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Cosmopolitanism and the De-colonial Option

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Abstract

What are the differences between cosmopolitanism and globalization? Are they “natural” historical processes or are they designed for specific purposes? Was Kant cosmopolitanism good for the entire population of the globe or did it respond to a particular Eurocentered view of what a cosmo-polis should be? The article argues that, while the term “globalization” in the most common usage refers and correspond to neo-liberal globalization projects and ambitions (roughly from 1980 to 2008), and the Kantian concept of “cosmopolitanism” responded to the second wave (XVIII and XIX of European global expansion), “de-colonial cosmopolitanism” refers to global processes and conceptualizations delinking from both neo-liberal globalization and liberal cosmopolitan ideals. But it delinks also from theological and Marxist visions of a homogenous world center around religious ideals or state socialist regulations. De-colonial cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism of multiple trajectories aiming at a trans-modern world based on pluriversality rather than on a new and good universal for all.

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Notes

  1. Kant 1996, op.cit., p. 235.

  2. Kant, op.cit., p. 249, bold added.

  3. Kant, op.cit., p. 248.

  4. Kant, op.cit., p. 248.

  5. Holland had a flourishing commercial interregnum in the seventeenth century, but Dutch is not one of the top 10 languages with the larger number of speakers. Portuguese is in seventh place, above Italian and French, and below Arabic and Bengali.

  6. Toulmin, op.cit., p. 133.

  7. Toulmin, op.cit., p. 133.

  8. Toulmin, op.cit., p. 133.

  9. Crimes that have been covered in velvet and shoveled out of the main stream, by the beautifully written and well advertised essay Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers, by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Appiah 2006).

  10. Guaman Poma de Ayala Nueva Corónica y buen Gobierno was finished in 1516, presumably composed during a period of two decades. See de Ayala (1985).

  11. See Abraham Ortelius’s world map (Ortelius 1570).

  12. On the topic, see Anghie (1999), Mignolo (2000), and Weik (2007).

  13. Anghie, op.cit., p. 102, emphasis added.

  14. Anghie, op.cit., p. 103. emphasis added.

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Mignolo, W. Cosmopolitanism and the De-colonial Option. Stud Philos Educ 29, 111–127 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9163-1

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