Cosmopolitanism in Modernity Human Dignity in a Global Age

Cosmopolitanism in Modernity: Human Dignity in a Global Age analyses the contributions of theorists seeking cosmopolitan solutions to struggles for human happiness and dignity. It focuses on the ways in which the ideal has been forced to adapt, by accepting its limitations, as it maintains its fundamental insistence on the potential of universal human community that simultaneously constitutively encompasses difference. The book concludes that a combination of strategies specifically addressing individual, communal and intercommunal levels of human interaction are the most productive ways forward. It recommends non-imperialist, accountable, coalitional strategies that seek to emphasize a different understanding of human beings than the one that undergirds the neo-liberal state. While the central focus is on an idea that has a particular trajectory in the West, the book argues it is not limited to this context, and in fact may share importantly with ideals from other traditions, such as satyagraha. The central thread of the argument is that in our contemporary globalizing world, a conception of dynamic human individuality and community that stretches beyond the boundaries of the local, while not entirely transcending them, is vital for us to strive with any success for a truly just institutional, communal and individual human existence.