Beyond Epistemic Pluralism

T he genealogy of cosmopolitanism is not terribly cosmopolitan.Yet commentators in the 1990s and 2000s wagered that a European concept could apply to non-European nations.Why worry about the origins of an idea that explicitly eschews origins?Legatees of European cosmopolitanism, which sutured ancient Greek and Enlightenment thought, found the concept too good to pass up: it could secure universal human rights and establish common ground via challenging conversations. 1 The answer to the question, "Is universalism ethnocentric?" was therefore a thoughtful, but hard, no. 2 But the question continued to nag at a subsequent generation of cosmopolitan theorists, who began to wonder "how radically" they could rewrite the history of cosmopolitanism and how "dramatically" they could redraw its map, once they were "prepared to think outside the box of European intellectual history." 3 Since then, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ko jin Karatani, and Walter Mignolo have done much to "decolonize" cosmopolitanism, provincializing European universals while shining light on a multiplicity of new ones. 4n earlier generation that put its faith in Diogenes-"I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolite s]"-gave way to a newer one seduced by Marxist universalisms or "rooted" or "vernacular" particularisms.In the process, scholars shattered the illusory categories of East and West, rethinking world history in part thanks to a study of the medieval world system before European hegemony. 5Motivating the new wave of discrepant cosmopolitanisms was a rejection of monism and an embrace of pluralism-an attempt to truly world the genealogy of world citizenship.