constitutional framework of the existing world order is presented as the realisation of the cosmopolitan vision, or cosmopolitanism is turned into a utopian vision of a world order in which power is subordinated to the rule of international law. I suggest that the difficulties associated with both wings of cosmopolitanism threaten the legitimacy of the project and call for an understanding and culture of human rights that is less exclusively “conceptual” and more firmly grounded in social theory.

IS LIBERAL NATIONALISM INCOMPATIBLE WITH GLOBAL DEMOCRACY?

Abstract: To respond to globalization‐related challenges, many contemporary political theorists have argued for forms of democracy beyond the level of the nation‐state. Since the early 1990s, however, political theory has also witnessed a renewed normative defense of nationhood. Liberal nationalists have been influential in claiming that the state should protect and promote national identities, and that it is desirable that the boundaries of national and political units coincide. At first glance, both positions—global democracy and nationalism—seem to contradict each other. We do not share this oppositional picture. Developing a more harmonic picture of nationalist ideals and cosmopolitan visions is the aim of this essay.

Cosmopolitan anxieties: Turkish challenges to citizenship and belonging in Germany

In Cosmopolitan Anxieties , Ruth Mandel explores Germany’s relation to the more than two million Turkish immigrants and their descendants living within its borders. Based on her two decades of ethnographic research in Berlin, she argues that Germany’s reactions to the postwar Turkish diaspora have been charged, inconsistent, and resonant of past problematic encounters with a Jewish “other.” Mandel examines the tensions in Germany between race-based ideologies of blood and belonging on the one hand and ambitions of multicultural tolerance and cosmopolitanism on the other. She does so by juxtaposing the experiences of Turkish immigrants, Jews, and “ethnic Germans” in relation to issues including Islam, Germany’s Nazi past, and its radically altered position as a unified country in the post–Cold War era. Mandel explains that within Germany the popular understanding of what it means to be German is often conflated with citizenship, so that a German citizen of Turkish background can never be a “real German.” This conflation of blood and citizenship was dramatically illustrated when, during the 1990s, nearly two million “ethnic Germans” from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union arrived in Germany with a legal and social status far superior to that of “Turks” who had lived in the country for decades. Mandel analyzes how representations of Turkish difference are appropriated or rejected by Turks living in Germany; how subsequent generations of Turkish immigrants are exploring new configurations of identity and citizenship through literature, film, hip-hop, and fashion; and how migrants returning to Turkey find themselves fundamentally changed by their experiences in Germany. She maintains that until difference is accepted as unproblematic, there will continue to be serious tension regarding resident foreigners, despite recurrent attempts to realize a more inclusive and “demotic” cosmopolitan vision of Germany.

The Last Musketeer of the French Revolution: Exploring the Republican Political Agenda of Pierre Bourdieu

This paper argues that Pierre Bourdieu was motivated by the frustration of the French Revolution. His work continually criticized the gap between the ideological promise of the Enlightenment and the actual persistence of inequality in modern France. This paper exposes the centrality of the failed revolution in Bourdieu's oeuvre by visiting four topics he delved into: Education, gender, globalization and the role of social science. The analysis shows that the contrast between the ideals of equality and meritocracy and their poor implementation in schools and universities has motivated his sharp critique of the French system of education. Similarly, the failure of the State to support gender equality drove him to expose the deeply embodied cultural mechanisms that guarantee the advantages men have over women. The paper further shows that Bourdieu also extended this preoccupation with the failure of the Revolution to global politics. Specifically, his recent critique of globalization and global organizations suggests that capitalist Western elites betray the cosmopolitan vision of the Revolution while using international law and global companies to exploit third world countries. Finally, the paper shows that Bourdieu's preoccupation with the Revolution reappeared in the role he projected for social science and concludes that, for Bourdieu, the French Revolution is still to come. In that sense, Bourdieu was consistently preoccupied with the Revolution, and it is thus most fitting to see him, emphatically, as the last Musketeer to fight the betrayal of the French republic. The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the Social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected, and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. (The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,

Global generations in world risk society

Does something called global generations exist? Do we need to adopt a outlook to understand the generational dynamic? It was Karl Mannheim who first drew attention to the role of generations in historical change, and who highlighted the importance of traumatic historical events in the creation of a generational consciousness. A cosmopolitan vision means social sciences and humanities which get rid off methodological nationalism and take globality and human social life on planet Earth seriously. Cosmopolitan social science differs from universalist science in that it is not based on something supposedly general, but on global variability, global interconnection and global intercommunication. Cosmopolitan sociology doesn't mean treating global generations as a single, universal generation with common symbols and a single consciousness. Rather, it conceptualises and analyses a multiplicity of global generations which appear as a set of interwoven futures. The relationships between these futures are no longer to be seen in terms of a polar star radiation from the North Atlantic segment of the globe, but as something in a wide spectrum of possible interactions

Allegory, Capital, Modernity: Peer Gynt and Ibsen's Modern Breakthrough

It is one of the least challenged suppositions of Ibsen criticism that Peer Gynt offers a satirical portrait of the titular hero's escapist flights of fancy.1 According to this canonical view, Ibse...

Cosmopolitan Visions: Ethnic Chinese and the Photographic Imagining of Indonesia in the Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial Periods

The history of photography in Indonesia reveals Chinese Indonesians—members of a marginalized, transnational minority—as active participants in the project of nation making, rendering visible the cosmopolitan origins of national formations. In the early postcolonial period, Chinese Indonesian amateur and studio photographers acted as cultural brokers who mediated global currents and reworked colonial-era conventions to forge new national visual idioms. The specific cosmopolitanisms of these two distinct groups of ethnic Chinese photographers yielded divergent iconographies that have remained important strands in Indonesia's visual and political culture, in which a nostalgic ideology of the “asli” (authentic, original, or indigenous) competes with an outward-looking vision of Indonesia as a location from which to participate in global modernity.

Religious Pluralism in an Era of Globalization: The Making of Modern Religious Identity

Impacted by the technologies that make the world a single place, the theological discourse on religious pluralism comes to expression in the era of globalization as religious differences are in ever greater contact. However, the construction of religious identity that emerged in the early stages of globalization may need to be rethought and theologies constructed on a “container theory” of difference and division replaced with outlooks that embrace hybridity and pursue a cosmopolitan vision.

What can Examining the Psychology of Nationalism Tell Us About Our Prospects for Aiming at the Cosmopolitan Vision?

Opponents of cosmopolitanism often dismiss the position on the grounds that cosmopolitan proposals are completely unrealistic and that they fly in the face of our human nature. We have deep psychological needs that are satisfied by national identification and so all cosmopolitan projects are doomed, or so it is argued. In this essay we examine the psychological grounds claimed to support the importance of nationalism to our wellbeing. We argue that the alleged human needs that nationalism is said to satisfy are: (i) either more complex than initially one might think or (ii) do not necessarily provide very strong grounds for the theses advocated by nationalists or (iii) can be well met in alternate ways than through national identification. Moreover, commitment to cosmopolitanism is not antithetical to meeting these needs: rather, more cosmopolitan worldviews can do quite well in meeting the needs of interest. Moreover, we argue that since nationalism is a fluid and socially constructed phenomenon, quite open to the influence of other factors, the current evidence suggests that central aspects of cosmopolitanism are quite feasible and realistic.

‘Power Smashes into Private Lives’

In Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie fashions a novel of global proportions, tracing the interlacing fortunes of characters from a small Kashmiri village and from the metropolises of North America and Europe. Against the backdrop of international networks of diplomacy, capital and Islamic terrorism, and the repressive forces of the Indian state, Rushdie explores both vernacular and global articulations of cosmopolitanism. The essay argues mainly that Rushdie draws in this novel on the ideal of Kashmiriyat to imagine possibilities of conviviality across religious differences. Ultimately, he projects this ideal of a reconstituted Kashmiriyat, characterized as a vernacular form of cosmopolitanism, onto a global screen. Appealing as such a projected ideal might be, it is problematic in that it advances an elite vision of cosmopolitanism.

The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries (review)

James D. Faubion (ed.) Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 277 pp. This is a book about ethics of affect as manifested in kinship relations. James Faubion asked a number of one-time doctoral students of anthropology at Rice University (Texas) and two like-minded colleagues to write essays about their own personal experiences of kinship. resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for present renewal of debates in anthropology of kinship. Each of contributors chose to focus on some aspect of their own kinship history which they somehow problematized. result is a number of fascinating essays dealing with what one might call margins of kinship:1 forgotten' relatives, manipulations of law of kinship, clandestine adoptions, love and hate, class and kinship, sibling cooperation and rivalry, sexual preference and legal family, etc., all accumulate to bring out a marvellously varied picture of middle-class kinship in United States. Indeed, although a number of contributors expound interestingly on their family histories in diverse places of origin around world (Eastern Europe, North Africa, Indian subcontinent, Trinidad), what they tell us are stories of kinship as lived in America. As a matter of fact, whilst writing their accounts, most of contributors not born in United States were undertaking a move to permanent residence there-to use Nityanand Deckha's words, they were becoming new citizens of West (153). book resonates with this sense of America as land of success and liberation which merges with authors' own pride in their individual success within academia as doctoral students. Karim, for example, tells us of her diasporic urge to remake myself into a subject who transcended kinship ties and was not bound by local and national habits and prejudices-a cosmopolitan subject. (118) Reddy, Deckha and Youngblood all make similar statements. Nevertheless, their location is decidedly in North America, which belies their cosmopolitanism. Indeed, not all venues and not all classes can grant aura of cosmopolitan subjecthood. Cosmopolitanism is a paradoxically local privilege that only some can exercise when they are accepted by certain countries and belong to certain classes. As Susan Ossman puts it elsewhere, The abstract, far-sighted nature of this cosmopolitan vision can easily lead us to ignore actual movements of people (2006: 561). In essays, logic of marginality2 is put to work wonderfully to reveal both relation between kinship and other aspects of social life and relation between people's discursive practices and those aspects of their lives which they know and share but which they normally have no means to speak of. Clearly, judging from emotional depth of accounts, for every single one of contributors, exercise came to have a self-revelatory, exutorial function. Thus, book is both a good read and a comment on how anthropological examination can breakthrough convention. Denise Youngblood (presently editor at CountryWatch, Houston) writes an essay about her family background in Trinidad, dealing mostly with issue of marriage across race and its relation to ethnicity, nation, and color. She shows us how the ideology of cosmopolitanism in Trinidad relates to production of both family and nation (48). She turns interestingly to Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital to show how marital and extra-marital sexual relations were used to produce family in a context where, due to dramatic boom and bust cycles which characterize Trinidad's economic history, wealth was seen as rather transient. According to her account, intermarriage3 is actually encouraged in Trinidad, as it produces a hybrid identity which furthers nation's sense of itself as cosmopolitan. …

Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers by Katja Garloff

91O Reviews arranger, and conferencier, do stand out as remarkable forwhat theyachieved under tryingcircumstances; others such as Gertrude Bodenwieser, the founder of a ballet school inAustralia, were equally remarkable. But there are no international figures or outstanding dramatists inLang's account. Some of theperformers did manage to make careers inAustralian theatre, film,and TV, and some of the exiles' enthusiasm for theatre almost certainly did transfer to awider sphere, but cabaret programmes and Bunte Abende tend to be for themoment, and small-scale community and mi nority theatre cannot compete with real world-class professional theatre. The real significance of such theatrewas what itmeant for the identity of theGermans and Austrians living inAustralia. It is doubtful, therefore,how farone can agree with Lang's finalclaim: thatwithout thisGerman-language theatrical activity theSydney Opera House might never have been built. INSTITUTE OF GERMANIC AND ROMANCE STUDIES J.M. RITCHIE Words fromAbroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German JewishWriters. By KATJAGARLOFF. (Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies) Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2005. xii+ 252 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978 o-8 I43-3245-0. Katja Garloff's book offersa rich and persuasive study of theworks ofGerman Jew ishwriters of the survivor generation in the context of diaspora theories,which have frequently ignored or elided a consideration of Jewish cultural paradigms. Look ingparadigmatically at authors received inpost-war West Germany, including Peter Weiss, Gunther Anders, Nelly Sachs, and Paul Celan, Garloff tests the applicability of recent diaspora theories to thepredicament of post-Shoah Jewish culture, arguing that diaspora constitutes itselfat the juncture of creativity and critical intervention. She makes her case through a critical consideration of diaspora theorists, including Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy, who have made important contri butions to current understandings of diaspora while only partially reflectingon the Jewish diaspora before the Shoah or ignoring italtogether. Against the positive con struction of dislocation as the site of incursion intohegemonic cultural discourses by Bhabha, Rosi Braidotti, and others, Garloff brings together the theoretical strands of diaspora, trauma, and testimony studies to show how the study of post-war German Jewishwriters instead highlights the intersecting traumatic and creative aspects of displacement. Garloff sets out with explorations of Theodor W. Adorno, whose I959 essay title 'Words fromAbroad' she borrows forher own book, as well as ofGulnther Anders and JeanAmery, todemonstrate theperceived or real dissonance of emigrants' voices from contemporaneous German debates on Germany's past and present. She goes on tomap inmore detail PeterWeiss's production of a tension between self-chosen and catastrophic dislocation inhis visions of cosmopolitanism. The next substantial chapter is dedicated toNelly Sachs's construction of the Jewish diaspora in rela tion to her references toZion. Garloff takes issue with the predominant reading of these passages as indications of Sachs's Zionist beliefs, and instead develops an in terpretation of Sachs's conception of Zion as ametahistorical sign ofmemory and cross-cultural encounter between Jews and non-Jews beyond geographical confines. From hereGarloff proceeds to the most complex and stimulating chapter ofher book, inwhich she discusses Paul Celan's ceuvre. She reads his I963 volume Die Niemands roseas attempting toundermine theboundaries of text, time, and geographical space in order to commemorate the destroyed Eastern European Jewish diaspora while creating, through itshistorical encryptions, a transitory alliance of readers. MLR, I02.3, 2007 91I At times, the breadth of approaches forming the theoretical core threatens to ob scure theclarity of theargument, aswhen Garloff moves from trauma theory's notion of testimony as a reconstitution of collectivity to the conception of the communal aspects of diaspora in theworks of Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin-a broad sweep both risking the generalization of concepts of community and neglecting to account for theworkings of art as distinct from other forms of enunciation. Moreover, the author herself leans towards an over-positive reading of diaspora in privileging it as the site of critical intervention into homogenizing constructions of cultural and personal origins. One wonders ifthese findingswould have taken on a different twist had textsbyGerman Jewishwriters received in theGDR also been considered, as the undifferentiated 'German' of thebook's title indeed seems topromise. On thewhole, however, Garloff's book succeeds in linking the often...

Living With Difference: Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Political Community

In Living with Difference: Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Political Community, Feyzi Baban makes an important intervention in the continuing debate over the possibility of cosmopolitan democracy at the global level. Baban summarizes the current debate over cosmopolitanism, weaving together its North American and European strands. Arguing that, as currently formulated, cosmopolitanism falls prey to an abstract and potentially coercive universality that erases difference instead of living with it — seen, in particular, in those analytics that deploy a Kantian rationality and its universal reason and are predicated on multiple forms of exclusion, principally those that arise out of colonialism and racism — Baban proffers a vision of cosmopolitanism that is open to difference and conflicting value systems.

The cosmopolitan imagination: critical cosmopolitanism and social theory

Critical cosmopolitanism is an emerging direction in social theory and reflects both an object of study and a distinctive methodological approach to the social world. It differs from normative political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception of cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism. This signals a post-universalistic kind of cosmopolitanism, which is not merely a condition of diversity but is articulated in cultural models of world openness through which societies undergo transformation. The cosmopolitan imagination is articulated in framing processes and cultural models by which the social world is constituted; it is therefore not reducible to concrete identities, but should be understood as a form of cultural contestation in which the logic of translation plays a central role. The cosmopolitan imagination can arise in any kind of society and at any time but it is integral to modernity, in so far as this is a condition of self-problematization, incompleteness and the awareness that certainty can never be established once and for all. As a methodologically grounded approach, critical cosmopolitan sociology has a very specific task: to discern or make sense of social transformation by identifying new or emergent social realities.

Liberal dreams: Materialism and evolutionary civil society in the projection of nation in Southeast Asia

This article focuses on the introduction of ethnicity into Southeast Asia, as a component of the nineteenth century British projection of empire. The argument is that rather than projecting a cosmopolitan vision of community, British liberalism naturalised ethnicity through the concept of civil society. This presented a global vision of societies being independent and emerging from the local landscape. These liberal notions of civil society represent an early incarnation of self-determination. The British Empire in Southeast Asia emerged within this intellectual climate, and its early construction reflected this vision. In essence, the British Empire in Southeast Asia was founded on the nebulous idea of providing self-determination to Southeast Asian nations. This notion of self-determination was a qualified concept of independence, framed around opening these civil societies to British trading hegemony.

Towards a Cosmopolitan Vision of Conflict of Laws: Redefining Governmental Interests in a Global Era

It has now been ten years since the idea of global online communication first entered the popular consciousness. And while the internet has undoubtedly opened up new worlds of interaction and cooperation across borders, this increased transnational activity has also at times inspired parochialism, at least among the legislatures and courts of nation-states around the globe. Such assertions of national authority have helped to reawaken scholarly interest in the classic triumvirate of topics historically grouped together under the rubric of conflicts of laws: jurisdiction, choice of law, and recognition of judgments. In a previous article, I argued that territorially-based conceptions of legal jurisdiction may no longer be adequate in an era when ideas of bounded nation-state communities operating within fixed territorial borders are under challenge. I offered instead what I called a cosmopolitan pluralist conception of jurisdiction: cosmopolitan because it recognized the possibility that people can hold multiple, sometimes non-territorial, community affiliations; and pluralist because it acknowledged that forms of legal (or quasi-legal) jurisdiction can be asserted by communities that are not official state-sanctioned courts. This essay turns the focus to choice of law and recognition of judgments. Analyzing three recent U.S. cases (two involving choice of law and one addressing recognition of judgments), I seek to apply some of the principles of cosmopolitanism to consider how courts should understand their institutional role in cases raising multinational concerns. Taking seriously the observation that in conflicts scholarship there is nothing truly new under the sun, the cosmopolitan perspective I offer here does not purport to create a new theory of choice of law. Instead, it combines aspects of each of the three major choice-of-law regimes of the twentieth century-vested rights, governmental interests, and the substantive law method - to shape an overall attitude with which judges can approach cases involving conflicting transnational legal norms. This attitude starts from the idea that governments have an interest not only in helping in-state litigants win the particular litigation at issue, but a more important longer-term interest in being cooperative members of an international system and sharing in its reciprocal benefits and burdens. Similarly, with regard to judgment recognition, the cosmopolitan perspective asks judges to consider the independent value of enforcing a foreign judgment, even when that judgment is contrary to local policy choices. Moreover, the cosmopolitan approach focuses less on literal contacts with a territorially-based sovereign entity and more on the extent to which the various parties might be deemed to have affiliations with the possible communities seeking to impose their norms. Thus, while derived from various extant conflicts theories, the cosmopolitan perspective yields a distinctive approach, and one that I believe is better suited to a world of interconnection, interrelationship, and multiple community affiliations.

Back to the future: Walter Scott on the politics of radical reform in Ireland and Scotland

During the months after Peterloo, in the midst of widespread political agitation and fears concerning a populist rising in the west of Scotland, Walter Scott seems to have been experiencing a bout of historical deja vu. Reflecting on both the ill‐fated “Friends of Reform” movement in Scotland in 1793 and 1794 (in which the United Irishmen played a key role) and the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Scott saw history repeating itself, as cracks began to appear in the foundation of the stadial progress model that explicitly informed his attempts to give voice to the past elsewhere. The classical liberal position Scott held was of course but another version of the same story told by the radicals: in either case we get a narrative of historical advancement, a cosmopolitan vision whereby interpersonal relationships might increasingly reflect the “natural” human disposition for harmony and sympathetic interconnectedness. The means to attain this goal differed dramatically for Scott and the radical reformers in Scotland and Ireland of course. But in either case, in the interest of achieving greater unity in a time which is ever and always “yet to be,” Scott, like his radical opposition, justifies war and other forms of violence as legitimate means for achieving peace.

City and Nation: Rethinking Place and Identity

This compendium offers a textured historical and comparative examination of the significance of locality or place, and the role of urban representations and spatial practices in defining national identities. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines - from literature to architecture and planning, sociology, and history - these essays problematize the dynamic between the local and the national, the cultural and the material, revealing the complex interplay of social forces by which place is constituted and contributes to the social construction of national identity in Asia, Latin America, and the United States. These essays explore the dialogue between past and present, local and national identities in the making of modern places. Contributions range from an assessment of historical discourses on the relationship between modernity and heritage in turn-of-the-century Suzhou to the social construction of San Antonio's Market Square as a contested presencing of the city's Mexican past. Case studies of the socio-spatial restructuring of Penang and Jakarta show how place-making from above by modernizing states is articulated with a claims-making politics of class and ethnic difference from below. An examination of nineteenth-century Central America reveals a case of local grassroots formation not only of national identity but national institutions. Finally, a close examination of Latin American literature at the end of the nineteenth century reveals the importance of a fantastic reversal of Balzac's dystopian vision of Parisian cosmo-politanism in defining the place of Latin America and the possibilities of importing urban modernity.

Reasonability, normativity, and the cosmopolitan imagination: Arendt, Korsgaard, and Rawls

In this essay I consider the normative implications of the notion of reasonability for the construction of an idea of public reason that is cosmopolitan in scope. First, I consider the argument for the distinction between reason and reasonability in the work of Sibley and Rawls. Second, I evaluate the normative implications of reasonability through a consideration of Korsgaard's recent work. Third, I argue for a notion of reasonability that moves us beyond a Kantian concept of autonomy through a consideration of the relationship between reasonability and judgment vis-a-vis Arendt's work on Kant's Third Critique. Finally, I argue for a cosmopolitan appropriation of the notion of reasonability based on Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea. The latter argument relaxes the bonds of public reason, moving us beyond the domain of ethnocentricism.