Cosmopolitan Sociology

Ulrich Beck & Natan Sznaider

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have to redefine and reinvent the social sciences and humanities for the global world. This is a double challenge: first, to discover and criticize how sociology, political science, history, and so forth are still prisoners of the nation-state and gave birth to a historically mistaken national imagination. Second, how to transnationally redefine the basic theoretical concepts and units of empirical research, such as politics, society, identity, state, history, class, law, democracy, community, solidarity, justice, mobility, military, and household, in a cosmopolitan perspective. This calls for a paradigm shift. This is also a “Cosmopolitan Manifesto for the Social Sciences,” not only to renew their scientific standing and public claims but also to bring the social sciences back on the public agenda. The classics of sociology are so thoroughly pervaded with a spatially fixed understanding of culture that it is rarely remarked upon. It ...

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