Abstract
Ulrich Beck called for a 'methodological cosmopolitanism' to replace the 'methodological nationalism' of the mainstream social sciences as a part of his program of a cosmopolitan social theory. In this article, Beck's methodological cosmopolitanism is submitted to a detailed assessment.
To begin with, it is shown that central to Beck's concept of cosmopolitanism is a deep tension between cosmopolitization as a real-world process and cosmopolitism as a normative philosophical tradition, which is, on the epistemological level, translated into a parallel tension between the empirical-analytical and normative-political approach to social life. The discussion of methodological cosmopolitanism highlights the role of the politics of scales and multi-perspectivism in it as well as the arbitrary choice of the unit of analysis, one of which continues to be the nation-state.
Three types of criticism of methodological cosmopolitanism are presented: methodological, historical and substantive, and a criticism derived from the tension between the empirical and the normative within Beck's cosmopolitanism. It is argued that Beck's critique of methodological nationalism has a one-sided normative underpinning which disqualifies it as an argument against the continuing reliance of social science research on analytical categories said 'methodologically nationalist'.