What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? Typically, cosmopolitanism is understood as a broad moral orientation, involving some kind of commitment to global moral equality. On this understanding, to be cosmopolitan is simply to evidence that moral orientation oneself. By contrast, Being Cosmopolitan takes up a thoroughly political approach. The focus is on what it might mean, and what it is like, to be political in a distinctly cosmopolitan form. What it means to be cosmopolitan in this thoroughly political sense cannot involve appeal to any particular moral orientation, because politics is about, inter alia, the contestation of such orientations and commitments. Instead, this book offers an account that is based upon the internalization of particular kind of global "social imaginary," involving the imagination of a global public to which certain issues—or global public affairs—are understood to pertain.
Within which kind of global order is it possible, or comfortable, for a cosmopolitical agent to live? In answer to this question, the book argues against the viability of both a world of self-determining peoples, and of "pluralist" global visions—both of which are popular with moral cosmopolitan theorists.