The concept of cosmopolitanism of dissent sounded novel, pointing to a cosmopolitan practice previously unexamined. Permanent questioning and life in problematicity were plausibly leading to the concept of post-foundational cosmopolitanism. The audiences to whom I presented my findings were confirming – or at least it seemed so to me – the originality of my approach. However, soon I realised that my approach was not so novel: cosmopolitanism of dissent reiterated the first cosmopolitan stance of the Ancient Cynics who performed a sustained critique of every aspect of life, of all customs, rules, habits, unveiling the roots of every convention of life in the Greek antiquity, rejecting the polis itself as the ultimate convention and declaring themselves ‘citizens of the world’. What a joy to discover that your ‘novel’ approach reiterates the birth of cosmopolitanism! But the joy was short and my approach susceptible to some academic malpractice: should not one look firstly at the birth of cosmopolitanism and only after that to advance ‘novel’ concepts? The bizarrerie is that I looked at the history of the idea of cosmopolitanism and at its birth, but dissent, negativity and radicality of the first cosmopolitan stance were not easy detectable – all were well hidden under other less dissenting accounts of the idea of cosmopolitanism. But if cosmopolitanism was indeed born through dissent, then what happen to the dissenting element, why was it so difficult to ‘detect’ it?

THE ANCIENT CYNICS AND THE FIRST COSMOPOLITAN DISSENT

Cosmopolitanism was born in the Greek antiquity, in the fourth century bce, when Diogenes the Cynic, one of the founders of Cynic philosophy, was asked where he came from, and he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolitês]’ (DL 6.63), and when he said that ‘The only true commonwealth’ is ‘as wide as the universe’ (DL 6.72). Some Cynics declared themselves ‘citizens of the Diogenes’ (DL 6.93), while others emphasised their rootlessness: ‘My homeland is not one tower, nor one roof, but the citadel and home of the whole world is ready for us to inhabit’ (DL 6.98).