COSMOPOLITANISM. – The etymological derivation of the term (from cósmos and pólis) also expresses its concept. C. is that conception which regards man as a citizen of the whole world and consequently denies any value to homeland, nation, and State, which are considered barriers dividing humanity. It must therefore be distinguished from universalism and internationalism: the former refers to the conceptual and practical attitude of one who regards humanity as a homogeneous family in nature and aspirations, and therefore bound by moral ties, without, however, denying homeland, nation, or State; the latter, in its most common sense, emphasizes the need for a superior juridical unity of States within the universal society of peoples. Marxist internationalism, on the other hand, contains traces of c.
C. is an ancient concept. It goes back to the Cynics, but became more widely diffused during the Hellenistic period. With Alexander’s enterprises, and the collapse of the restricted conception of the pólis as a closed political nucleus to which other peoples were foreign, Greek thought, having come into contact with Eastern thought, assumed a universalistic orientation. Stoicism contributed to this tendency: proceeding from a monistic conception of the universe, stirred by the same immanent lógos, it arrived at the affirmation that man is a citizen of the whole world. Roman Stoicism inherited this concept. Seneca, for example, writes: «This whole world, which you see and which contains divine and human things, is one... We are the members of a great body. Nowhere is man a stranger... his true homeland is the universe» (Epistola 95).
The cosmopolitan conception faded with the spread of Christianity, which in its universalism reconciles the unity of the human race, as a family deriving from the same heavenly father, with the existence of homeland, nation, and State. It reappeared in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, rationalism, and romanticism. The agnostic premises to which these currents of thought are connected led to an overvaluation of the human, from which derived the so-called religion of humanity and that vague humanitarianism which spread especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. According to this new atheistic ideology, man would be nature’s supreme being and humanity its ultimate end. His highest duty would consist in love for the human race, to whose indefinite progress all particularistic sentiments—namely, patriotism and nationalism—should be sacrificed in order to attain universal brotherhood.
The Romantic period saw these conceptions expand. In every country, the best-known writers devoted themselves to discrediting the idea of homeland and nation: in France, for example, Renan; in England, Spencer; in Germany, Lessing; in Russia, Tolstoy; and in Italy, Mazzini, who went so far as to foresee the day when, with the triumph of humanity’s moral law, the homeland, sacred today, would disappear. C. also found strong support in humanitarian pacifism, which holds that the only means of achieving the pacification of the human race consists in suppressing national and political divisions, the cause of all dissensions. As noted above, Marxist internationalism likewise bears traces of c., insofar as it defines the idea of homeland and nation as a prejudice devised by capitalism and connected with the present economic order. The proletarian has no homeland; his action must aim at overthrowing bourgeois society and its structure, in order to achieve, through the abolition of every political power, the fusion of all peoples into a universal republic.
Once the kernel of truth contained in every form of c. has been removed—that is, the importance attributed to the unity of the human race, to universal brotherhood, and to the need to eliminate the causes of division, ideas common to sound universalism—the remainder is pure utopia, since it will never be possible to suppress homeland, nation, and State, realities corresponding to the deepest laws of human nature and required by man’s rational, emotional, moral, and physical needs.