Miguel Vatter Politico-Theological Foundations of Universal Human Rights: The Case of Maritain social research Vol. 80 : No. 1 : Spring 2013 233 COSMOPOLITANISM BETWEEN POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND BIOPOLITICS Contemporary political theory took a turn toward cosmopolitanism roughly in the same years that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), according to the new historiography (Moyn 2012), began to take hold as a governance mechanism of the current neolib- eral “world order.” This new cosmopolitanism—understood as a legiti- mation discourse of the emergent institutionality of universal human rights—is accompanied by a new respect afforded “world” religions in the public sphere and by a new understanding of “human dignity,” which is now recognized to all individuals by virtue of their status as living beings rather than as rational beings. Jacques Maritain was one of the earliest philosophical propo- nents of universal human rights, and he played a nontrivial role as leading intellectual advisor to the drafters of the UDHR (Glendon 2002, chap. 5; Moyn 2010). His case serves to support an hypothesis as to why and how the cosmopolitical underpinning of the new discourse of universal human rights brings together a political theology and a biopolitics of a special kind. A cosmopolitan perspective, strictly speaking, requires that indi- viduals understand themselves first as “citizens of the world” and then