Cosmopolitanism
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The quality of being cosmopolitan.; The idea that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community. countable, uncountable
"The philosophy of cosmopolitanism underlies theories of global citizenship. Cosmopolitanism is the ability to balance a local and global identity. A cosmopolitan individual engages meaningfully with different cultures and feels at home in the world."
- 2 The quality of being cosmopolitan.; Transnationalism. countable, sometimes, uncountable
- 3 The quality of being cosmopolitan.; Transnationalism.; Jewishness. countable, euphemistic, sometimes, uncountable
"rootless cosmopolitanism"
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"They represent their reactionary cosmopolitanism as "internationalism", and they try to cover up their fight against peace and democracy with pacifist and pseudo-democratic phrases."
Etymology
From cosmopolitan + -ism. The sense referring obliquely to Jewishness comes from the long era in which all Jews lived in the Jewish diaspora because Jews had been banished from the ancient Jewish homeland and no new homeland yet existed. In Soviet use it was rooted in fear of transnationalism generally but took on coded or dogwhistle antisemitic qualities that were not explicitly separable from the generality.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.