To a very large degree, the modern political landscape in the United States and across the world is shaped by divergent attitudes towards cosmopolitanism. Kosmos means the “order” of the world, the world as “universe” rather than as chaos, and was used in Greek philosophical and poetic literature in reference to the entirety of reality, divine, celestial, terrestrial, human, cthonic, and so forth. The more usual word for the humanly inhabited portion of the wider kosmos was oikoumenē, derived from oikos, “household,” and also cognate with oikia, the physical structure of the house itself. Polis means “city,” broadly speaking, but there have been cities longer than there have been poleis, which are a very particular social arrangement of rights, responsibilities, obligations, and powers that emerged in the Aegean world of mainland, insular, and Greater Greece (Lat: magna Graecia) during the Archaic period (800-500 BCE, to the eve of the Persian Wars) in the wake of the Bronze Age Collapse and the so-called Greek Dark Age (roughly 1200-800 BCE, collectively). A polis is fundamentally a citizenry, a register of politai, rather than simply an urban settlement (the better Latin translation of polis than either urbs or oppidum is therefore civitas, the collective of cives or citizens). These politai—in the Greek world, almost exclusively men—are bound together by a common, often fictive ancestry, one that includes the land (whence the concept of autochthonia), the inheritance of common nomoi or “customs,” predominantly of cult to deities and heroes (also ancestors) but also of domestic, social, and city-wide matters. The nomoi fundamentally regulate the limits of freedom and the legitimate exercise of power in the polis, defining what public life of a politēs (as opposed to the life of a private person, an idiōtēs) looks like. These laws—inscribed in stone or composed in some more malleable manner—constitute a politeia, a “constitution” which is mutable and governable by multiple kinds of regimes but which is also considered by ancient people to be a sacred aspect of society. In later ages, these concepts would be recycled as elements of the concept of ethnos, the notion of shared peoplehood by descent and culture. This is why the architects of a cherished politeia achieved quasi-divine status in the ancient polis alongside the actual founders of the city or colony, the ktistai: Lycurgus and Solon were more important to ancient Athens and Sparta than any particular king or even than famous generals like Pericles or Demosthenes. For the Athenians, their anacyclotic transition from Bronze Age monarchy (preserved in the religious office of the basileus as late as the Classical era) to Archaic oligarchy to demokratia of the landed, male-owning citizenry (the demos) were identity shifts of constitutional importance that each left their mark on the enduring character of their polis. Demokratia was a popular alternative to monarchy and oligarchy which endured in Sparta and the cities of the Peloponnesian League among the members of the amphictyony of Delos. It endured as a local politeia even in the age of Philip II and Alexander of Macedon, whose Greek cultural education, and when Alexander conquered Greek cities under formerly Persian rule in Ionia, he spun it as liberation, action taken for the eleutheria Hellenōn, the “freedom of the Greeks,” even as he was on a campaign of appropriating Near Eastern-style divine, sacral kingship of the Egyptian and Persian varieties. Alexander’s empire, stretching from the Greek peninsula to Bactria and northern India, broadened the concept of shared citizenship well beyond the parochialism of Greek poleis in the Archaic and Classical eras. It also complicated, though it did not eliminate, the Classical prejudice against barbaroi: on the one hand, Alexander’s adoption of Hellenism, Greekness, as his true culture reinforced the Hellenic-barbaric divide even as it overcame that distinction in his person, and on the other hand, the synkrisis of Greek and non-Greek in the Near East was so complete that the distinction became one of kind rather than degree. Multiple non-Greek cities sought Greek style politeiai to secure privileges from Hellenistic rulers and to more broadly enjoy the luxuries of international culture in Syria and Egypt during this time; other Near Easterners more jealously guarded their traditions, sometimes with great enmity for both traditional and new cultural others.
As early as the Archaic period, Greek poets and philosophers were considering the human experience in universal terms, and the kosmos as a single body with a single soul, of which all bodies and souls were merely parts. Hellenistic philosophers, especially Stoic-influenced, took these ideas further in that, from their perspective, they were looking at fairly massive projects of such universalism in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms. And in partial protest against intercultural, inter-city, and inter-kingdom warfare, they prized the ideal of the kosmopolitēs, the “citizen of the world.”
The first person to call himself such in Greek appears to have been Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic, whose philosophical lifestyle was to a large degree predicated on the rejection of the ordinary comforts of domestic and public life (Diog. Laert. VI.63). As Martha Nussbaum puts it, Diogenes’s answer “suggests…the possibility of a politics, or a moral approach to politics, that focuses on the humanity we share rather than the marks of local origin, status, class, and gender that divide us.”1 In fact, for Diogenes, “The only correct political order was, he said, that in the world (kosmos) as a whole” (VI.72). The Stoic Presocratic, Academic, and Cynic inheritance includes Diogenes—a famous character for plenty of riotous stories in which, among other things, he plucks a chicken and presents it as Plato’s man, the featherless biped, sneezes on a rich man in his house because everything else in the house was too nice to sneeze on, holds aloft a lantern in broad daylight, shining it in people’s faces because he’s looking for a real human being, and, just as apocryphally, telling Alexander the Great to get out of his light (VI.38)—and like Diogenes, when the Stoics identify a polis of the kosmos they are implicitly and explicitly identifying a politeia based on nature (recall that the Cynical lifestyle is effectively an attempt to return to nature in the Greek world). This is a nature that includes the divine of course: “since there are gods (if they really exist, as they certainly do), it is necessary that they be alive, but also rational and bound to each other by a kind of political affinity and society, governing this single cosmos like some shared republic or city” (Cicero, DND 2.78).2 The Stoic speaker in Cicero’s dialogue on the divine circles back around to this idea as he wraps up his case: “[T]he cosmos is like a common home for gods and humans or a city which both [gods and human beings] inhabit. For only creatures who use reason live by law and justice. So, just as one must hold that Athens and Sparta were founded for the sake of the Athenians and Spartans and everything in these cities is properly said to belong to those peoples, in the same way one must hold that everything in the entire cosmos belongs to gods and humans” (2.154). The Christian writer Eusebius preserves an account from Aristocles that the Stoics believed that “all things in the cosmos are organized extremely well, as in a very well-managed government” (Eusebius, Prep. Ev. 15.14). Seneca the Younger (4 BCE - 65 CE) wrote of a
different kind of man, who is kind to his friends, moderate to his enemies, governing public and private affairs in a pious and religious manner. We saw that he did not lack patience in enduring what had to be endured or prudence in doing what had to be done. We have seen his generosity in distributing, his effort and determination (which relieve bodily weariness) in working. Moreover, he was always consistent in every action, not good by some plan but by character the sort of person who was not only able to act properly, but could not act otherwise…the desires were to be held in check, fears repressed, plans made for action, what was owed was to be distributed; so we grasped temperance, courage, prudence, and justice, and we assigned each to its own appropriate role. So, where did we get our understanding of virtue? It was shown to us by his orderliness, fittingness, and consistency, by the mutual harmony of all his actions, and by his greatness which elevated itself above all else. This is the source for our understanding of the happy life that flows smoothly in its own course and is completely in its own course and is completely in control of itself…This perfect and virtuous man never cursed fortune, was never sad about what happened, regarded himself as a citizen and soldier of the cosmos, and so endured all his labors as though he were under orders” (Letters on Ethics 120.10-12).
Epictetus (c. 50-135 CE) similarly advises the reader:
Consider who you are. First of all a human being, and this means that you have nothing more authoritative than your power of moral choice and everything else is subordinate to it, but it itself is free and independent. Consider, then, what you are separate from in virtue of your rationality. You are separate from wild beasts and from sheep. And in addition you are a citizen of the cosmos and a part of it—not one of the servile parts but one of its principal parts. For you are able to follow the divine administration and figure out what comes next. So, what is the commitment of a citizen? To have no private advantage, not to deliberate about anything as though one were a separate part but just as if the hand or foot had reasoning power and were able to follow the arrangements of nature, they would never have sought or desired anything except after referring to the whole. That is why the philosophers are right to say that if the honorable and good person knew what was going to happen, he would even collaborate with disease and death and lameness, being aware that these things are dispensed by the arrangement of the whole and that the whole is more authoritative than the part and the state more authoritative than the citizen” (Disc. 2.10.1-5).
Stoic pantheology and naturalism is key to their concept of what it is to be a citizen of the kosmos, as well as what it means to think of the kosmos as a polis. Cosmopolitanism of their sort is “non-hierarchical”; it “belongs…to all who have some basic threshold level of capacity for moral learning and choice”; it is not “based on the idea of a rank-ordered society,” has an “egalitarian heart,” and is fundamentally a “moral ideal” rather than a political one, though it invokes the language of politics and clearly shapes policy when employed.3 It is perhaps for this reason that Stoic physics, ethics, and logic, which were the most popular and influential in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods of Mediterranean antiquity (so, somewhat arbitrarily, 323 BCE to around the end of the first or beginning of the second century CE), so deeply shaped the egalitarian ethics of some of the New Testament writers. Scholars widely agree that Paul is shaped by Stoic ideas, whether he himself was a Stoic;4 especially, his image of the assembly of Jesus’s followers as a body bound together by sympatheia between all its members is clearly derived from Stoic cosmology, and suggests his vision of the ekklesia as a microcosm of the new universe to come, in which the pneumatic life of the Kingdom of God is being cultivated in anticipation of the parousia.5 It is for this reason, too, that Paul, although a Jew who never renounces his Jewish identity or praxis, nevertheless seemed to hold a policy of equality in the ekklesia between its multiethnic, multigender, and multiclass membership (Gal 3:28) even while not calling on his readers to disband social identities in their worldly life (1 Cor 7). This is a Jewish, Jesus-oriented form of cosmopolitanism, influenced by the ideology and language of Stoicism without being fully directed by the value system of the Hellenistic world of the imperium Romanum. When, decades after his death, the Gospel of Matthew recalls Jesus’s command to go and make disciples of all the nations by baptism and teaching them Jesus’s commands (Matt 28:19-20), this, too, is a Jewish and Jesus-centered form of cosmopolitanism, albeit one that unlike Paul probably envisioned gentiles really embracing the Mosaic Torah in ways that Paul and his colleagues did not generally support.6 And all of the Jesus Movement’s efforts to include non-Jews can be seen as species of the wider generic issue of the “gentile problem” in Early Judaism, the mainstream response to which in both Judea and the Diaspora emphasized models of sympathization, international unity through ethical monotheism, participation in the life and future of the Jewish community, and, occasionally, conversion; very few Jews in antiquity looked forward to the final exclusion of the nations.7
The late antique, medieval, and early modern receptions of Greco-Roman cosmopolitanism in both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires were squeezed through the Jewish and Christian division of the world into Israel and the nations.8 The Jesus Movement’s reinvention of itself as Christianismos, as an international collegium scattered throughout the oikoumene, as a tertium genus between Judaism and Hellenism, and as a new philosophical school and mystery cult in the second through the fourth centuries, concurrent with the empire’s program of Romanitas extending citizenship to all free adult men in the empire, laid an additional foundation for the cosmopolitan impulses of Western and Near Eastern intellectuals for centuries afterwards. It was also surely an inspiration for the Muslim empires and the particular brand of Arab-inspired cosmopolitanism, especially economic, cultural, and religious, that they sought to encompass beneath the religious and political unity of the umma.9 But it would be a mistake to limit cosmopolitanism to the Near East and the West. We find parallel traditions at work in South and East Asia, similarly seeking to arrive at a political and moral vision of human life that looks to the world rather than to more local associations as its point of reference. These traditions deserve their own thorough intellectual and social history that are perhaps better saved for another article, but in no particular order, one could consider: the renunciant lifestyles of forest and mendicant ascetics in Vedic and post-Vedic society, the early Buddhist sangha, imperial efforts at unification of the South Asian peninsula in the late centuries BCE and early centuries CE, Mohism but also its putative opposite in Warring-States era Yangism in China, the so-called “philosophical” Daoism of the early sages and texts in that tradition, the imperial unification of mainland China under the Han and subsequent dynasties, the growth and spread of Mahayana Buddhism in all its forms beginning in the first century CE through India, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, China, Tibet, Korea, and Japan, Tang China,10 the early Mongol Empire and the short-lived Yuan Dynasty, the Islamic khanates, sultanates, the Turko-Islamicate world that eventuated in the Ottoman Empire, and so forth. I focus on the Greco-Roman and Christian iterations of cosmopolitanism not because they are the only or the best, but because they are the ones most clearly responsible for the formation of modernity’s cosmopolitan ideals (and shortcomings).
As Nussbaum argues, there are some inherent tensions in the Cynic/Stoic cosmopolitanism that Early Christianity inherited (and later re-Platonized, but that, too, is another article). On the one hand, Cynics and Stoics were at least rhetorically committed to the idea that the equal dignity of humanity at the moral level necessitated the repudiation of wealth; but on the other, this never manages to translate into any kind of advocacy for the redistribution of existing wealth in service to the dignity of all people. Likewise, over-against the absolutist demands of ancient poleis and imperial kingdoms, the Stoics especially looked to the collective of humanity and nature as enabling a kind of moral independence for the individual, and espoused a practiced indifference to the idea of a “world state” or even an “ideal city” (like the sort envisioned by Plato’s Republic or Zeno’s now lost treatise of that name). This independence is not purely political: it includes religion, and accounts for the marked Stoic diversity on questions of the importance and meaning of traditional cult and myth about the divine.11
Yet the abstracted universalism of this vision ends up at odds with our sense “that justice must be from and for the living,” leaving us in quest of “a convincing theory of cosmopolitan emotion and of the relationship between particular attachments and the love of humanity.”12 It seems fair to observe that no cosmopolitan effort of modernity has successfully balanced the tension between the universal and the particular as we meet them in, as Nussbaum enumerates, the spheres of moral psychology, pluralism and political liberalism, the limits of international law, the ambiguities of foreign aid, and the political Scylla and moral Charybdis of asylum and migration.13 Nussbaum is not alone in these observations: Richard Haass has been arguing for around a decade now that the failure of the United States in particular to secure the human rights, needs, and flourishing of its citizens domestically undermines not only its role in the global order but also the global order itself.14 That is to say, the current fortunes of the US are largely predicated on the feedback loop that it stands in a reciprocal relationship with the rest of the world, where hurting either itself or its neighbors contributes to the bad of everyone; domestic and foreign policy are intertwined by virtue of the inherently cosmopolitan character of any political enterprise (and specifically the American one). Francis Fukuyama’s recent book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, makes the observation that the major critiques of classical liberalism and the liberal order, especially its postwar iteration, and the threats of its breakdown, are all consequences of inherent weaknesses in liberalism as a political philosophy but also vulnerabilities that cannot be easily traded without also losing some of liberalism’s strengths—particularly, I would parse, its cosmopolitan strengths. So for instance, on the one hand, liberalism tends to water down the “thick identity” of a cultural collective by emphasizing the rights of the individual to self-define in matters of cult and culture (which, recall, were the essential features of identity that ancestries fictive or not themselves were intended to convey), but on the other, it is only the concept of the human being as an individual agent whose unique rational and moral existence is meaningful even apart from the cultural matrix within which it is shaped and with which it inescapably dialogues that allows one to be a kosmopolites at all. And, as Nussbaum frequently alludes to, and Haass is refreshingly realistic about for someone who skews center-right on the political spectrum, modern Western cosmopolitanism tends to exclude some people from its definition of the human, include them in a qualified manner, and generally exclude the non-human world as “irrational” and “servile” and therefore not as true citizens of the universe alongside humans and their divine overlords. All of which to say, the crux of the cosmopolitan dilemma is that its ideal is obviously right, but the cultivation of that ideal in any culturally specific context is always limited by the available knowledge and prejudices of the people that produce it.
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2019), 1.
For convenience I have used the translation of Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson, trans., The Stoics Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008) for this and all Stoic texts. The reader may wish to consult them in primary language should they possess the facility, but as a classicist, trust me, Inwood and Gerson know what they’re doing.
Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, 1-3.
See Michelle V. Lee, Paul, the Stoics, and the Body of Christ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
An emerging scholarly consensus sees the author of Matthew as representative of a Jewish community of Jesus-followers in contact, collaboration, and competition with other, Pharisaic communities, perhaps in Galilee and southern Syria; see John Kampen, Matthew within Sectarian Judaism (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), and Anders Runesson and Daniel M. Gurtner, Matthew Within Judaism: Israel and the Nations in the First Gospel (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020).
See Matthew Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016), 19-42.
See Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), and Rosen-Zvi’s article here.
See, e.g., Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2015).
On which see Mark Edward Lewis, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), and the forthcoming Shuchen Xiang, Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).
Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, 64-96.
Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, 96.
Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, 210-235.
See Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (New York: Penguin, 2017); idem, The World: A Brief Introduction (New York: Penguin, 2020); idem, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens (New York: Penguin, 2023). One should also consult the Council of Foreign Relations where he was until recently President for quite awhile.
Very interesting and I agree with your conclusions - how will you continue this series, though? I doubt you intend to solve liberalism or something grand like that