World citizenship : cosmopolitan thinking and its opponents

Scholarly interest in the topic of cosmopolitan political thought has recently developed to a remarkable degree and generated a literature of high quality. The reader will be introduced to some of this work however, this book, it must be made immediately clear, has no pretensions to participate in this academic debate. It has, rather, its own more modest two-fold purpose. First, it is offered as an interpretive textbook: useful to students at various levels, yet throwing out some suggestions for analysing the great range of material of which the topic is composed in order the more readily to comprehend its meaning and significance. Second, and as one of the interpretive devices, the chapters are arranged according to a basic breakdown of the concept of citizenship. The purpose of this approach is to insist that, if world citizenship is to be seriously accepted, it must stand alongside and be comparable with citizenship in the traditional, state-embedded sense. The content of the chapters has two particular features. These are: the generous use of historical material to exemplify the arguments; and the presentation of the case hostile to the idea and practice of world citizenship as well as the case marshalled in its favour, because the latter case cannot be fully understood without this context.