Cosmopolitanisms: past, present, future?

Contributor(s): Professor Etienne Balibar | A cosmopolitics that allows it for mankind to address its common interests is clearly needed, as demonstrated again by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is even urgent, a matter of life and death for millions, and survival for the planet as a livable environment.
But there can exist no cosmopolitics without a cosmopolitan idea. From this point of view, we find ourselves in an extremely contradictory situation: always an “essentially contested concept” throughout history, cosmopolitanism today appears squeezed between powerful nationalisms competing for global or local hegemony, and utopian ideals in search of their capacity to rally the multitude. The lecture does not offer a blueprint, it traces a genealogy and delineates some possibilities for the future which is already our actuality.
Meet our speaker and chair
Etienne Balibar is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, and Anniversary Chair of Contemporary European Ph