(Ebook) Thinking Differently About Cosmopolitanism:

Theory, Eccentricity, and the Globalized World by

Marianna Papastephanou ISBN 9781612050799, 1612050794
Pdf Download

https://ebooknice.com/product/thinking-differently-about-
cosmopolitanism-theory-eccentricity-and-the-globalized-
world-49412674

★★★★★
4.8 out of 5.0 (65 reviews )

DOWNLOAD PDF

ebooknice.com
 (Ebook) Thinking Differently About Cosmopolitanism: Theory,
Eccentricity, and the Globalized World by Marianna
Papastephanou ISBN 9781612050799, 1612050794 Pdf Download

EBOOK

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide Ebook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

 We believe these products will be a great fit for you. Click
the link to download now, or visit ebooknice.com
to discover even more!

(Ebook) Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook by Loucas, Jason; Viles,

James ISBN 9781459699816, 9781743365571, 9781925268492,
1459699815, 1743365578, 1925268497

https://ebooknice.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-6661374

(Ebook) Matematik 5000+ Kurs 2c Lärobok by Lena Alfredsson, Hans

Heikne, Sanna Bodemyr ISBN 9789127456600, 9127456609

https://ebooknice.com/product/matematik-5000-kurs-2c-larobok-23848312

(Ebook) SAT II Success MATH 1C and 2C 2002 (Peterson's SAT II

Success) by Peterson's ISBN 9780768906677, 0768906679

https://ebooknice.com/product/sat-ii-success-math-1c-and-2c-2002-peterson-
s-sat-ii-success-1722018

(Ebook) Cosmopolitanism: Educational, Philosophical and

Historical Perspectives by Marianna Papastephanou (eds.) ISBN
9783319304281, 9783319304304, 3319304283, 3319304305

https://ebooknice.com/product/cosmopolitanism-educational-philosophical-
and-historical-perspectives-5605320
(Ebook) Master SAT II Math 1c and 2c 4th ed (Arco Master the SAT
Subject Test: Math Levels 1 & 2) by Arco ISBN 9780768923049,
0768923042

https://ebooknice.com/product/master-sat-ii-math-1c-and-2c-4th-ed-arco-
master-the-sat-subject-test-math-levels-1-2-2326094

(Ebook) Cambridge IGCSE and O Level History Workbook 2C - Depth

Study: the United States, 1919-41 2nd Edition by Benjamin
Harrison ISBN 9781398375147, 9781398375048, 1398375144,
1398375047
https://ebooknice.com/product/cambridge-igcse-and-o-level-history-
workbook-2c-depth-study-the-united-states-1919-41-2nd-edition-53538044

(Ebook) Toward New Philosophical Explorations of the Epistemic

Desire to Know: Just Curious about Curiosity by Marianna
Papastephanou (editor) ISBN 9781527530584, 1527530582

https://ebooknice.com/product/toward-new-philosophical-explorations-of-the-
epistemic-desire-to-know-just-curious-about-curiosity-42802092

(Ebook) Practical Wisdom : Thinking Differently about College

and University Governance by Peter D. Eckel; Cathy A. Trower;
Richard Chait ISBN 9781620368404, 1620368404

https://ebooknice.com/product/practical-wisdom-thinking-differently-about-
college-and-university-governance-51644992

(Ebook) Thinking Differently about HIV/AIDS: Contributions from

Critical Social Science by Eric Mykhalovskiy (editor), Viviane
Namaste (editor) ISBN 9780774860703, 0774860707

https://ebooknice.com/product/thinking-differently-about-hiv-aids-
contributions-from-critical-social-science-11117286
 Thinking Differently
about Cosmopolitanism
 Interventions Series: Education,
Philosophy, and Culture
Edited by Michael A. Peters and Colin Lankshear

Titles Available

Subjects in Process: Diversity, Mobility, and

the Politics of Subjectivity in the 21st Century
Edited by Michael A. Peters and Alicia de Alba (2012)

Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity,

Rethinking Cosmopolitanism
By Sharon Todd (2009)

Democracy, Ethics, and Education: A Thin Communitarian Approach

By Mark Olssen (2007)

Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future

By Gert J. J. Biesta (2006)

Education, Globalization, and the State in the Age of Terrorism

Edited by Michael A. Peters (2005)
 Thinking
Differently about
Cosmopolitanism
Theory, Eccentricity, and the
Globalized World
Marianna Papastephanou
First published 2012 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2012 , Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Papastephanou, Marianna.
Thinking differently about cosmopolitanism : theory, eccentricity, and the globalized
world / Marianna Papastephanou.
p. cm. -- (Interventions: education, philosophy & culture)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-61205-079-9 (hc. : alk. paper)
1. Cosmopolitanism. 2. Globalization--Political aspects. I. Title.
JZ1308.P365 2012
303.48’2--dc23
2012004641

ISBN 13 : 978-1-61205-079-9 (hbk)

ISBN 13 : 978-1-61205-080-5 (pbk)
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1. Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism 9

2. Eccentric Cosmopolitanism and a Globalized World 27
3. A Critique of Globalist Positions 45
4. Identity-versus-Difference Dilemmas 70
5. Home, Homelessness, and the Cosmopolitan Self 87
6. Who’s Cosmopolitan? 111
7. Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism as Boundary Discourses 134
8. The Importance of Conceptual Reconsiderations 156
9. Revisiting Patriotism 180
10. Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Justice 202
11. Reflections on an All-Encompassing Conception of 219
Cosmopolitanism

Conclusion 240

References 250

About the Author 263

v
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

Let me thank here my friends outside academia for inspiring and en-
couraging me throughout the years. I am no less indebted to local and
international academics (in particular, Anna Kouppanou, Maria Pa-
paioannou, and Olga Papastamou) and to my students, my colleagues,
and my friends in the Department of Education (among them, the new
head of the department, Professor Mary Ioannides-Koutselini, as well
as Charoula Angeli-Valanides, Nicos Valanides, Maria Heliophotou-
Menon, Zelia Gregoriou, Stavros Photiou, and Miranda Christou).
I give special thanks to Michael Peters, who suggested that I write a
book on cosmopolitanism about two years ago. I am grateful to him
not only for providing the initial impetus but also for his overall sup-
port in making this idea a reality. Likewise, many thanks to Paradigm
Publishers for agreeing to publish the book and for all the work done
on their part (and many thanks to Jason Barry, associate acquisitions
editor of Paradigm Publishers, for his guidance and encouragement).
I am grateful to Professors Richard Smith, Paul Standish, Marius
Felderhof, Bharath Sriraman, Ronald Sultana, Michalinos Zembylas,
Tyson E. Lewis, Claudia Ruitenberg, David Bridges, Chris Winch,
David Hansen, Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd, Cristina Cammarano,
Marios Constantinou, Nick Burbules, Victor Roudometof, Simone
Galea, Duncan Mercieca, Carmel Borg, Paul Gibbs, Mark Murphy,
Ted Fleming, James Mensch, Alan Reid, Ian Davies, A. Britton, and H.
Blee for offering me opportunities to contribute either to conferences
or to collections of essays and thus to receive valuable responses to,
and constructive criticism of, my ideas.
I express my gratitude especially to Professors Christopher Norris,
Karl-Otto Apel, Klas Roth, Leonard Waks, Alison Iredale, Lynn Fendler,

vii
viii ▼ Acknowledgments

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, and Heinz-Uwe Haus for their friendship, their valuable
comments, and our regular e-mail exchanges on several issues related
to philosophy, art, and philosophy of education.
Terry McLaughlin’s support during the early phase of my work in
philosophy of education is always remembered with gratitude. The
memory of his personality and friendship is as vivid as ever.
Many thanks also to the following journals for giving my arguments
a first airing in their pages and for permitting me to employ some of
those arguments in an expanded or revised version in this book: Journal
of Philosophy of Education (for the articles “Arrows Not Yet Fired: Cul-
tivating Cosmopolitanism through Education” and “The Cosmopolitan
Self Does Her Homework”); Educational Philosophy and Theory (for the
articles “Globalization, Globalism and Cosmopolitanism as an Educa-
tional Ideal” and “Walls and Laws: Proximity, Distance and the Double-
ness of the Border”); History of the Human Sciences (for the article
“Kant’s Cosmopolitanism and Human History”); Educational Theory
(for the article “Material Spectres: International Conflict, Disaster
Management and Educational Projects”); Ethics and Education
(for the article “Hesiod the Cosmopolitan: Utopian and Dystopian
Discourse and Ethico-Political Education”); and Journal of Social
Science Education (for the article “A New Vision of Europe: Infectious
or Infected? The Position of Education”).
I owe a huge debt to my family, whose loving and caring support
cannot be overestimated. In mentioning my family, many tender
thoughts come to mind about my grandfather, Panayotis, who spent
most of his life sailing in local and foreign seas. His narrations of his
journeys and of his childhood on his island in times that seem so
distant and different from the present were always a source of excite-
ment and wonder for me. He recounted these stories in the most
engaging way, even until his peaceful death last December. I dedicate
this book to his memory.
Introduction

T he book argues that a new conception of cosmopolitanism

is needed and addresses this need by formulating a conception of
cosmopolitanism as an “eccentric” ethico-political ideal. Such cosmo-
politanism is eccentric in the sense that it decenters the self, cultivates
centrifugal virtues, and questions the inflated concern for the globally
enriched self. It does so for the sake of an as yet deflated concern for
strong ethico-political demands that otherness makes upon the self.
The demands in question will be presented in the book as higher than
the currently fashionable ones of tolerance, respect, charity, duty, and
moral/legal obligation.
The why of discussing cosmopolitanism in fresh semantic-conceptual
terms emerges through the following rationale: (1) the academic currency
of diverse but often incompatible meanings of cosmopolitanism causes
unease to many academics and students and creates the impression
that cosmopolitanism is elastic enough to mean just about anything
related to globality; (2) the reluctance to discuss some of those meanings
frequently leads to uncritical dissemination of fashionable though
facile and even undesirable conceptions of cosmopolitanism;
(3) the overreliance on the modern understanding of cosmopolitan-
ism and failure conceptually to go beyond it reintroduce pathologies
(e.g., toxic universalism, Eurocentrism, developmentalism) that have
been associated with modernity—or do not hold them sufficiently in
check; and (4) the failure to handle conceptual requirements adequately
consolidates and reproduces problems of needless internal contradic-
tion or needless preoccupation with false dilemmas. Many approaches
that omit conceptual work fall, precisely due to this omission, into the
trap of contradictory uses of cosmopolitanism, for they employ it both

1
2 ▼ Introduction

as a negatively and as a positively meant concept often even within

the very same text. And other approaches fail to navigate through
drastic choices and unproductive tensions between cosmopolitanism
and patriotism, among other things, because they lack the conceptual
means for transcending terminological accounts that typically entail
such dichotomous thinking.
A more detailed explanation of the necessity for conceptual work is
given in Chapter 1, and some further defense of it is provided in Chap-
ter 8. However, it is important here to note that a turn to conceptual
work on cosmopolitanism is not proposed as a mental exercise but
rather as a springboard for a new outlook on political praxis. The
necessity of conceptually revisiting cosmopolitanism is not simply
semantically and logically compelling but also theoretically and practi-
cally crucial for the following reason. When the necessity of discussing
what should count as cosmopolitanism is ignored, people tend to rely
on established and easily digestible meanings of cosmopolitanism—the
most popular being the perception of cosmopolitanism as mobility,
border crossing, readiness to live and work abroad, and openness to
anything foreign. Consequently, the borders that the self has to cross
in order to merit the attribute “cosmopolitan” appear to be external
(e.g., walls, checkpoints, frontiers).
Against such an outlook on cosmopolitanism, this book claims
that the real borders to be crossed by true cosmopolitans are internal
and, regrettably, traversable, raised at an early age, preserved through
education, and carried along wherever one goes. The most important
such internal barriers are not those that restrict one’s physical move-
ment in space (e.g., fear of traveling, sedentary habits of life, emotional
dependence on rootedness) but rather those values, mentalities, and
motives for action (as well as their rationalizations) that accompany
a self everywhere and underpin the self ’s uncosmopolitan treatment
of others and of the environment. Because such internal barriers are
cultivated from a very early age through upbringing, education, and
acculturation, they are not easily shaken just by the self ’s mere exposure
to alternative lifestyles that are noticeable outside her country. A truly
demanding cosmopolitanism requires a capacity on the part of the self
to critically reconsider the impact of her priorities and values on others
 Introduction ▼ 3

and nature; whether her actions and practices are ethico-politically

defensible; and the extent to which the self should rethink her own intel-
lectual, ethical, and emotive “boundaries” regardless of her mobility or
rootedness in space. In other words, this book argues that a redefined
cosmopolitanism requires nothing less than an ongoing decentering
of the self and an education that enables such eccentricity.
The book’s main argument is deployed in eleven chapters. Chapter 1
sets up and previews the direction that the book will take and forecasts
the discussion of the “eccentric” conception of cosmopolitanism. It aims
to cover the intellectual ground that works as a prelude to some of the
arguments of the book. Chief among its concerns are to get to the heart
of current debates on the desirability of cosmopolitanism that make
the necessity for reconceptualization more compelling and to explain
the “eccentric” in the proposed conception of cosmopolitanism by
contrasting the standard illustration of cosmopolitanism through the
geometrical image of concentric circles with the as yet nontheorized
illustration of cosmopolitanism through the image of eccentric circles.
It will be argued that the latter helps us illustrate a more complex rela-
tion of selfhood, multiple identities, and cosmopolitanism.
However, a complex relation of selfhood and cosmopolitanism
presupposes that the self who aspires to approximate, or is regulatively
guided by, the cosmopolitan ideal perceives, to a sufficient extent, the
distance that separates the ideal from the real. Against hasty identi-
fications of cosmopolitan ideality with globalized reality, Chapter 2
discusses the world, which, in Jacques Derrida’s parlance, “has been
shaken, fissured, and rearranged by all kinds of quakes” (2006, 408),
as a globalized rather than as a cosmopolitan world. Hence, a first step
toward a reformulation of cosmopolitanism involves a clarification of
its difference from globalization and its many faces, from the global
imaginary, and from globalism as the discourse of and about the global-
ized world. The chapter ends with the main positions of general global-
ism, which are traceable and informative in educational globalism too.
A further step, one that is taken in Chapter 3, involves the kind of
critique of globalism that eases the passage to formulating cosmopoli-
tanism as an ethico-political ideal that presupposes a more complex
outlook on current realities. For instance, the uniform, homogeneous
4 ▼ Introduction

treatment of the subjectivity that is influenced by globalization is

deemed implausible. Globalist discourse is thus criticized regarding its
main assumptions about how globalization affects unity and plurality,
social and international justice, emancipatory enrichment of humanity,
and protection of natural life. This critique is woven around issues of
(1) the nation-state and territoriality, (2) diversity and homogeneity,
(3) identity and rootlessness, and (4) equality and life options. It leads,
finally, to the question of how to steer clear of both national or cultural
organicism of original belonging and internationalist, globalist, and
globalizing marketization.
Chapter 4 translates the question with which the third chapter ends
into the broader set of “identity-versus-difference” dilemmas that are
often encountered in various current theorizations of cosmopolitanism.
The discussion of “identity and difference politics” in this chapter aims
to challenge the confines of the largely constructed opposition between
these two edges of globalist discourse and to show that cosmopolitanism
can take some necessary distance from both. The whole problem some-
times appears to boil down to a dichotomy of communal ethos versus
strangeness—a dichotomy that informs much educational globalism
too. The chapter responds to it by handling the cliché of the “cosmo-
politan stranger of the world” in a way that drives home criticisms of
both the unreflective communal affect and the reduction of strangeness
to adaptability to life beyond borders—a reduction that operates at the
expense of a more thorough challenge of the self ’s “internal” borders.
The above paves the way for critiquing the conception of cos-
mopolitanism that is promoted by much educational philosophical
globalism today, which I term “culturalist cosmopolitanism.” Such a
critique is undertaken in Chapter 5 where the ideal self-description of
the purportedly “cosmopolitan” self is exposed as a tacit prescription
of an idealized global self, one that relies on stereotypical and domes-
ticated otherness, a harmless, anodyne “strangeness,” which is, in the
end, self-affirmative. As a contrast to such an ideal self-description,
and in critical response to contemporary demands for illustrating
cosmopolitanism through more embodied rather than abstract avatars,
the chapter singles out historical figures who personify cosmopolitan
existence in ethico-political rather than simply culturalist terms. The
 Introduction ▼ 5

ethico-political responsibility that makes higher demands upon the self

than those (e.g., tolerance, respect for diversity) made by culturalist
cosmopolitanism is thus premised (in a preliminary way) on a caustic
and eccentric cosmopolitan idiom. Such an idiom shifts attention from
the agreement to the treatment perspective on otherness and sees home
and homelessness in a different light.
Chapter 6 asks more explicitly the question that operates below the
surface in Chapter 5. Who is cosmopolitan then? A head-on discussion
of this question with an eye to a cosmopolitanism expected to decenter
the self confronts popular self-images of the cosmopolitan that make
things too easy for subjectivity. They do so because they function
within the limits of a monologically understood cosmopolitanism
and neglect the stronger, relational dimensions of cosmopolitanism.
They thus turn cosmopolitanism into a badge, a self-bestowed attribute
that secures for the self the positive moral image of cosmopolitanism
being one’s accomplished reality, as shown in the declaration, “I am a
cosmopolitan.” To challenge all this, the chapter makes the origin of
cosmopolitanism recede further back into ancient times through refer-
ence to Democritus and suggests his “third-person” cosmopolitanism
of wisdom and goodness as a line of thought that has not been mined
yet. In so doing, the chapter deals with issues of intellectual, ethical, and
emotional preconditions for a cosmopolitan encounter with otherness.
Once the above issues are sorted out, Chapter 7 questions in more
detail the neat categorizations of patriotism as the discourse of the
border and cosmopolitanism as the discourse of the borderless. Using
colonial expansion as an example, the chapter shows that instead of
always being oppositional, the border and borderlessness can make
common cause in violence. In such a case, the only way to dissolve this
complicity is by realizing, along with the ethical restrictions to particu-
larist attachment, the ethical limits to border crossing. In simpler words,
when the set of values that motivates mobility remains unchallenged,
the connection of mobility and cosmopolitanism is nothing more
than wishful thinking. Because, as has already been said, borders and
obstacles to cosmopolitanism are internal, the interplay of walls and
laws, of border and order, is far more complex than usually assumed
within standard accounts of cosmopolitanism. And if patriotism
6 ▼ Introduction

and cosmopolitanism, in their coarser, cruder, and more pernicious

meanings, can make common cause in violence, they can also make
common cause in justice—on the condition of their being conceived,
internalized, and practiced otherwise.
The ground that eccentric cosmopolitanism can cover regarding
the ethico-political treatment of otherness and the accommodation of
patriotic concerns leads us again to issues of conceptualization. These
crop up in Chapter 8 in relation to some educational philosophical
approaches that can serve as examples of how and why the reconcep-
tualization of cosmopolitanism (by now quite extensively prepared)
is much more than a semantic question or a concern of “armchair
philosophy.” Failures to revisit cosmopolitanism and patriotism are now
more concretely shown to place cosmopolitanism and patriotism in an
unproductive and disabling tension. The complementarity of patriotism
and cosmopolitanism, anticipated in Chapter 5 through the interplay
of home and homelessness and investigated in Chapter 7 through the
interplay of border and order, is now more clearly spelled out.
As already indicated, however, the patriotism that can be recon-
ciled with a reconceived cosmopolitanism invites its own share of
conceptual elaboration. Chapter 9 attempts precisely this—yet only
to a degree, since a more thorough reconceptualization of patriotism
would sidetrack a book that focuses on cosmopolitanism. The degree
to which patriotism is conceptually discussed is determined by the fact
that the suggested compatibility of cosmopolitanism and patriotism
presupposes that the meaning of not only the former but also the
latter must be sufficiently clear and that such patriotism is not danger-
ously close to nationalism. To the extent that patriotism maintains an
ethnic dimension, it is important to show that this “ethnic” element is
neither the inoperative/folklore one of much globalist discourse nor
the nationalist one of regressive political accounts—which is inimical
to and incompatible with cosmopolitanism.
Chapter 10 places cosmopolitanism and patriotism in a relation of
set and subset. Once again, this raises issues about whether particularist
identities are not by definition problematic and thus hostile to cosmo-
politan identity. Once such objections are met, the task then becomes
to meet objections of the opposite kind, that is, objections that target
 Introduction ▼ 7

cosmopolitanism as either expendable (since its ground might be

covered by a well-meant patriotism) or completely unrealistic. Answers
to such quandaries are provided through a discussion of how justice
authorizes the desirability of both patriotism and cosmopolitanism
as distinct yet compatible ideals (and virtues). Within the suggested
framework, obligations to locality and to otherness are seen through
the lens of various aspects of justice and not through that of charity
and aid. In this way, the ground is prepared for a redefinition and
reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the sig-
nificance of the diachronic and synchronic entanglement of peoples
and the pending moral debts that such entanglement has effected—
making the order of treatment more urgent and compelling than the
order of agreement.
Chapter 11 makes fall into place the nodal points of the ground of
critique that the previous chapters have covered. The conception of
eccentric cosmopolitanism now emerges as an all-encompassing set of
ethico-politically significant aspects of relating to cosmos. The politics
owed to cosmos is recast in light of the conception of cosmopolitanism
as an ideal of love and care for the whole world; responsibility and
accountability for individual and collective human impact on human
and nonhuman existence; sensitivity and responsiveness to historical
debts pending among peoples and cultures; epistemic and existential
openness to cultural alterity; and economic/practical initiatives and
measures for world survival and redirection. The various aspects of
cosmopolitanism are then grouped in monological and relational
categories, and their significance (and role) for cosmopolitanism is
decided accordingly. All in all, an eccentric cosmopolitanism requires
an all-encompassing synthesis of relational and monological aspects
in interplay.
The book tasks the ethico-political with the re-visioning of politics,
that is, of polis, the second component of cosmopolis. But this does
not mean that the first component, that is, cosmos, need not be seen
otherwise. For it is typically treated in most contemporary literature
as the opposite of chaos and equated with order. The book concludes
with objections to this treatment of the term “cosmos” and by placing
cosmos in a more complex relation with chaos and order. The opposite
8 ▼ Introduction

of cosmos, the Other that should be excluded from an otherwise all-

encompassing ideal, is only ethical obtuseness and cruelty, the internal
borders that separate the supposedly mixed-up, modern world from
its created underworld and push the planet to the brink of disaster.
Chapter One

Setting Up the New

Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism and relevant notions—that is, notions

that appear either as synonymous or allied with, or even inimical to,
cosmopolitanism (e.g., globalization, universalism, multiculturalism,
citizenship, patriotism, nationalism)—are widely discussed in philoso-
phy of education and, more generally, in educational studies. There has
been a vast literature on such topics, deriving from diverse and often
contradictory accounts of what cosmopolitanism is about. The diversity
of sources, the complexity of associated themes, and the richness
of diverging perspectives are often experienced as disconcerting by
many readers and researchers, who feel unable to locate in most of
the available theoretical production an incentive for a discussion
in fresh terms of what cosmopolitanism might be; of what related,
alternative, or even opposed conceptions might involve; and of why
cosmopolitanism might constitute an educational ideal. Therefore, the
abundance and proliferation of material related to cosmopolitanism
invites conceptual discussion and requires some work in the direction
of crucial clarifications.
This book attempts some such discussion and clarifications. However,
against the perfunctory character that such an attempt might take,
or be expected to take, the challenge that the book confronts is more
critical rather than introductory-descriptive. The challenge is to put
forward a specific reworking of cosmopolitanism that breaks with some
problematic, though still quite fashionable, accounts of it. The need
for new conceptual work is all the more pressing now that the politi-
cal exploitation, the facile use, the confounding, modish ubiquity of

9
10 ▼ Chapter 1

terms such as cosmopolitanism and globalization (or their contrast and,

more rarely, their coupling with patriotism or resurgent nationalisms),
and the academic capitalization on them are widespread and, mostly,
uncritically received. Such “utility” (and “utilization”) of these terms
makes their meaning and their relation extremely familiar but, at the
same time, extremely unclear to many students and academics.
But even if the above complications were not operative, the necessity
for conceptual work would still be there for many scholarly reasons. For
example, should we teach (or, more subtly, cultivate) cosmopolitanism?
A no answer usually reflects an identification (or a strong connection)
of cosmopolitanism with Eurocentrism and expansionism. Defenders
of cosmopolitanism have often confronted, and responded to, charges
such as elitism, rationalism, and utopianism (Lu 2000); coldness and
aloofness (Nussbaum and Cohen 1996); and uncritical universalism,
moral rootlessness, disguised ethnocentrism, and elitist aestheticism
(Hansen 2010).
Now, if we opt for a yes answer to the question about teaching cos-
mopolitanism, will that mean that we must focus on preparing students
to live and work across borders? Or is cosmopolitanism something else,
something not quite identical to adaptability to unfamiliar contexts and
not exhausted in tolerance of harmless cultural difference? From another
perspective, should we associate cosmopolitanism exclusively with
global crises and imagine it as a solution to political world problems?
In that case, do we not presuppose a perception of cosmopolitanism
as a reaction to crises, thus rendering it parasitic upon “rupture, strife
and fragmentation” (Hansen 2008b, 206)? Should we rather view it
as a cognitive ideal of human open-mindedness and broadening of
one’s horizons, regardless of the global condition and the inequalities
of power that usually invite the association of cosmopolitanism with
politics? Do we have to make any such drastic choices, or is it possible
to work out a more comprehensive account of cosmopolitanism?
Further, does the teaching of cosmopolitanism mean that the
cultivation of patriotism should be more limited or is perhaps ill-
suited to a cosmopolitan curriculum? Another yes here would rely
on the assumption that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are either
antagonistic or even mutually exclusive ideals. A no answer, one that
 Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism ▼ 11

makes patriotic teaching either necessary or at least permissible in a

cosmopolitan curriculum, demands some explanation of the implicit
assumption that cosmopolitanism and patriotism are compatible or
even complementary. Both possibilities enjoy wide textual support in
recent political philosophical sources, but the ultimate and deepest
response to them depends on what the meaning of the juxtaposed
terms might allow or preclude.
Surely, the choice is not always between yes or no answers. But
even a qualified educational welcome of an idea (or an overcautious
and undecidable stance) does not avoid the semantic challenge and its
theoretical and practical implications.
Then again, the whole issue is not one of a simple redefinition of a
term. Any understanding of cosmopolitanism, to the extent that the
latter is presented as an ideal to be followed, involves both normative
and descriptive levels. In simpler words, it involves an urge, an exhorta-
tion, toward an Ought that must guide, regulate, and redirect action if
a specific, desirable situation is to be approximated, and it involves a
description, an account of the self, the world, and the current situation,
that justifies the necessity for, and the desirability and feasibility of,
such redirection against dangerous alternatives. For instance, when
Sharon Todd claims that “cosmopolitanism as a set of ideas that seek
more peaceful forms of living together on a global scale is in need of a
theoretical framework that faces directly the difficulties of living in a
dissonant world” (2010, 216), she actually couples a specific normativity
(the sought-for peaceful forms of living together on a global scale) with
the kind of descriptive accounts (the specificities of living in a dissonant
world) that protect that normativity from turning into its undesirable
double, that is, into a facile notion of peace that ignores conflict and
dissent in a multidimensional reality. After all, more peaceful forms
of living can be the ideal of that old order that is largely known as Pax
Romana or even of a new order that resembles it. For any normative
discussion of peace not to slide into Eurocentric, toxic universalism,1
a new description of the world and a new specification of what counts
as true peace are needed.
As we will see below, some authors (for instance, trends draw-
ing from Michel Foucault or from poststructuralism and often from
12 ▼ Chapter 1

postcolonial studies) use the term “cosmopolitanism” negatively,

projecting on its ideal and normative plane the descriptive ground
on which the modern Western world attempted to base cosmopoli-
tanism. In other words, they identify principles of universality and
cosmopolitanism with the kind of universalizing aspirations upheld
by the so-called Western world in its most expansionist and imperial-
ist moments. They thus incriminate normative cosmopolitanism as
such. Many others leave the modern descriptive basis untouched while
defending and promoting cosmopolitan principled normativity, as if it
were independent from and unaffected by the faulty descriptive level.
Others perform changes in the normative or in the descriptive level that
range from minimal to drastic modifications. Finally, others jettison
the normative level for the sake of a—supposedly—purely pragmatic
cosmopolitanism qua globalized reality. The position that this book
defends operates at both the normative and descriptive levels, as it views
the semantic reworking of cosmopolitanism in the light of elaborations
on the ethical vision of cosmopolitanism and in the light of accounts
of the self, the world, and current global realities.
The recently revived interest in cosmopolitanism has created, in my
opinion, three major tendencies. One is to understand cosmopolitanism
in negative terms as identical with a toxic universalism. Another is
to understand cosmopolitanism positively, but in a pragmatic way, as
mobility, rootlessness, openness to different lifestyles, and detachment
from the nation-state. This tendency typically associates cosmopoli-
tanism with a particular class of people (notice the uncosmopolitan
exclusivism here), as becomes obvious in the following citation: “The
new professional-managerial groups have become less concerned
about national interests and turned their back on the nation-state:
they display cosmopolitan tendencies” (Isin and Wood 1999, 101).
In this citation, those who display cosmopolitan tendencies are new
professional-managerial groups, that is, footloose and rootless people
of a specific social position; by implication, those who may not belong
in such groups or who may be concerned about national interests
(even in a benign way) are by definition excluded from displaying
cosmopolitan tendencies. Thus cosmopolitanism becomes an attitude
of some and not, potentially, of all people—unless, of course, one can
 Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism ▼ 13

show that all people may enter the cohorts of managerial classes or
that all will eventually abandon any interest in the nation-state in
order to qualify as “cosmopolitans.” The third major tendency also
affirms cosmopolitanism, but it differs from the second in adding to
pragmatic cosmopolitanism cultural and legal or political and ethical
dimensions. Some approaches clearly side with the negative option,
while many others side with the positive options. Several treatments
of cosmopolitanism waver between the positive and the negative, and
some others hope to combine the two by recruiting the notion of aporia,
or productive tension.
In some cases, the (regrettably) sweepingly negative usage of cos-
mopolitanism can be explained as a reaction to very true and tangible
complicities of self-proclaimed cosmopolitans of imperial times. For
instance, Antonio Gramsci dismissed cosmopolitanism because, to
him, the “cosmopolitan” implied a “superficial or ‘picturesque’ attach-
ment to a cultural miscellany based on empire” (Brennan 1989, 16).
Even today, that is, long after the formal collapse of the imperial political
configuration, for some theorists, “cosmopolitanism” is one of those
words that retain imperialist traces and should, therefore, be jettisoned.
For Paul Gilroy, cosmopolitanism was “entangled with and tested by
the expansion of Europeans into new territories and compromised,
if not wholly discredited, by the consolidation and management of
the resulting imperial orders” (quoted in Knowles 2007, 3).2 But the
outcome of such a sweeping incrimination of cosmopolitanism is often
self-contradiction. Sam Knowles shows this with regard to Gilroy, but
the criticism is pertinent to many other current positions too. In various
instances, Gilroy makes a facile use of the very term that he has rejected;
to avoid this contradiction, he requires a revised or redefined term. As
he does not follow this option, Gilroy is “left without an alternative
structure with which to strengthen his replacement for ‘multicultur-
alism’”; he is thus forced “to employ the previously-criticised term in
entirely un-critical reference to ‘cosmopolitan conviviality’ (Gilroy 9)
[and] in addressing ‘provocative cosmopolitan questions’ (Gilroy 18)”
(Knowles 2007, 3).
Nevertheless, the complicities of cosmopolitan discourse (or, at
least, of the descriptive grounds on which it was based) are justifiably
14 ▼ Chapter 1

chastised by friends and foes alike. One cannot ignore the homog-
enizing universalism and the developmentalism that accompanied
modern imperial conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The fallacy of
developmentalism consisted “in thinking that the path of Europe’s
modern development must be followed unilaterally by every other
culture” (Dussel 1993, 68) because it supposedly exemplified the natural
process by which a superior civilization deployed itself. This sense of
superiority obliged modernity “to ‘develop’ (civilize, uplift, educate)
the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped civilizations” (Dussel
1993, 75). It produced, among many other atrocious realities, “civilizing
heroes” and their conquered, colonized victims. One might object that
such rationales underpinned the universalistic cosmopolitanism of
other times. Indeed, “at the request of newly independent states, the
language of civilisation was removed from international law” (Tully
2008, 26). But, as James Tully remarks, it was removed only to be
immediately “replaced with the language of modernisation, marketi-
sation, democratisation and globalisation with the same grammatical
structure, signifying universal processes of development and a single
endpoint of modern citizenship and its institutions” (2008, 26).
The concern about undesirable vestiges of older outlooks on
cosmopolitanism such as the above is evident in many contempo-
rary endeavors to defend cosmopolitanism and see it through a less
abstract-universalistic lens. Anthony Appiah’s effort to distance his
cosmopolitanism from humanism reflects the extent to which the
charge of a homogenizing universalism has gained popularity and
infiltrated most globalist discourse. He states that it would be wrong to
conflate cosmopolitanism and humanism “because cosmopolitanism
is not just the feeling that everybody matters. For the cosmopolitan
also celebrates the fact that there are different local human ways of
being.” By contrast, Appiah continues, humanism “is consistent with
the desire for global homogeneity. Humanism can be made compatible
with cosmopolitan sentiments, but it can also live with a deadening
urge to uniformity” (1997, 621).
This neat categorization invites the objection that, if cosmopoli-
tanism can be purified of modernist undertones of uniformity, then
why would one exclude humanism from such purification? After all,
 Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism ▼ 15

humanism has also been a term of rich and diverse semantic content
throughout history, some of which could resist the desire for global
homogeneity. Besides, though it is true that cosmopolitanism is often
conflated with the pernicious side of humanism, especially in some
Foucault-inspired discussions of it, more often than not, it is cosmo-
politanism as such that causes unease. For instance, within educational
contexts, such an understandable unease about the very employment
of the term has been expressed by Thomas Popkewitz (2008). How-
ever, in Popkewitz’s book we come across the same problem that we
mentioned above in relation to Gilroy’s position. The recourse to the
same term to denote desirable and undesirable meanings—for lack
of an alternative term that would be tasked only with signifying the
cultural theses of modernity—backfires because it reinforces what it
sets out to criticize. Inevitably, the conclusion is that if we wish to talk
about cosmopolitanism, all we have to rely on is the specific modern
Western conception that now acquires transcendental value; that is,
it becomes declared an inescapable human constant, the condition of
possibility of any inclusive globality, so to speak. Therefore, all we can
do is be aware of its duplicities and be cautious regarding its dangers.
However, as I shall argue, when dealing with ideals, we need a sense of
surplus, of a normativity that goes beyond sedimented meanings that
the ideal may have taken at various times. This surplus helps us resist
the transcendentalization of the specific, historical meaning of an ideal
and urges us to redefine and reapproach it.
The toxic universalistic and developmentalist ideology that passed
for cosmopolitanism burdened the politically weak subject (the domi-
nated, the marginalized, the under- or nonprivileged, the “lagging be-
hind”) with the task of changing so as to meet the strong’s standards.
Unlike it, a self-reflective cosmopolitanism should place demands on
the politically strong subject,3 expecting higher levels of awareness of
its global historical and contemporary responsibilities and redirection
of its values and priorities. To distinguish the former cosmopolitanism
from what cosmopolitanism can and should become, we need a specific
term for denoting the wrongheaded, expansionist cosmopolitanism. To
this end, I recommend the term “universalization” because it reflects
more accurately the emphasis on the kind of universalism that the
16 ▼ Chapter 1

modern era favored and the processual character (consider the ending
“-ization” of the term) that toxic universalism acquired as a modern
practice. As to why the term “cosmopolitanism” should not become
synonymous with modern expansionism, it is simply that toxic uni-
versality as a process of expansion is not inherent in the “cosmos” and
“polis” components of cosmopolitanism for reasons that will become
apparent throughout this book. Hence, I suggest that we maintain the
normativity that accompanies the term “cosmopolitanism” from an-
tiquity to the present by distinguishing it from the “universalization”
that the cultural theses of modernity have favored. Following Zygmunt
Bauman (1998), I take the term “universalization”—by now fallen into
disuse and by and large forgotten—as encompassing concepts such as
“civilization,” “development,” “convergence,” “consensus,” and many
other modern ideas, and as conveying

the modern, Western hope, the intention and the determination of order-
making. Those concepts were coined on the rising tides of modern powers
and the modern intellect’s ambitions. They announced the will to make
the world different from what it was and better than it was, and to expand
the change and the improvement to global, species-wide dimensions.
It also declared the intention to make the life conditions of everyone
everywhere, and so everybody’s life chances, equal. (1998, 38–39)

I believe that, thus defined, universalization covers the same conceptual

ground as Popkewitz’s negatively used “cosmopolitanism,” while being
temporally more accurate to account for modern thought and norma-
tively less overarching than the ideal of cosmopolitanism. And, as David
Hansen asserts, not all conceptions of cosmopolitanism project “a prior
human essence to which persons must conform.” In the wake of this,
there can be a cosmopolitanism outside the kind of universalism that is
understood as “a unified, aprioristic, and unquestioning stance regard-
ing such matters as human nature and reason” (Hansen 2010, 161).4
Therefore, the line of reformulation of cosmopolitanism that this
book will follow views cosmopolitanism as an ideal about humanity’s
relation to itself and to nature that comprises ethical, legal, political,
historical, cultural, emotional, aesthetic, economic, and cognitive as-
pects that denaturalize established worldviews. This cosmopolitanism
 Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism ▼ 17

is primarily about a responsible, lawful, loving, thoughtful treatment

of the whole cosmos. Inclusion enters the picture through the word
“whole,” a word that extends responsibility and obligation to an unlim-
ited number of entities affected by human action and/or by the vagaries
of time. But to have a cosmopolitanism worthy of the name, such an
inclusion must be taken for granted, and the emphases and tensions
must concern only what counts as obligation, how responsibility must
be construed, and the level of awareness of historical debt that burdens
(principally though not exclusively) those who have been very active in
creating inequalities, global asymmetries, hunger, poverty, destruction,
and other pathologies inflicted upon others or upon nature. By contrast,
when inclusion is put center stage (e.g., as happens in the case of the
No Child Left Behind educational controversy), the issue seems to be
that we, the “advanced” and “progressive” of the world, set the various
standards, and we are kind enough not to leave anybody out; in other
words, we wish everybody to catch up. Worse, as Popkewitz shows, what
lies behind such emphases on inclusion is more often than not a very
uncosmopolitan effort to contain difference in order to normalize it
and hold it in check. Certain universalizing educational practices and
measures stem from a cultural territory marked by fears about failures
of cognitive utility and procedural reform to redeem totality through
the incorporation of alterity. In turn, the territory of alterity causes fear
that the “civilized” space is threatened by the modes of living of the
disadvantaged and risk-prone Others (Popkewitz 2008, 167). When
inclusion becomes the most central stake of cosmopolitanism, we have
already moved away from the more demanding cosmopolitanism for
which the issue is not to identify and stigmatize the excluded in the
moralist and condescending effort to include her or to eliminate risky
diversity by turning all alterity into a liberally tolerable and harmless
difference. The issue for a normatively more elaborate cosmopolitanism
is rather to highlight and debate global ethico-political responsibility.
This book focuses its conceptual effort on this issue. To do so, it
draws and emphasizes distinctions between globalization, globalism,
and cosmopolitanism, and it attempts critical work on some widespread
conceptions of cosmopolitanism.
18 ▼ Chapter 1

Beyond older, universalist conceptions and reconceptualized in a

multicultural light, the cosmopolitanism that is now largely endorsed
has come to be seen as a glorification of diversity and a celebration of
global mobility and border crossing. In this way, cosmopolitanism is
theorized in proximity to, perhaps even identification with, globaliza-
tion. Within such a context, a crucial point on which most theoretical
efforts converge is the primacy of culturalist cosmopolitanism, that is,
a cosmopolitanism that concentrates only on challenging fixed cultural
boundaries and that neglects any other possible tasks that would fall
into its theoretical province (e.g., issues of redistribution of wealth and
global equality).
Thus, I describe the notion of cosmopolitanism that is widely held
in much political philosophy, cultural studies, and philosophy of
education as “culturalist” cosmopolitanism. This kind of cosmopolitan
discourse operates within the confines of a more encompassing
theoretico-political discourse that revolves around globalization, a dis-
course that can be termed “globalist.” In a nutshell, the globalized world
comprises, among other things, a self-referential discourse that glorifies
cosmopolitanism and purports to uphold it as an educational ideal.
Yet, there are contradictions in this globalized world, just as in any
other world: precisely when there is so much glorification of mobility
and cosmopolitanism, things are not as one might expect in actual
educational systems. The critical and cosmopolitan civic discourses
“are marginalized in the curricular texts that define the standards and
prominent meanings of citizenship taught in schools” (Knight Abowitz
and Harnish 2006, 657). Even more threatening in my view, however,
is the tendency to transfer into educational contexts the conception
of cosmopolitanism that enjoys currency within globalism. This
tendency enhances an educational globalism that, despite its merits,
makes common cause with the culturalist and more generally unde-
manding notion of cosmopolitanism. Among other things, then, this
book aims to challenge the educational dependence upon dominant
trends within globalism and to suggest some enrichment of the notion,
scope, and significance of educational cosmopolitanism.
The book approaches globalization as an empirical reality (ac-
complished as well as in process) that comprises global facticity, the
 Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism ▼ 19

set of everyday experiences that make globalization constantly felt as

an empirical phenomenon and the imaginary that reflects the varying
reception of such a facticity. Globalization is viewed as an empirical
reality that is in a complex relation to its corresponding globalist
discourse and at a considerable distance from a more demanding
cosmopolitan ideal. I argue that failure to grasp the distinctions
between globalization, globalism, and cosmopolitanism derives from
mistaken identifications of the Is with the Ought and leads to naive and
Eurocentric glorifications of the potentialities of globalization. In the
end, while culturalist cosmopolitanism and its educational expression
purport to serve multiculturalism, inclusion, and diversity, they turn
out to reproduce exclusions, divisions, and normalizations of global
inequalities. Conversely, drawing the appropriate distinctions helps us
articulate a more critical approach to contemporary cultural, economic,
and political phenomena and to reconsider the current place and po-
tential role of education within the context of global affairs. From this
perspective, antagonistic impulses cultivated by globalization and by
some globalist discourse (consolidating binary oppositions such as
rootedness versus rootlessness, patriotism versus cosmopolitanism,
and so forth) are singled out and targeted via a radicalization of edu-
cational orientations.
Current positive receptions of cosmopolitanism are also open to
criticisms that invite some reworking of the semantic content and
scope of the term that today enjoys so much popularity. The positive
treatment of cosmopolitanism that rests on a pragmatic conception
derives from an uncritical and undertheorized adoption of the everyday
use of the term, which denotes mobility, glorification of travel, eclectic
responsiveness to difference, adaptability, rootlessness, and develop-
ment of qualifications that guarantee success all over a globalized world.
“Propelled and defined by media and market, cosmopolitanism today
involves not so much an elite at home, as it does spokespersons of a
kind of perennial immigration, valorised by a rhetoric of wandering,
and rife with allusions to the all-seeing eye of the nomadic sensibil-
ity” (Brennan 1989, 2). The more philosophical, positive treatment of
cosmopolitanism sets out from a pragmatic cosmopolitanism to add to
it some more demanding preconditions. Those vary from expectations
20 ▼ Chapter 1

that the cosmopolitan self be open to and respectful of cultural diversity,

as well as mindful of international legality, down to expectations that
the cosmopolitan be an informed, caring, and responsible global citizen.
Many such philosophical approaches adapt the notion to new givens,
drawing from the philosophical tradition but couching it in a more
adequate and updated philosophical idiom. The former lighthearted,
pragmatic sense of cosmopolitanism can be encountered in the work
of many contemporary and influential political philosophers, and it
may underpin even a legalist focus on cosmopolitanism. The philo-
sophically deeper—though in no way immune to criticism—sense of
cosmopolitanism can be found in Martha Nussbaum’s renegotiation of
stoicism and in neo-Kantian and post-Kantian political philosophies
that pay more attention to the deontological rather than the legalist
interpretation of Kantian cosmopolitanism. However, even this kind
of cosmopolitanism must spell out its distance from a “tourist,” cul-
turalist conception. It must also show that it does not rest on obsolete
philosophical descriptions of the self.5 Then it must prove that it does
not express the concerns of a paternalistic and elitist small group of
intellectuals (Lu 2000). The latter objection can be met, I believe, by
reworking the conception of cosmopolitanism in such a way that it
becomes more relevant to, and approachable by, the masses. This pre-
supposes that cosmopolitanism must acquire a meaning that rescues
it from standing or falling on the grounds of one’s wealth, academic
attainment, social capital, and other such factors that facilitate global
mobility yet in no way guarantee truly cosmopolitan feelings, attitudes,
and responsibility toward cosmos.
Then again, the strong theoretical-normative element in such a
meaning of cosmopolitanism might attract objections concerning
a possible omission of a more embodied, practical, and everyday
cosmopolitanism. It has been noted that “discourses envision cosmo-
politanism as a primarily philosophical, moral, or cultural perspective;
however, critics have recently called for a more material analysis of
the way cosmopolitanism is performed in people’s everyday lives”
(Germann-Molz 2006, 2). What is now elevated to global exemplarity
is the cosmopolitan “not just as a political or cultural figure of global
allegiance, but also as an embodied subject with a corporeal disposi-
 Setting Up the New Cosmopolitanism ▼ 21

tion toward the world as a whole” (Germann-Molz 2006, 1, emphasis

mine). My initial response to such objections to theory and normativity
is that the words that I have just italicized give the impression of political
cosmopolitan selfhood as an accomplished reality that needs now only
to become somewhat more energetic and fit. I find the assumptions
underlying this impression, as well as the emphasis on this kind of
corporeality, too optimistic regarding the merits of rootlessness and
unjustifiably lopsided in favor of contemporary, “practical” manifesta-
tions of “cosmopolitanism.” Hence, in this book, I provide an alternative
to such a construal of cosmopolitan embodied selfhood by reference
to some neglected, but no less real and embodied, figures of rooted/
rootless existence. I do not explore their fitness to travel or their trav-
eling to fit into the category of the “cosmopolitan” but rather their
ethico-political commitments that drove them to specific actions that
are exemplary of cosmopolitan life. Keeping in mind the idea that “the
traveller’s inoculated body becomes a cosmopolitan body that literally
tolerates and is open to difference and danger” (Germann-Molz 2006,
13) as a background assumption to which the alternative examples
that I shall be using might be contrasted, we will see that the actions
required by normative cosmopolitanism are not quite risk-free. In fact,
the lives of the figures whom I discuss in this book involved far realer
risks than those associated with world traveling. And they undertook
these risks for the sake of others rather than for the sake of fitting into
contemporary fashionable ideal self-descriptions. This leads to an
important difference between monological and relational conceptions
of cosmopolitanism. The former concentrate on individual well-being
and enrichment of one’s experience; the latter concentrate on human
entanglement (I borrow the term from Paul Ricoeur [1996, 9–10]) and
on the ethico-political issues that such an entanglement raises.
To expose some of the problems of facile and faddish approaches
to planetary movement, I then employ the example of colonial border
crossing and its rationalization. Utilizations of claims to universality
have often been sheer rationalizations of much deeper-laid motivations
for expansion. Though this has not always been the case, it has not
been rare, nevertheless, to embark on “civilizing” expeditions not out
of a supposed faith in universalism but, in truth, out of faith in profit
Other documents randomly have
different content
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebooknice.com