COSMOPOLITANISM. – The etymological derivation of the term (from *cosmos* and *polis*) also expresses its concept. Cosmopolitanism is that conception which regards man as a citizen of the whole world and consequently denies any value to the fatherland, nation, and State, which are considered barriers dividing humanity. It must therefore be distinguished from universalism and internationalism, the former of which refers to the conceptual and practical attitude of those who consider humanity as a homogeneous family in nature and aspirations, and thus bound by moral ties, without however denying the fatherland, the nation, or the State, while the latter, in the most common sense, emphasizes the necessity of a superior juridical unity of States within the universal society of nations. Traces of cosmopolitanism, however, are found in Marxist internationalism.
Cosmopolitanism is an ancient concept. It dates back to the Cynics, but had wider diffusion in the Hellenistic period. With the conquests of Alexander, the narrow conception of the *polis* as a closed political nucleus to which other peoples were strangers fell away, and Greek thought, coming into contact with the East, took on a universalistic orientation. Stoicism contributed to this trend, which, starting from a monistic conception of the universe, agitated by the same immanent *logos*, arrived at the affirmation that man is a citizen of the whole world. Roman Stoicism inherited this concept. Seneca, for example, writes: "All this 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 fatherland is the universe" (Epistle 95).
The cosmopolitan conception was excluded 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 the fatherland, nation, and State. It revived in the 18th century with Enlightenment, rationalism, and Romanticism. The agnostic premises underlying these currents of thought led to an overvaluation of humanity, from which sprang the so-called religion of humanity, and that vague humanitarianism which spread especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. According to this new ideology, man would be the supreme being of nature and humanity its ultimate end. Its highest duty would consist in love for the human race, to whose indefinite progress all particularistic sentiments, i.e., patriotism and nationalism, should be sacrificed in order to achieve universal brotherhood.
The Romantic period saw these conceptions expand. In all countries the most prominent writers devoted themselves to discrediting the idea of fatherland and nation, e.g., in France Renan, in England Spencer, in Germany Lessing, in Russia Tolstoy, in Italy Mazzini, who even went so far as to foresee the day when, with the triumph of the moral law of humanity, the fatherland, now sacred, would disappear. A strong support for cosmopolitanism was also found in humanitarian pacifism, which holds that the only means to achieve the pacification of humanity consists in the suppression of national and political divisions, the cause of all discord. As has been noted above, Marxist internationalism also bears traces of cosmopolitanism, in that it defines the idea of fatherland and nation as a prejudice devised by capitalism, connected with the present economic order. The proletarian has no fatherland; his action must tend to overthrow bourgeois society and its structure, in order to achieve, with the abolition of all political power, the fusion of all peoples into a universal republic.
Setting aside the kernel of truth contained in every form of cosmopolitanism—namely, the emphasis on the unity of the human race, universal brotherhood, and the necessity of eliminating the causes of division, ideas common to sound universalism—the rest is pure utopia, since it will never be possible to suppress the fatherland, nation, and State, realities which correspond to the deepest laws of human nature and are demanded by the rational, emotional, moral, and physical needs of man.