Is the cosmopolitan someone who is at home wherever she or he goes? Thomas Bender turns this question upside down: the cosmopolitan is someone who is at least slightly uncomfortable everywhere, even at home. For Bender, cosmopolitanism is an unsettling experience that provokes inquiry into difference. Its demand is not only to come to an understanding of the other, but also to come to a new understanding of oneself. Self-reflexivity inspired by the encounter with difference is difficult, Bender acknowledges, and increasingly rare as public spaces change and human interaction is increasingly digital. So cosmopolitanism remains to a significant degree aspirational; it cannot be taken for granted as what our ordinary social spaces already give us.