The hybrid stranger and cosmopolitan self

The paper critically identifies and examines the affinities between the category of the stranger & the cosmopolitan attitude/disposition that underlies recent theories of cosmopolitanism. I argue that the cosmopolitan attitude can be located within the sociological discourse of the stranger. Thus one needs to reconceptualise the cosmopolitan self in terms of the cosmopolitan stranger.

This new subject develops a more perceptive, broader and keener insight of the social world that is not available than those confined to a universalistic or particularistic perspective. The final part of the paper challenges this assertion through a critical assessment of the socalled in-between position occupied by the cosmopolitan stranger.