Cosmopolitanism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Cosmopolitanism - Essay Example In this reference, the cosmopolite has some advantages that might include personal and political emancipations and freedoms over less economically privileged individuals. The philosophical significance in cosmopolitanism lies in its challenge to generally recognize attachments to fellow-citizens, parochially shared cultures, the local state, and the like. In Ancient Greece the term Cosmopolite meant citizen of the world. The opus of the Greek term, cosmopolis, already indicates this unsolved stress: cosmos, an accepted universal order, is related to polis, society's inconsistent order. As a result, from the Greek democratic city-state to the international village, the idea of cosmopolite has been disturbed by questions such as whose world this actually is. Can the forces of homogenous external expansionist exist harmoniously with the heterogeneous localized ones A truly cosmopolitan answer would imply a permanent interest in difference and the recognition that internationals and locals depend on each other in order to exist. Since its beginning, cosmopolitanism has been a category marked by a need to negotiate with "others" and has reflected tensions between local and regional realities, ethnocentric and relativist perceptions, and particularism and universalism. Historically, cosmopolitanism has reflected the ideologies of different periods and modes of integration to larger, colonial or global, political units. As a category mostly held by elites, it often means the sophistication that results from familiarity with what is diverse. It has become an allegory for mobility, migrancy, sensitivity and forbearance to otherness, independence from specific authorities, and transcultural and intercontinental realities and claims. Its opposing concepts have often indicated racism, fixity, parochialism, restricted sovereignty, and commitment to a motherland or a nation-state. The history of the relationships between local and regional conceptions is old as human race. A strong inclination towards local reality, particularism, variety and context may oscillate, such as at the end of the Renaissance or during the Enlightenment, towards highlights on general formal timeless statements that pretend to be universal. Having its roots in Ancient Greece, cosmopolitanism has been disconnectedly present in western philosophical or political deliberations. The military conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) opened up the situations for the existence of a "world empire" that supposedly aimed at uniting East and West into an enlightened commonwealth. Greek became the lingua franca of the Hellenistic age (4th - 1st century B.C.), an age that lasted until the institution of Roman hegemony. Although cosmopolitanism was a subject for Greek philosophers before Stoicism, this school of philosophy established in Athens by 300 B.C. systemized cosmopolitan theories advancing revelations such as that of a world city, an ideal state where everyone would be a resident. Stoics were active in assessing Greek ethnocentrism towards barbarians and promoted a sense of brotherhood, a vision of humankind that was conveyed to Romans and predated Christianity's claims to universalism. Cosmopolitanism passed on to different political and intellectual elites from the Roman Empire through Medieval Europe. The Christian church played a chief role in the reproduction of cosmopolitan ideals and apparatuses by shaping two or more cultures sacred imagined