Introduction to Symposium on The Humble Cosmopolitan by Luis Cabrera

This piece introduces a symposium on Luis Cabrera’s The Humble Cosmopolitan (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is a comparative political theory text in three senses. First, it expands conventional conversation partners to include authors who are engaged in constructing their nation out of a colonial context, principally, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is a scholar, politician, Chairman of the Constitutional Drafting Committee for the newly independent India, and Dalit activist (“Dalit” being the self-applied term for those outside of the Hindu caste hierarchy) and Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar, the historical thought leader of Hindu nationalism. Second, Cabrera reaches across the colonized-colonizer divide, engaging with intra-nation difference, enabling cross-time comparisons, broadening the moral and political meanings of, contributions to, and criticisms of cosmopolitan thinking. Third, using grounded normative theory, it is methodologically comparative, utilizing the author’s own empirical research through over 150 interviews of activists and politicians from both Indian and European cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan struggles.