Agency, Freedom, Cosmopolitanism: Theorizing Citizenship in a post-National World.

The only true method for attaining freedom, we are told, is by the use of critical reason, the understanding of what is necessary and what is contingent. So wrote Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay, Two Concepts of Liberty. This paper explores this Enlightenment maxim in terms of recent efforts to think citizenship, or ethical and political engagement, beyond the redounds of the nation-state. What does it mean for the person to commit to ideals that expressly disavow the necessary (spatial) limits drawn by the state? Can such ideals furnish a conception of community that would legitimate itself through temporal rather than spatial exigencies? What might cosmopolitan civic engagement look like? What ethical and political affirmations of agency and freedom might be fostered in a cosmopolitan ethos of ‘the political’? To what extent would such an ethos remain true to Enlightenment ideals, namely, a philosophy governed by the Kantian spirit of critique? The future of philosophy’s taking up such questions must be mediated through the historicity of its past. The paper concentrates on Jacques Derrida’s turn to Kant and suggests that, as Derrida’s recent work has shown, an Enlightenment-inspired philosophy has much to contribute to contemporary efforts to understand freedom’s role in discriminating the necessary from the contingent in global life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]