Eric Packer, a young billionaire asset manager, journeys across New York in his limousine despite a threat against his life, and the occurances of various events that are stalling traffic throughout the city.

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world. "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia "[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all. . . . His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books

Originally published: New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, c1990.

In current debates, the term cosmopolitanismA” often remains quite vague and leads to sweeping generalizations. Unlike many recent publications, this book looks at the notion from a decidedly historical perspective, trying to give depth and texture to the concept.

A collection of essays exploring key aspects of the relationship between Rome and its empire.

The most important book on planning practice of the late 20th Century. It will set the terms of debate for years to come. Robert Beauregard The best contemporary text for teaching planning history and theory. It pushes theory and practice beyond its stubbornly modernist paradigms and into the new spaces opened by post-modern, post-colonial and feminist critiques. Edward Soja Sandercock draws on recent theoretical and political debates on gender, rate and sexuality as well as on grassroot struggles in the radically multiple cities of the late 20th Century to argue that planners have to find a way of building the new multicultural city, the Cosmopolis. Neil Smith A brilliant tour de force, an original critique no thinking planner should be without. Passionate yet coherently reasoned and lucidly written, the book advances a Utopian vision, deeply grounded in actual cases drawn from a wide variety of countries, to demonstrate how multicultural urban communities can achieve justice in a democratic manner. Janet Abu-Lughod From polis to metropolis, men and women have continued to struggle to perfect our cities. Urban history presents a picture of grand ideals and devastating failures. Towards Cosmopolis explores why we have failed, and how we could succeed, in building an urban Utopia - with a difference. Globalization, civil society, feminism and post-colonialism are the forces, ever shifting and changing, which are shaping our cities. We need a new vision to face such change. Sandercock pulls down the pillars of modernist city planning and raises in their place a new post-modern planning, a planning sensitive to community, environment and cultural diversity. Towards Cosmopolis is illustrated with case material from around the world - which present 'a thousand tiny empowerments' of current planning practice - and with a superb range of specially commissioned images. This bold critique cuts to the heart of current debates about the future of our cities. It deserves a place on every citizen's shelf.

This volume makes a challenging critique of the idea of Cosmopolis - that is, the idea of world or 'global' government. In recent years this idea has been put forward as a way of averting the threat of war and international disorder, and as a way of avoiding the destruction of the planet. Proponents of this idea call for a radical reform of the United Nations which aims to legitimize this institution as an international police force and as a provider of global justice. Zolo criticizes this new cosmopolitan philosophy and rejects the idea of trying to eliminate international conflict through the use of centralized and superior military force. He seeks instead to develop a conception of international relations which takes account of their pluralistic, dynamic and conflictual nature. This conception moves away from the logic of hierarchical centralization, which so dominates the UN Charter, and towards the logic of 'weak interventionism' and 'weak pacifism' which relies on self-organization, co-ordination and negotiation. Timely, provocative and iconoclastic, Cosmopolis is an important contribution to current debates in politics, international relations and social and political theory.