Cosmopolitan Club at the University of Illinois

Above All Nations Is Humanity

Philosophy of the Cosmopolitan Club

What Is Cosmopolitanism?

by George W. Nasymth
(reprinted from Cosmopolitan Annual, 1909)

Many of the world's great movements are so broad and so filled with the spirit of growth and progress that they cannot be defined. Modern socialism, for instance, has almost as many definitions as it has disciples. The Renaissance, democracy, modernism--each of these words has a wealth of connotation and association for us, and we know well the idea for which each stands, but each of these great movements refuses to be bound within the limits of a formal definition. Cosmopolitanism is one of these movements, too broad, too full of the vigor of youth and health to be fitted into the terms of a formula.

It is easier to say what cosmopolitanism is not. It is not a temporary banding together of the foreign students in American universities. It is not an exotic growth, bizarre and mysterious. It is not Bohemianism. It is not internationalism, though like it. What internationalism is to the nations of the world, Cosmopolitanism is to individuals who make up the nations.

Perhaps the best short summary of cosmopolitanism is given in the words of Professor Fetter, "Cosmopolitanism is Democracy writ large." In true cosmopolitanism we find the ideas of liberty and equality and fraternity which makes up democracy bursting through the confines of nationality and even of race, spreading out in ever widening circles of inspiration and power to all mankind and the uttermost parts of the earth.

But cosmopolitanism is something more than this. Democracy, even though writ large, does not convey the idea of brotherly love, of sympathetic understanding, of service to mankind, for which cosmopolitans are known everywhere. We must add to this conception of cosmopolitanism the ideal of "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men" for which it stands. Cosmopolitans believe that in bringing about a better understanding between men of differing nationalities, races, and religions, they are working in the most effective way to cleanse civilization from its deepest sin--the folly, cruelty, and guilt of war.

Besides its ideals of progress through democracy, and of peace through sympathy and understanding, cosmopolitanism is characterized by one other life-giving ideal--service to humanity. It is this last ideal which gives such depth of meaning in the heart of every Cosmopolitan to those prophetic words, "Above all Nations is Humanity."

The Cosmopolitan Motto:

September 3, 1997 (updated Sept. 2008).
Send comments to Cosmoplitan Club.