Thinking historically about cosmopolitanism invites us (a) to understand how ideas of cosmopolitanism and a cosmopolitan world order have been legitimized or challenged; (b) to offer a hypothesis about the principal function of discourses of cosmopolitanism in modern societies (by ‘modern’ one would consensually mean societies since roughly the last quarter of the 18^th century), or, to put it differently, to begin to recognize the specific place of cosmopolitanism in the discursive landscape of modernity; and c) to identify the historically evolving domains (political, artistic, scholarly, etc.) in which ideas and sentiments of cosmopolitanism have been articulated. Here I focus at more length on (b) and (c). I begin by constructing a hypothesis about the underlying function which discourses of cosmopolitanism perform in modernity. Once the dual nature of these discourses is elucidated, I concentrate on their domains of articulation, with particular emphasis on one enduring idea of Enlightenment provenance (world literature), whose afterlives I address selectively in order to expand and detail my argument about the historical symbiosis of cosmopolitanism and nationalism.