John Rundell

This paper approaches the issue of cosmopolitanism from the vantage point of hospitality. The notion of hospitality throws into relief some issues that are at the heart of political cosmopolitanism, but cannot be addressed by it. This is because these issues do not necessarily revolve around the category of the citizen, but around the categories of stranger and outsider. The paper critiques the tendency to conflate the categories of the stranger and the outsider and goes on to argue that the standard cosmopolitan extension of democracy to international contexts risks reproducing the exclusion of “outsiders” by nation-states, even democratic ones

In this essay, Durkheim's work is approached from a double vantage point. One vantage point looks at Durkheim's work with a post-classical attitude that intersects the ontological recasting of the social in the work of Castoriadis. It is in the context of social opening that I will concentrate on Durkheim's work as it presents a model of reflexivity that concentrates on the historical development of the modern period. Durkheim's model of reflexivity also opens onto the other vantage point of political modernity, which is viewed as a particular constellation of the circulation of power, especially in nation-states, open forms of reflexivity, and democracy, in contrast to another political modernity that revolves around closed socially reflexive forms of totalitarianism and terrorism. Durkheim's work can be a fruitful point of departure for an analysis of political modernity because his theorisation occurs in a way that opens onto the historical development of its mode of reflexivity.