Not All Is Lost in Translation: World Varieties of Cosmopolitanism

Of the many challenging issues facing cosmopolitan thought today, a major one is the problem of conceptual and cultural translation, since it is often the case that cosmopolitanism is highly relevant to Indian and Chinese thought, even though the term itself is not used in the sources or in the interpretations. Three problems are addressed, namely universalist versus contextualist positions, Eurocentrism, and the problem of conceptual and cultural translations between western and non-western thought. The central argument is that cosmopolitanism thought needs to expand beyond its western genealogy to include other world traditions. However, the solution is not simply to identify alternative cultural traditions to western ones which might be the carriers of different kinds of cosmopolitan values, but of identifying in these different cultural traditions resources for cosmopolitics. In this way critical cosmopolitanism seeks to find an alternative both to strong contextualist as well as strong universalist positions.