This book reconstructs the intellectual and social context of several influential proponents of European unity before and after the First World War. Through the lives and works of the well-known promoter of Pan-Europe, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, and his less well-known predecessor, Alfred Hermann Fried, the book illuminates how transnational peace projects emerged from individuals who found themselves alienated from an increasingly nationalizing political climate within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the new nation states of the interwar period. The book’s most important intervention concerns the Jewish origins of crucial plans for European unity. It reveals that some of the most influential ideas on European culture and on the peaceful reorganization of an interconnected Europe emerged from Jewish milieus and as a result of Jewish predicaments.

This new edition of this classic text from one of the major figures of world sociology includes an introduction published in English for the first time. In Norbert Elias's hands, a local community study of tense relations between an established group and outsiders becomes a microcosm that illuminates a wide range of sociological configurations including racial, ethnic, class and gender relations. The Established and the Outsiders examines the mechanisms of stigmatization, taboo and gossip, monopolization of power, collective fantasy and `we' and `they' images which support and reinforce divisions in society. Developing aspects of Elias's thinking that relate his work to current sociological concerns, it presents the

As ideologies such as communism, fascism and various nationalisms vied for global domination during the first half of the 20th century, this book shows how a specific group of individuals - a cosmopolitan elite - became representatives of those ideologies the world over. Centering on the Indian intellectual M.N Roy, Cosmopolitan Elites and the Making of Globality situates his life within various social circles that covered several ideological realms and continents. An example of an individual who represented ideologies such as anticolonial nationalism, communism and humanism, Roy is identified as unusual but by no means singular in this capacity, and shows how other elites were similarly able to represent ideologies that sought to make the world anew. This book explores how Roy and his peers and competitors became a political elite as they cultivated a cosmopolitan reputation that meant they were taken seriously even when speaking of regions outside of their own. By considering the social and performative practices that turned them into credible, global, cosmopolitans, Wolters uncovers the exclusive basis on which the universal claims of world-changing ideologies were made.

The cosmopolitan political tradition defines people not according to nationality, family, or class but as equally worthy citizens of the world. Martha Nussbaum pursues this “noble but flawed” vision, confronting its inherent tensions over material distribution, differential abilities, and the ideological conflicts inherent to pluralistic societies.

From Simon & Schuster, Cosmopolitan Culture is Bonnie Menes Kahn's exploration of the gilt-edged dream of a tolerant city. "The author attempts to identify common features of great cities, past and present. Consequently, the reader is shuttled breathlessly from Babylon to Constantinople to Vienna to New York with brief side junkets. Kahn concludes that common characteristics of the great city meaning and purpose, tolerance, etc.created an environment where outsiders felt welcome to join the cosmopolitan culture and in the process strengthen it." —Library Journal

This book examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed in recent decades. It offers a unique understanding of the ways in which postcolonial writers have contested views of place as fixed and unchanging and are remapping conceptions of world geography, with chapters on cartography, botany and gardens, spice, ecologies, animals and zoos, and cities, as well as reference to the importance of archaeology and travel in such debates. Writers whose work receives detailed attention include Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Kroetsch. Challenging both older colonial and more recent global constructions of place, the book argues for an environmental politics that is attentive to the concerns of disadvantaged peoples, animal rights and ecological issues. Its range and insights make it essential reading for anyone interested in the changing physical and human geography of the contemporary world.

While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history's most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book's three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores "post-historical" Hunchun's diverse sociopolitics since high socialism's demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound "end of history" which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.