Adam Kempton Webb - Deep cosmopolis : rethinking world politics and globalisation

Adam Webb brilliantly explores an alternative path to globalization with dashing originality and stunning erudition. Webb defends a cosmopolitanism that is at once rooted and diverse, culturally rich and historically sensitive. His vision of a deep cosmopolis draws at once on the virtues of local knowledge and the universalist impulse that is embedded within all human cultures, yet resists the homogenized and flattened form of globalization encouraged by an elite class dismissive of local diversity and impatient with the rich complexity of civilizations.

Patrick Deneen, University of Notre Dame, USA

Deep Cosmopolis

Too often, observers of globalisation take for granted that the common ground across cultures is a thin layer of consumerism and perhaps human rights. If so, then anything deeper and more traditional would be placebound and probably destined for the dustbin of history. But must this be so? Must we assumeas both liberals and traditionalists now tend to dothat one cannot be a cosmopolitan and take traditions seriously at the same time? This book offers a radically different argument about how traditions and global citizenship can meet, and suggests some important lessons for the contours of globalisation in our own time.

Adam K. Webb argues that if we look back before modernity, we find a very different line of thinking about what it means to take the whole world as ones horizon. Digging into some fascinating currents of thought and practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, across all major civilisations, Webb is able to reveal patterns of deep cosmopolitanism, with its logic quite unlike that of liberal globalisation today. In their more cosmopolitan moments, everyone from clerics to pilgrims to empire-builders was inclined to look for deep ethical parallelspoints of contactamong civilisations and traditions. Once modernity swept aside the old civilisations, however, that promise was largely forgotten. We now have an impoverished view of what it means to embrace a tradition and even what kinds of conversations across traditions are possible. Webb draws out the lessons of deep cosmopolitanism for our own time. If revived, it has something to say about phenomena from the rise of new non-Western powers such as China and India and what they offer the world, to religious tolerance, to global civil society, to cross-border migration.

Deep Cosmopolis traces an alternative strand of cosmopolitan thinking that cuts across centuries and civilisations. It advances a new perspective on world history, and a distinctive vision of globalisation for this century which has the real potential to resonate with us all.

Adam K. Webb is Resident Professor of Political Science at the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre, which is one of the two overseas branches of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Routledge Innovations in Political Theory

1 A Radical Green Political Theory

Alan Carter

2 Rational Woman

A feminist critique of dualism

Raia Prokhovnik

3 Rethinking State Theory

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4 Gramsci and Contemporary Politics

Beyond pessimism of the intellect

Anne Showstack Sassoon

5 Post-Ecologist Politics

Social theory and the abdication of the ecologist paradigm

Ingolfur Blhdorn

6 Ecological Relations

Susan Board

7 The Political Theory of Global Citizenship

April Carter

8 Democracy and National Pluralism

Edited by Ferran Requejo

9 Civil Society and Democratic Theory

Alternative voices

Gideon Baker

10 Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory

Between critical theory and post-Marxism

Mark Devenney

11 Citizenship and Identity

Towards a new republic

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12 Multiculturalism, Identity and Rights

Edited by Bruce Haddock and Peter Sutch

13 Political Theory of Global Justice

A cosmopolitan case for the world state

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14 Democracy, Nationalism and Multiculturalism

Edited by Ramn Maiz and Ferrn Requejo

15 Political Reconciliation

Andrew Schaap

16 National Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics

Edited by Ephraim Nimni

17 Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought

New theories of the political

Saul Newman

18 Capabilities Equality

Basic issues and problems

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19 Morality and Nationalism

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20 Principles and Political Order

The challenge of diversity

Edited by Bruce Haddock, Peri Roberts and Peter Sutch

21 European Integration and the Nationalities Question

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22 Deliberation, Social Choice and Absolutist Democracy

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23 Sexual Justice/Cultural Justice

Critical perspectives in political theory and practice

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24 The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt

Terror, liberal war and the crisis of global order

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25 In Defense of Human Rights

A non-religious grounding in a pluralistic world

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26 Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory

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27 Political Constructivism

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28 The New Politics of Masculinity

Men, power and resistance

Fidelma Ashe

29 Citizens and the State

Attitudes in Western Europe and East and Southeast Asia

Takashi Inoguchi and Jean Blondel

30 Political Language and Metaphor

Interpreting and changing the world

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31 Political Pluralism and the State

Beyond sovereignty

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32 Political Evil in a Global Age

Hannah Arendt and international theory

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33 Gramsci and Global Politics

Hegemony and resistance

Mark McNally and John Schwarzmantel

34 Democracy and Pluralism

The political thought of William E. Connolly

Edited by Alan Finlayson

35 Multiculturalism and Moral Conflict

Edited by Maria Dimova-Cookson and Peter Stirk

36 John Stuart Mill Thought and Influence

The saint of rationalism

Edited by Georgios Varouxakis and Paul Kelly

37 Rethinking Gramsci

Edited by Marcus E. Green

38 Autonomy and Identity

The politics of who we are

Ros Hague

39 Dialectics and Contemporary Politics

Critique and transformation from Hegel through post-Marxism

John Grant

40 Liberal Democracy as the End of History

Fukuyama and postmodern challenges

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41 Deleuze and World Politics

Alter-globalizations and nomad science

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42 Utopian Politics

Citizenship and practice

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43 Kant and International Relations Theory

Cosmopolitan community building

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44 Ethnic Diversity and the Nation State

National cultural autonomy revisited

David J. Smith and John Hiden

45 Tensions of Modernity