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The moral philosophy of contemporary cosmopolitanism—the basis on which cosmopolitanism is discussed today—is distinctly Western. What this means is that it is based philosophically, historically, and culturally in the Western tradition of liberal thought. Western liberalism, in spite of being posed and proposed in abstract and culture-neutral terms, emerged from Judeo-Christian Europe and to this day is conditioned by these cultural roots, as well as tainted by the history of colonization and abasement of the constructed non-Western "other." I am referring to liberalism here as "Western" because, in spite of it not being possible that there be any other type of liberalism in the world, I want to differentiate it from a type of liberalism that aspires to be purged from the conditionings of Western supremacist history and culture. My ambition in this book is to lay the grounds for the possibilities of what I call Cosmopolitan Liberalism, which will embrace the cultural achievements of Western liberalism but will leave behind its parochial limitations. Western liberalism, in trying to propose itself as abstract thought, refuses to see how its own structure is culturally shaped by the Judeo-Christian ethos and also how such structure depends on stories of supremacy that are mingled both with race and wealth as symbols of worth.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230111424_1

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