Beck Et Al-2010-The British Journal of Sociology
Beck Et Al-2010-The British Journal of Sociology
Beck Et Al-2010-The British Journal of Sociology
Abstract
This article calls for a re-conceptualization of the social sciences by asking for a
cosmopolitan turn. The intellectual undertaking of redefining cosmopolitanism is a
trans-disciplinary one, which includes geography, anthropology, ethnology, inter-
national relations, international law, political philosophy and political theory, and
now sociology and social theory. Methodological nationalism, which subsumes
society under the nation-state, has until now made this task almost impossible. The
alternative, a cosmopolitan outlook, is a contested term and project. Cosmopoli-
tanism must not be equalized with the global (or globalization), with world system
theory (Wallerstein), with world polity (Meyer and others), or with world-
society (Luhmann). All of those concepts presuppose basic dualisms, such as
domestic/foreign or national/international, which in reality have become
ambiguous. Methodological cosmopolitanism opens up new horizons by demon-
strating how we can make the empirical investigation of border crossings and other
transnational phenomena possible.
Keywords: Cosmopolitanism; methodological cosmopolitanism; methodological
nationalism; social theory
Beck (Department of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich) and Sznaider (School of Behavioral Sciences,Academic
College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel) (Corresponding author email: [email protected])
London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01250.x
382 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider
The core disciplines of the social sciences, whose intellectual traditions are
reference points for each other and for other fields, were therefore domes-
ticated in the sense of being preoccupied not with Western and world
civilization as wholes but with the domestic forms of particular national
societies (Shaw 2000: 68).
horizons for social science research making visible new realities encouraging
new research programmes (Beck and Lau 2005; Beck, Bonss and Lau
2003: 135). Against the background of cosmopolitan social science, it sud-
denly becomes obvious that it is neither possible to distinguish clearly
between the national and the international, nor, correspondingly, to make a
convincing contrast between homogeneous units. National spaces have
become denationalized, so that the national is no longer national, just as the
international is no longer international. New realities are arising: a new
mapping of space and time, new co-ordinates for the social and the political
are emerging which have to be theoretically and empirically researched and
elaborated.
This entails a re-examination of the fundamental concepts of modern
society. Household, family, class, social inequality, democracy, power, state,
commerce, public, community, justice, law, history, memory and politics must be
released from the fetters of methodological nationalism, re-conceptualized,
and empirically established within the framework of a new cosmopolitan
social and political science. It would be hard to understate the scope of this
task. But nevertheless it has to be taken up if the social sciences want to avoid
becoming a museum of antiquated ideas.
into sociology. Nevertheless, the question has to be asked and answered: Why
is there a cosmopolitan moment now, at the beginning of the twenty-first
century?
On the other hand the discourse on cosmopolitanism so far has not really
paid attention to the fact that, besides the intended, there is an unintended and
lived cosmopolitanism and this is of growing importance: the increase in inter-
dependence among social actors across national borders (which can only be
observed from the cosmopolitan outlook), whereby the peculiarity exists in the
fact that this cosmopolitanization occurs as unintended and unseen side-
effects of actions which are not intended as cosmopolitan in the normative
sense. Only under certain circumstances does this latent cosmopolitanization
lead to the emergence of global public spheres, global discussion forums, and
global regimes concerned with transnational conflicts (institutionalized
cosmopolitanism). Summarizing these aspects, we speak of the Cosmopolitan
Condition as opposed to the Post-modern Condition.
unfolds beneath the surface or behind the faades of persisting national spaces,
jurisdiction and labelling, while national flags continue to be hoisted and
national attitudes, identities and consciousness remain dominant. Judged by
the lofty standards of ethical and academic morality, this latent character
renders cosmopolitanism trivial, unworthy of comment, even suspect. An ideal
that formerly strutted the stage of world history as an ornament of the elite
cannot possibly slink into social and political reality by the backdoor. Thus, we
emphasize the centrality of emotional engagement and social integration and
not only fragmentation as part of the cosmopolitan world.And this emphasizes
that the process of cosmopolitanization is bound up with symbol and ritual,
and not just with spoken ideas. And it is symbol and ritual that turns philoso-
phy into personal and social identity and consequently relevant for social
analysis. The more such rituals contribute to individuals personal sense of
conviction, the larger the critical mass available to be mobilized in cosmopoli-
tan reform movements for instance, be they movements against global inequal-
ity or human rights violations (see the contributions by Robert Fine (2006:
4967) and Angela McRobbie (2006: 6986)). And the farther cosmopolitan
rituals and symbols spread, the more chance there will be of someday achiev-
ing a cosmopolitan political order. This is where normative and empirical
cosmopolitanism meet. At the same time, we must remember that a cosmo-
politan morality is not the only historically important form of todays global-
ized world. Another one is nationalism. The nation-state was originally formed
out of local units to which people were fiercely attached. They considered
these local attachments natural and the nation-state to be soulless and arti-
ficial Gesellschaft compared to the local Gemeinschaft. But thanks to national
rituals and symbols, that eventually changed completely. Now today many
people consider national identity to be natural and cosmopolitan or world
identity to be an artificial construct. They are right. It will be an artificial
construct, if artificial means made by humans. But they are wrong if they think
artificial origins prevent something from eventually being regarded as natural.
It did not stop the nation-state. And there is no reason it has to stop cosmo-
politan morality. However, the challenge will be to see these moral orders not
as contradictory but as living side by side in the global world. Cosmopolitanism
and nationalism are not mutually exclusive, neither methodologically nor
normatively.
There can be no doubt that a cosmopolitanism that is passively and unwill-
ingly suffered is a deformed cosmopolitanism. The fact that really-existing
cosmopolitanization is not achieved through struggle, that it is not chosen, that
it does not come into the world as progress with the reflected moral authority
of the Enlightenment, but as something deformed and profane, cloaked in the
anonymity of side-effects this is an essential founding moment within cos-
mopolitan realism in the social sciences. Our main point is here to make a
distinction between the moral ideal of cosmopolitanism (as expressed in
London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology
Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences 389
Cosmopolitan traditions
If we ask who are the intellectual progenitors of this internal cosmopolitaniza-
tion of national societies, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Dewy
come to mind, as well as such classical German thinkers as Kant, Goethe,
Herder, Humboldt, Nietzsche, Marx and Simmel. All of them construed the
modern period as a transition from early conditions of relatively closed soci-
eties to universal eras (universelle Epochen, Goethe) of interdependent soci-
eties, a transition that essentially involved the expansion of commerce and the
dissemination of the principle of republicanism.
For Kant, even more so for Marx, and in different ways also for Adam Smith
and Georg Simmel, the dissolution of small territorial communities and the
spread of universal social and economic interdependence (through the not yet
associated risks) was the essential mark, and even the law, of world history.
Their preoccupation with long lines of historical development made them
sceptical towards the idea that state and society in their nationally homog-
enous manifestations could constitute the end point of world history.
British Journal of Sociology London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
390 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider
The politics of human rights provides empirical evidence for this claim. If
human rights come to be understood as the necessary basis of an increasing
number of individuals autonomy, these people will feel that they are defend-
ing the foundations of their own identities when they defend the importance of
human rights for foreigners and strangers. The cultural and political diversity
that is essential to this kind of life has been slowly elevated to a central
political principle. It sometimes seems as if it were even more highly valued
than the representative principle with which it now shares pride of place. The
interesting thing about an individualistic culture is that it could conceivably
embrace a concept like cosmopolitan justice in the same paradoxical way that
it is able to embrace the politics of ecology. Ecology in many ways embodies a
conservative perspective. It takes the values of local community, the idea of
communal responsibility, and magnifies it to the level of civil society. In effect,
it treats civil society as a great community, one which should have control over
its environment. It treats society as something that can be regarded for these
purposes as a single community, despite the fact that it consists of very differ-
ent subgroups and classes.
This demonstrates that the everyday experience of cosmopolitan interde-
pendence is not a mutual love affair. It arises in a climate of heightened global
threats, which create an unavoidable pressure to co-operate. With the concep-
tualization and recognition of threats on a cosmopolitan scale, a shared space
of responsibility and agency bridging all national frontiers and divides is
created that can (though it need not) found political action among strangers in
ways analogous to national politics. This is the case when recognition of the
scale of the common threats leads to cosmopolitan norms and agreements and
thus to an institutionalized cosmopolitanism.
However, existing research on the emergence of corresponding supra- and
transnational organizations and regimes has shown how difficult it is to make
the transition from agreement on the definition of the threats to agreement on
what form the required response should take. Ongoing communication con-
cerning threats is an important component of informal cosmopolitan norm-
formation.The socializing effect of world risk society is not adequately grasped
if we restrict its potential to new and yet-to-be founded institutions of success-
ful global co-ordination. Already prior to any cosmopolitan institution-
formation, global norms are produced by outrage over circumstances that are
felt to be intolerable. The emergence of global norms is not necessarily con-
tingent on the conscious efforts of positive norm formation but can be fuelled
negatively by the evaluation of global crises and threats to humanity.
The concept of cosmopolitan memory is a good example in this connection.
It is not global in any homogeneous sense. It rather represents a mixture of the
local and national with the global, which in turn never was truly global but
sprang from very specific historical occurrences. This cosmopolitanization of
memory can potentially create new solidarities and support global-political
London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology
Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences 393
and global-cultural norms for the effective spread of human rights: cosmopoli-
tanized memory as practical enlightenment, as it were. Through the media and
other means of communication, people are drawn into cycles of cosmopolitan
sympathies, at times even against their own will (Levy and Sznaider 2005).
Thus analytical-empirical cosmopolitanism simultaneously delimits itself
from normative-political cosmopolitanism and presupposes it. This distinction
does not only promote a value-free approach to everyday experience and to
the epistemology of world risk society in the social sciences; it compels us to
demarcate, though not to neglect, normative and political cosmopolitanism in
a world that has become a danger to itself. In fact, this distinction first makes
it possible to pose the question of the relation between the categories and
cognitions of the cosmopolitan outlook (or the critique of methodological
nationalism), on the one hand, and the topics of cosmopolitan ethics and
politics, on the other. How are cosmopolitan democracy, justice, solidarity,
community, identity, law, politics, state, etc. possible? What does a cosmopolitan
redefinition of religion mean?
Methodological cosmopolitanism
We can distinguish three phases in how the code word globalization has been
used in the social sciences: first, denial, second, conceptual refinement and
empirical research, and, third, epistemological shift.
To the extent that the second phase was successful, the insight began to gain
ground that the unit of research of the respective social scientific disciplines
becomes arbitrary when the distinctions between national and international,
local and global, us and them, lose their sharp contours. The question for the
research agenda following the epistemological turn is: what happens when the
premises and boundaries that define the units of empirical research and theory
disintegrate? The answer is that the whole conceptual world of the national
outlook becomes disenchanted, that is, de-ontologized, historicized and
stripped of its necessity. However, it is only possible to justify this and think
through its consequences within the framework of an interpretative alterna-
tive which replaces ontology with methodology, that is, the current leap which
replaces the ontology and imaginary of the nation-state with methodological
cosmopolitanism.
This leap seeks to overcome the naive universalism of early Western
sociology. Methodological cosmopolitanism implies becoming sensitive and
open to the many universalisms, the conflicting contextual universalisms for
example, of the post-colonial experience, critique and imagination, where the
retreat from empire has resulted in large waves of immigration from
the margins (of former empires to it) to the former metropolitan centres.
Methodological cosmopolitanism also means including other (native)
British Journal of Sociology London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
394 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider
The most inappropriate way to grasp the reality of the Global Age is to
seek how to refit human society back into the systems mould. Systems
theory requires a firm position on what constitutes the system and what its
environment is. In order to preserve the nation-state society as the unit of
analysis, Parsons had to allocate other state societies, as well as the mate-
rial world, to the category of environment. This was artificial even in the
1950s. Nation-state societies exist within a field of other societies, in per-
sistent exchange and interaction. This has been part of the self-evident
premises of the theory of international politics, but it applies equally to
those institutions which elude state control, including money, information,
science, transport, technology and law. The collapse of the Soviet system is
only the most blatant example of what happens if the control attempt is
carried through regardless of the risks involved. In other words, totaliza-
tion discourse was a symptom of the overreach of the nation-state.
(Albrow 1996: 111).
What about the basic conceptual ideas which came up since the 1970s, like
Weltgesellschaft (Niklas Luhmann), world system theory (Immanuel
Wallerstein), world polity (John Meyer and his group)? These are more or
less established sociological theories and research programmes which do have
a huge impact on the international sociological debates. Their surplus value in
conceptualizing the cosmopolitanization of the world has to be examined very
carefully. But some problems can be identified and demonstrated.
Niklas Luhmann, on the one hand, criticized what we call methodological
nationalism already in the 1970s. On the other hand, he introduced his concept
of world society as a logical implication of his theory of communication. His
argument is that in principle, there are no borders to communication, therefore
there only can be one society and that is the world society without any
consideration of empirical facts. Thus his hypothesis can neither be falsified
nor verified. If there is analytically! only one world society, there is no need,
for example, to explore the new realities of fifty years of Europeanization. So
here we have another reason why social theory is blind to Europe.
Immanuel Wallersteins world system theory presupposes the national
international dualism, as does John Meyers concept of world polity. Even
though both concepts are very powerful in producing extremely interesting
empirical interpretations, they both ignore the new historical facts of Europe-
anization (as does Niklas Luhmanns system theory). And neither realizes that
the distinction which underpins their view of the world, namely that between
national and international spheres, is now dissolving in what remains a some-
what hazy power space of global domestic politics. None the less, it was this
distinction that helped to shape the world of the first modernity, including the
key concepts (and theories) of society, identity, state, sovereignty, legitimacy,
violence and state authority.
London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology
Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences 397
Cosmopolitan understanding
How and why is the twenty-first century very different from France in 1912
when Durkheim published The Elementary Forms of Religious Life? One
obvious difference is that Australian aboriginals have access to Durkheims
sociology of religion either through their interaction with contemporary
anthropologists, or through educational web-sites, or through participation
in university discourses on Durkheims sociological theory. Cosmopolitan
understanding, despite the existence of digital divide, is discursive, dialogic
and reflexive.Whereas the Elementary Forms assumed hat the Aunta tribe
was a passive object of sociological inquiry, the contemporary world is
connected together as a (more or less) unified place in a (more or less)
simultaneous time. Network society makes endless and instant dialogue.
(Turner 2004: 11)
The distinction between the actor perspective of society and politics and the
observer perspective of the social sciences only unfolds its disruptive potential
when the expanded options opened up by cosmopolitanization are viewed
from both perspectives. It then becomes clear that cosmopolitanization, in
both the agent and the observer perspectives, must be developed as a new
politics of perspectives (of starting points, modes of access, standards, framings,
foregrounds and backgrounds, etc.). (On the politics of scale i.e., the nego-
tiation of hierarchy and legitimacy among different scales of social interac-
tion see Brenner 1999, 2000; Tsing 2000; Burawoy et al. 2000). It follows that
social science can conceptualize and thematize the relational patterns tran-
snational, globallocal, globalnational, nationalglobal or globalglobal:
with a local focus (e.g. transnational lifestyles of Turks in London; global
co-operation and conflict within the World Trade Organization, the
American government or NGOs; conflicts between national and
British Journal of Sociology London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
398 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider
How does this relate to the post-Second World War period of sociological
thinking? In the 1960s the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory were the
dominant intellectual movements, in the 1970s and 1980s this role was assumed
by the French post-modernists; and now a cosmopolitan mixture in British
sociology could give birth to a cosmopolitan vision for the humanities and the
social sciences. This opens up new fields and research projects which this issue
will hopefully ignite. At the same time, methodological cosmopolitanism
emerges out and develops three fields in sociological research and practice.
The first field develops out of the old agenda of sociological theory after the
World War II and tries to integrate it within a new cosmopolitan sociological
imagination for the twenty-first century. The postwar conflicts in sociological
theory in Western Europe, especially in Britain, were pretty much concen-
trated on the relation between social class, race, gender and the welfare state
as an egalitarian actor of expanding citizenship. Sociology then was concerned
with bringing the state back in. It was class and in particular the rise of the
working class which was seen as the big social problem and the solidarity of the
nation-state was seen as the solution. As in the methodological nationalism of
Emile Durkheim fraternity became solidarity and national integration.
The new agenda highlights societal relations as distinct from the nation-
state. Society no longer appears under anyones control. In the cosmopolitan
constellation sociology is then concerned with the formation of post-national
and cross-national bonds, or who belongs and who does not, and how inclusion
and exclusion arise. Therefore the new agenda does not intend to throw the
state back out, but to understand how states are being transformed in the
London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology
Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences 401
cosmopolitan constellation, how new non-state actors arise and a new type of
cosmopolitan states might develop. This post-national state formation is not
anymore the General Will of modern democracy as mapped by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau onto the nation and further developed into sociological theories of
Durkheim and Weber. Rousseaus General Will was not only the foundation of
modern relativism; it was also the foundation of the modern idea of the nation
as the ultimate reality, not as a collection of followers, but as the one thing that
reconciled freedom and determinism. It was the birth of society as national
society, since the General Will must always be general in its object and its
subject and it is only general if it acts generally that is, when one decides
something that applies to all. Now, the general is called universal and the
universal is considered to be the nation. This is how methodological national-
ism became tied up with universalism in sociological theory. Bryan Turner
(2006: 13351) and Gerard Delanty (2006: 2547) have problematized the
connection between the old and the new agenda in sociological theorizing.
Their articles build the bridge to be crossed for the new agenda.The essay from
Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry (2006: 113131) and the one from Edgar
Grande (2006: 87111) push the new agenda a step further: the first through an
analysis of mobility and space showing how space can be deconstructed and
opened up for a cosmopolitan sociology. Edgar Grande takes the science of the
state to new levels by showing what methodological cosmopolitanism can do
for the mother science of nationalism and the state.
The second field from which a methodological cosmopolitanism emerges is
the cultural field of particularism either in its post-colonial, feminist or cultural
theory version. Methodological cosmopolitanism should be aware of strategic
essentialism where positive claims are being put forward by so-called essen-
tialist groups which claim that social bonds and moral sentiments are based on
particularity and as a consequence, therefore, sociology, as a moral science,
needs to theorize the particular. These theories of particularity do not stand in
opposition to the above universal theories of the nation.They complement and
relate to each other. Theories of particularity oppose the homogenizing char-
acter of universal theories, and therefore recognize and criticize how univer-
salizing universalism can be. However, on the other hand they do set a context
for these theories that has no universal horizon: i.e. cognitive, moral or
political. Angela McRobbies essay (McRobbie 2006: 6986) tries to disen-
tangle the importance and dilemmas of these contextualized theories and
shows how they can be used fruitfully for newly conceived methodological
cosmopolitanism.
The third related field holds the above together.This is the field of normative
social science whose followers read Kant as a sociologist. It is based on a
mixture of the moral universalism and cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth
century and centres itself upon (international) politics and not society as its
main field. These cosmopolitan normative theories have a tendency to ignore
British Journal of Sociology London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
402 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider
society and its more banal forms of everyday life. They create an opposition
between pure, ennobling public life, and cramping, constraining private life.
However, under the conditions of an interdependent global world, a globality
of risk and an advanced division of labour, every act of production and con-
sumption and every act of everyday life links actors to millions of unseen
others. This is what social life under cosmopolitan conditions means. It creates
the moral horizon for a newly conceived form of at times banal, and, at times,
moral cosmopolitanism. Robert Fine demonstrates how this works under the
shadows of catastrophe and what the sociological preconditions for military
interventions could be and how they connect to the social (Fine 2006: 4967).
Methodological cosmopolitanism does not, therefore, mean the end of the
nation but its transformation. It is the newly conceived research agenda which
tries to bring sociology back to its subject matter reality, which, of course, has
to be demonstrated in detail and which is no longer a national or international
but a cosmopolitan one. This opens up the horizon for the cosmopolitan
realism of a New Critical Theory which has a strong standing against the
retrogressive idealism of the national perspective in politics, research and
theory.
(Date accepted: December 2005)
Note
1. See also the debates on public sociol- on Cosmopolitan Sociology 57(1) of the
ogy (Burawoy 2005 and this special issue BJS).
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