Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations

摘要

The conjunction joining the two isms in my title ("Cosmopolitanism and Secularism") might suggest the complementarity of the two notions or the idea that we should try to build-or rebuild-a discourse combining a definition of secularism, even a secularist perspective, with a cosmopolitan perspective. I readily admit that these are positive notions and values, which form part of a civic and democratic understanding of the political. Simultaneously, I have become aware that their combination is profoundly contradictory and have even become convinced that the two notions, in the contemporary situation (itself the result of a long history), essentially undermine, destruct, or deconstruct the meaning and stability of each other, thus putting the validity of their combination into question. This makes referring to them as complementary aspects of the democratic project probably more difficult, not less. So, in a sense, what I want to do is to make it more complicated to associate cosmopolitanism and secularism within a single problematic, as many of us might be tempted to do for reasons that might be either affirmative or negative. In particular, I am trying to work against a tendency to which I owe a great many of my civic commitments: a tendency to see cosmopolitanism and secularism as natural components of modernity.1