Projects
Cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and belonging
Detailed Project Description
Multiple and competing identities are prominent in modern life. These correspond, in varying degree, to structures of social relations, shared culture, and mutual commitments. At large scale, they are shaped by markets, states, and other structures of indirect relations. Identities are subject to innovation and choice; they can also be deeply rooted.
Moral obligation and political solidarity follow from embedded social relations. At the same time, both morality and practical projects also call on us to transcend local and inherited bases for judgment. We do this by building connections among families and local communities, participating in intermediate associations, social movements, religions, and nations. We articulate norms for relations with those beyond close webs of belonging: fairness, for example, and hospitality. But there is a distinction between norms for direct interactions with strangers and norms for participation in webs of indirect, generally impersonal relations like markets and states. Some, like honesty and adherence to contracts are extensions from norms for direct relations. But ethical universalism and cosmopolitanism encourage transcending group loyalties in the name of justice or a larger good.
At every scale there are potential conflicts among norms. But at large-scale there is a particularly challenging tension between norms of belonging – notably to nations, religions, and ethno-racial identities – and norms of disengaged equivalence, like ethical universalism and cosmopolitanism. Neither holds a trump card against the other.
In a series of interrelated research projects, Dr. Calhoun focused on both transformations of scale as such and the ways this intersects with both social cohesion and social solidarities.
Recent Publications
Religious Imaginations and Global Transformations
“Secularism and Social Transformation: Keynote Address to the European Academy of Religion,” pp. 19-55 in EUARE Lectures 2019. Bologna: EUARE.
Works in Progress
Cosmopolitanism and Belonging: An examination of the importance and limits of political cosmopolitanism as an expression of disengaged norms of universalism, but also as a perspective informed by positions of privilege, unacknowledged disparities of practical capacity, and elite culture – despite a widespread claim to escape from the specificity and biases of culture. I also explore how to relate this to more rooted norms of belonging, including especially to nationalism. Under contract with Routledge.
Previous Publications (Selected)
General
Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Challenge of Difference
Community
Community: Toward a Variable Conceptualization for Comparative Research
Technology's Global Village Fragments Community Life
Computer Technology, Large-Scale Social Integration and the Local Community
Class, Place and Industrial Revolution
Nations and Nationalism
Nationalism and Civil Society: Democracy, Diversity and Self-Determination
Nationalism, Social Change, and Historical Sociology
Nationalism and the Cultures of Democracy
Nations Matter: Citizenship, Solidarity, and the Cosmopolitan Dream
Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
Populism, Nationalism, and Brexit
Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere
Cosmopolitanism and its Limits
The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers
Belonging in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary
Variability in Belonging: A Response to Brubaker
Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary
Beck, Asia, and Second Modernity: An Appreciation and Two Arguments
Cosmopolitan Liberalism and its Limits
Humanitarian Response to Emergencies
A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Order
Humanitarianism in Question: Power, Politics, Ethics
The Idea of Emergency: Humanitarian Action and Global (Dis)order
Religion and Secularism
Religion, Secularism, and Public Reason
Varieties of Secularism in ‘A Secular Age'
Religion’s Many Powers
Rethinking Secularism Including “Secularism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere”
Multiple and competing identities are prominent in modern life. At a large scale there is a particularly challenging tension between norms of belonging – notably to nations, religions, and ethno-racial identities – and norms of disengaged equivalence, like ethical universalism and cosmopolitanism. But identities and norms are rooted in structures of social relations and variation in agency.