America as Distinction: varieties of cosmopolitanism in Paris social clubs

Based on in-depth interviews, this article examines the cultivation of transnational connections, cosmopolitanism and global class consciousness among the members of Paris elite clubs. It compares how these institutions promote different forms of bourgeois and Western cosmopolitanism in relation with their own respective characteristics. This variety partly replicates wider logics of distinction concerning sociability practices, for instance eliciting struggles over the authenticity or inauthenticity of transnational connections. Yet clubs also oppose each other according to the unequal emphasis they lay on international ties per se, introducing a competing axiology within the symbolic economy of social capital accumulation among the French upper class.