Elijah Anderson, called "one of our best urban ethnographers" by the , introduces the concept of the "cosmopolitan canopy": the urban islands of civility amid segregated ghettos, suburbs, and ethnic enclaves.

Explores German cinema's enthusiasm for and anxiety about the blurring of postwar cultural boundaries

Originally the constitution was expected to express and channel popular sovereignty. It was the work of freedom, springing from and facilitating collective self-determination. After the Second World War this perspective changed: the modern constitution owes its authority not only to collective authorship, it also must commit itself credibly to human rights. Thus people recede into the background, and the national constitution becomes embedded into one or other system of 'peer review' among nations. This is what Alexander Somek argues is the creation of the cosmopolitan constitution. Reconstructing what he considers to be the three stages in the development of constitutionalism, he argues that the cosmopolitan constitution is not a blueprint for the constitution beyond the nation state, let alone a constitution of the international community; rather, it stands for constitutional law reaching out beyond its national bounds. This cosmopolitan constitution has two faces: the first, political, face reflects the changed circumstances of constitutional authority. It conceives itself as constrained by international human rights protection, firmly committed to combating discrimination on the grounds of nationality, and to embracing strategies for managing its interaction with other sites of authority, such as the United Nations. The second, administrative, face of the cosmopolitan constitution reveals the demise of political authority, which has been traditionally vested in representative bodies. Political processes yield to various, and often informal, strategies of policy co-ordination so long as there are no reasons to fear that the elementary civil rights might be severely interfered with. It represents constitutional authority for an administered world.

Critically interrogating the popular concept of cosmopolitanism, this book offers new insight of what it means to be a world citizen today.

Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.

The idea of the 'nation-state' has failed, Glenn argues, and a major shift in our understanding of the state is needed. He provides an original approach by situating cosmopolitanism in its historical context and demonstrating that the state is necessarily cosmopolitan in character, and has always been subject to transnational law-making.

The cosmopolitan political tradition defines people not according to nationality, family, or class but as equally worthy citizens of the world. Martha Nussbaum pursues this “noble but flawed” vision, confronting its inherent tensions over material distribution, differential abilities, and the ideological conflicts inherent to pluralistic societies.

After the Cosmopolitan? argues that both racial divisions and intercultural dialogue can only be understood in the context of the urbanism through which they are realized. All the key debates in cultural theory and urban studies are covered in detail: the growth of cultural industries and the marketing of cities social exclusion and violence the nature of the ghetto the cross-disciplinary conceptualization of cultural hybridity the politics of third-way social policy. In considering the ways in which race is played out in the world's most eminent cities, Michael Keith shows that neither the utopian naiveté of some invocations of cosmopolitan democracy, nor the pessimism of multicultural hell can adequately make sense of the changing nature of contemporary metropolitan life. Authoritative and informative, this book will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers of anthropology, cultural studies, geography, politics and sociology.

Addressing the relationship between Mead's notions of self and society and those of important continental thinkers, The Cosmopolitan Self demonstrates that Mead's ideas not only speak to resolving the tension between universalism and pluralism but do so in a manner that challenges and advances the positions of these continental theoreticians."--BOOK JACKET.