  Most past cosmopolitan authors did not fully live up to the literal interpretation of their cosmopolitan theories, and one can find misogynist, racist, nationalist, sectarian, or class-based biases and inconsistencies in their accounts. These shortcomings have often been used as arguments against cosmopolitanism, but they are not as easily used for that purpose as it may seem. Because the universalist potential in the discourse of ‘world citizenship’ can itself be used as a basis for exposing these shortcomings as problematic, one should say that they stem from too little, rather than too much, cosmopolitanism.