Wyndham Lewis's cosmopolitanism: on historicity and modernist studies

Given that it has been applied in so many different contexts, cosmopolitanism remains an imprecise term, and contemporary accounts of it diverge in significant ways: Kwame Anthony Appiah, for example, argues that philosophical cosmopolitanism entails both a “universal concern” for humanity and a “respect for legitimate difference”; David Held views cosmopolitanism as a necessary third term required to navigate the impasse between notions of democracy and globalism; Nikos Papastergiadis seeks to keep open politically radical (or at least non-liberal) conceptions of cosmopolitanism, while simultaneously agreeing with Appiah that cosmopolitanism constitutes an “imaginative engagement” with the other. As these three representative examples suggest, there is significant disagreement about both the meaning of cosmopolitanism and its relationship to existing political and economic regimes. And yet, while all three accounts of cosmopolitanism differ, they all owe clear debts to what Rebecca Walkowitz has termed “the philosophical tradition” of cosmopolitanism that “derives its view from Enlightenment theories of culture.” At heart, contemporary accounts of cosmopolitanism—even those that try to engage with more radical, left-wing positions—are largely informed by liberal notions of pluralism.