Asked where he came from, Diogenes the Cynic answered with a single word: kosmopolitês, meaning, “a citizen of the world”. This moment, however fictive, might be said to inaugurate a long tradition of cosmopolitan political thought in the Western tradition. A Greek male refuses the invitation to define himself by lineage, city, social class, even free birth, even gender. He insists on defining himself in terms of a characteristic that he shares with all other human beings, male and female, Greek and non-Greek, slave and free. And by calling himself not simply a dweller in the world but a citizen of the world, Diogenes suggests, as well, the possibility of a politics, or a moral approach to politics, that focuses on the humanity we share rather than the marks of local origin, status, class, and gender that divide us. It is a first step on the road that leads to Kant’s resonant idea of the “kingdom of ends,” a virtual polity of moral aspiration that unites all rational beings (although Diogenes, more inclusive, does not limit the community to the “rational”), and to Kant’s vision of a cosmopolitan politics that will join all humanity under laws given not by convention and class but by free moral choice. Diogenes, they say, “used to make fun of good birth and distinctions of rank and all that sort of thing, calling them decorations of vice. The only correct political order was, he said, that in the world (kosmos) as a whole”. Cynic / Stoic cosmopolitanism urges us to recognise the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings, a worth grounded in moral choice-capacity (or perhaps even this is too restrictive?), rather than on traits that depend on fortuitous natural or social arrangements. The insight that politics ought to treat human beings both as equal and as having a worth beyond price is one of the deepest and most influential insights of Western thought; it is responsible for much that is fine in the modern Western political imagination. One day, Alexander the Great came and stood over Diogenes, as he was sunning himself in the marketplace. “Ask me for anything you want,” Alexander said. He said, “Get out of my light”. This image of the dignity of humanity, which can shine forth in its nakedness unless shadowed by the false claims of rank and kingship, a dignity that needs only the removal of that shadow to be vigorous and free, is one endpoint of a line that leads to the modern human rights movement.

In the tradition I shall describe, dignity is non-hierarchical. It belongs—and in equal measure—to all who have some basic threshold level of capacity for moral learning and choice. The tradition explicitly and pointedly excludes non-human animals, rejecting that judgment; in some versions, though not that of Diogenes, it also excludes, though less explicitly, humans with severe cognitive disabilities. These shortcomings must be addressed in any contemporary version of the idea. The idea of dignity is not, however, inherently hierarchical or based on the idea of a rank-ordered society. In the medieval and early modern era, versions of the idea of dignity did crop up that were hierarchical and suited to a feudal society. I do not study these ideas here, or the traditions they ground. It is important to emphasise the egalitarian heart of this Stoic type of cosmopolitanism, since some scholars writing about dignity recently have supposed that the entire history of that concept derives from ideas of rank and status in hierarchical societies.

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