From Erewhon to Emancipation: Toward a Better Framework for Cosmopolitanism and Counter-Hegemonic Global Civil Society.

Cosmopolitan theory has experienced a resurgence with its appeals to a global human community and corresponding promise of human equality. As it tends to presuppose an emergent consciousness of human interconnectedness, and generally takes human improvement for granted, it devotes little space to evaluating itself as the basis for an intentional developmental project. And when advanced as just such a project, it often fails to account for its myriad limitations which unintentionally maintain or perpetuate global inequalities. This paper develops an emancipatory cosmopolitanism that is founded on neither purely ethical nor political grounds. As ethics is empty without action, and effective action demands a consciousness of the intricacies of risk, Craig Calhoun's critique of the "emergency imaginary" and Ulrich Beck's analysis of "risk society" serve as a foundation on which emancipatory consciousness and action are set. Applied in an analysis of the World Social Forum, this emancipatory cosmopolitan framework is used to consider the current state of counter-hegemonic global civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]