Books in the New Visions of the Cosmopolitan series

This essay collection examines the relationship between media and cosmopolitanism in an increasingly fragmented and globalizing world. It covers areas such as cosmopolitanization in everyday life, the mediation of suffering and cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitanism and trauma studies, and researching cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective.

This volume explores how we can learn to live with individual and group differences in the twenty-first century, locating this within the ambivalences of contemporary cosmopolitanism. It analyses visual, normative and cultural embodiments of difference, presenting dynamic conflicts at local sites connected through globalization and Europeanization.

This book examines recent debates on the political dynamics of cosmopolitanism, particularly in its connection with European civil society and the public sphere. Its aim is to trace to what extent cosmopolitanism defines the "second modernity" and to analyse what cosmopolitanism can offer to modern socially and politically diverse societies.

Normative democratic theory does not lie securely above societal argumentation but is instead a crucial part of it. We need to know not just how the public should reason, but how it actually does reason, or could reason in better foreseeable circumstances. After all, given the general societal and cosmopolitan challenges that we face, the health and the necessary extension of democracy fundamentally depends on the reasoning capacities of the public. The concept of the public sphere is intrinsic to understanding this process, but it has long been limited by its division into the twin approaches of normative argumentation in democratic theory and empirical-theoretical application in the social sciences. This book aims to go beyond this entrenched divide to show how democratic theory can become empirically applicable and the social sciences normatively relevant. It does this by linking democratic theory to the theory of society and relating both to a cognitive-communicative account of public culture. The book contributes significantly to exchanges within and between sociology, philosophy, cultural and communication studies, political science, and cognate disciplines. It also aims to address a long-established concern of critical theory by combining empirical and normative perspectives to advance the goal of a better society.

This book's critical approach addresses the anachronism, essentialism and ethnocentrism that underlie contemporary theoretical and methodological uses of the term "cosmopolitanism". It explores the concept of cosmopolitan reason from the viewpoints of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, postcolonialism and moral philosophy.