COSMOPOLITANISM. - The etymological derivation of the term (from cósmos and pólis) also expresses its concept. C. is that conception which considers man as a citizen of the whole world and consequently denies all value to fatherland, nation and State, held to be barriers that divide humanity. It is therefore to be distinguished from universalism and from internationalism: the first of these refers to the conceptual and practical attitude of one who considers humanity as a family homogeneous in nature and in aspirations, and therefore bound by moral ties, without however denying either fatherland, or nation, or State, while the second, in its most common sense, emphasizes the necessity of a higher juridical unity of States in the universal society of peoples. Traces, on the other hand, of c. are contained in Marxist internationalism.
C. is an ancient concept. It goes back to the Cynics, but had wider diffusion in the Hellenistic period. With the enterprises of Alexander, once the narrow conception of the pólis had fallen, as a political nucleus closed to other peoples, Greek thought, having come into contact with Oriental thought, took on a universalistic character. Stoicism contributed to this orientation, which, starting from a monistic conception of the universe, animated by the same immanent lógos, 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 encloses things divine and human, 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 is eclipsed with the diffusion 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 fatherland, nation and State. It revives in the 18th century with the Enlightenment, rationalism and Romanticism. The agnostic premises, to which these currents of thought are linked, 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 the supreme being of nature and humanity his ultimate end. His supreme duty would consist in love of the human race, to whose indefinite progress all particularistic sentiments, that is patriotism and nationalism, should be sacrificed, in order to attain a universal brotherhood.
The Romantic period saw such conceptions expand. In all countries the best-known writers devoted themselves to discrediting the idea of fatherland and nation, for example, in France Renan, in England Spencer, in Germany Lessing, in Russia Tolstoy, in Italy Mazzini, who went so far as to foresee the day when, with the triumph of the moral law of humanity, the fatherland, today sacred, would disappear. A valid support has still been found by c. in humanitarian pacifism, which holds that the only means of attaining the pacification of the human race consists in the suppression of national and political divisions, the cause of all dissensions. As was mentioned above, Marxist internationalism too bears traces of c., inasmuch as 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 attain, with the abolition of every political power, the fusion of all peoples into a universal republic.
Once the nucleus of truth that every form of c. contains is removed, in the emphasis given to the unity of the human race, to universal brotherhood and to 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 fatherland, nation and State, realities that correspond to the deepest laws of human nature and are required by the rational, sentimental, moral and physical needs of man.