Cosmopolitan Political Community: Why Does It Feel So Right?

Identification with a national community is typically associated with hot emotions, and opposed to cool cosmopolitanism as an ideal. Hence, it is considered in this paper how the oversimplified characterization of national feeling as hot and cosmopolitanism as cool tends to reify the former and idealize the latter. It considers cosmopolitanism in the neo-Kantian terms of human rights, in which, although emotion has not been addressed directly, hot national feeling and cool cosmopolitanism are implicitly opposed in this way. The author argues that the dichotomy makes it difficult to see how warm cosmopolitanism is actually developing in political communities organized by western national states, in less rationalist ways than is suggested by neo-Kantians and in association with, rather than in opposition to, national feeling.