Abstract
In a recent discussion of “Victorian Internationalisms,” the term cosmopolitan was used to designate the domain of individual feeling or ethics of toleration in contrast to the more geopolitical terminology of “inter-” or “trans-national.”1 For Goodlad and Wright, the tendency of cosmopolitanism to evoke individual ethos rather than cultural, social, or political process suggests the merits of exploring complementary terms (ibid. 15). They then go on to discuss authors with “more complicated subject positions than ‘European or American first’ ” serving other ends than conventional “European” hegemony.
History is marked by alternating movements across the imaginary line that separates East from West in Eurasia.
(Herodotus, The Histories)
We are good Europeans, Europe’s heirs, the rich, superabundant, but also abundantly obligated heirs of two millennia of the European spirit …
(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
Il n’y pas d’histoire de l’Europe, il y a une histoire du monde!
(Marc Bloc)
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Notes and References
“Victorian Internationalisms”, RaVoN (Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net) No. 48 (November 2007), eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright, esp. section “Beyond Cosmopolitanism” of “Introduction and Keywords”: 5–16.
Stefan Elbe, Europe: a Nietzschean Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–2.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All too Human, 2 vols., trans. Helen Zimmers (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909) vol. I Preface par. 3 p. 4 in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Dr Oscar Levy vols. 6–7.
See David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All too Human, 2 vols., trans. Helen Zimmers (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1909) vol. II par. 87, pp. 242–3 in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Dr Oscar Levy vols. 6–7. The full quotation reads: “The time for speaking well has passed, because the period of city — state civilizations has passed. The ultimate limit that Aristotle set for a great city — a herald would have to be able to make himself heard by the entire assembled community — troubles us as little as the urban communities themselves trouble us: for we want to be understood even beyond our nations. Thus everyone who wants to be properly attuned to what is European must learn how to write well, and become better and better at it. No excuses, not even if you are born in Germany, where miserable writing is taken to be a national prerogative. However, better writing also means better thinking: it means always inventing something worth communicating, and actually knowing how to communicate it, something translatable into the languages of our neighbors; making oneself accessible to the understanding of those foreigners who are learning our language; working toward the end by which everything good is common good, and by which everything stands free for the free; finally, preparing now for that future condition, no matter how remote, in which the great task falls right into the hands of the good Europeans: guiding and overseeing civilization as a whole on our Earth. Whoever preaches the opposite, whoever does not trouble himself about writing well and reading well... in effect will show the nationals a path along which they will become ever more national: such a one aggravates the sickness of the century — is an enemy of good Europeans, an enemy of free spirits.... We who have no homeland are too multiple and too mixed in race and descent, as “modern human beings”; as a result, we are not very tempted to participate in that mendacious racial self-aggrandizement and ill-breeding that proclaims itself a sign of the German way of life, something that is doubly false and indecent for a nation that has a “sense of history.” In a word... we are good Europeans.”
See also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), par. 377, p. 340.
Edward Carpenter, The Healing of Nations (London: George Allen, 1915), p. 151.
Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), see especially chapter 11 “Europe: Vanishing Mediator”, pp. 203–36.
See Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Cited in Gordon Johnson,"Red on maps, grey in minds”, in Times Higher (27 May 2005), p. 27.
Churchill Society London. http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/WSCHAGVE.htm/. See also “What is Europe?” The Guardian G2 (17 December 2004), pp. 2, 10–11.
S. A. Nigosian, World Religions: a Historical Approach, third edition (Boston: Bedford’s St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 288–9.
Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). According to Matar, the period of mutual toleration, even attraction, ends with the Restoration of the Monarchy and return of orthodox Anglicanism. Students henceforth had to attest to acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church, which included belief in the Trinity One and Indivisible, and those who rejected it were accused of heresy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the military and intellectual initiative slipped away from the Muslims and Britain ascended its own age of empire and progress. The Muslims shut the gate of ijtihad and suffered the consequences; the British Establishment, because of commercial interests and racial arrogance, sealed their ears to the wisdom of Islam. Matar, however, notes the exceptions. Justice Syed Ameer Ali, author of the classics A Short History of the Saracens (1889) and The Spirit of Islam (1891) retired from Indian service in 1904 and settled with his English wife in a country manor near Newbury to devote the remaining twenty-four years of his life to a literary campaign to disabuse the British of their Anglocentrism. See also Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006); and www.salaam.co.uk/bookshelf/inbritain.html.
Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 133. Harrison defines Enlightenment as detachment from the past.
Derek Heater, World Citizenship and Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Western Political Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), p. 209.
Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996): pp. 2–20.
Ibid., Martha Nussbaum’s “Reply”, p. 133.
See esp. (in Cohen, ed.) Charles Taylor and Immanuel Wallerstein (pp. 119–24) and Judith Butler (pp. 45–52). Other arguments were that it was too thin to inspire loyalty (Benjamin Barber); loyalty can only move from the inner to the outer circles of caring (Sissela Bok); structural factors (economic globalization) override value preferences (the humane state) (Richard Falk). Falk proposed a “neocosmopolitanism” or a globalization-from-below to contrast with the globalization-from-above that is capital-driven and ethically neutral. Greenpeace was an example, and “cosmopolitan democracy” such as UN conferences on women, development, and environment. Further arguments against cosmopolitanism included Gertrude Himmelfarb’s customary critique, that it was too high-minded, but also that it was too western, and Michael McConnell’s, that it was paternalistic, that to teach values of any kind is an attempt to “impose values” in market culture. Hilary Putnam argued that “universal reason” should be given up in favor of situated intelligence — actual reasoning is necessarily always situated within specific historical traditions (pp. 96–7).
Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism”, in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, eds. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Boston: MIT, 1997), pp. 25–58.
“Theory and Practice”, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 89.
This rational core as regulative ideal and universal was central to Kant’s idea of perpetual peace. As Allen W. Wood describes Kant’s project for perpetual peace: “Human history is a purposive natural process. As with all species of living things, nature’s end regarding the human species is the complete development of its dispositions and faculties... Nature’s means for the development of these faculties... consists in establishing relationships among human beings... making them simultaneously interdependent yet fundamentally antagonistic to one another — a relationship Kant names ‘unsociable sociability’.” (In Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 68).
Nussbaum (1997), p. 50
In Re-imagining Political Community, three distinguished political theorists see the way from national identities to global identification as a balance between communitarianism valuing diversity and cosmopolitanism valuing common rights and responsibilities. See Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, eds. Daniele Archibugi, David Held, Martin Kohler (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). See also Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) and Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Ibid. Cosmopolitics, Scott L. Malcolmson, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience”, pp. 238 and 242.
Ibid., Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots”, pp. 91–5. See also Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006).
Ibid., Cosmopolitics, James Clifford, “Mixed Feelings”, p. 369.
Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See esp. pp. 21 and 228. Vertovec and Cohen analyse six usages of cosmpolitanism: • a socio-cultural condition • a kind of philosophy or world-view • a political project towards building transnational institutions • a political project for recognizing multiple identities • an attitudinal or dispositional orientation and/or • a mode of practice or competence. They also reject the false antithesis of communtarianism, a belief that moral principles and obligations are grounded in specific groups and contexts, and cosmopolitanism as a belief in overarching principles of rights and justice, or at least broader than national ones.
Lauren Goodlad, “E. M. Forster’s Queer Internationalism and the Ethics of Care”, MLA Annual Meeting December 2006. And see “Victorian Internationalisms” in n. 1.
Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
See Chapter 4 fn. 4, pp. 194 above. Here I would join Bruce Robbins in reasserting that from a progressive perspective the State can be good as well as evil, distributing orange juice as well as agent orange. Bruce Robbins, “Orange Juice and Agent Orange.” Matters of State conference, University of Leuven, Belgium. 25 April 2009. Panel.
Wayne Martin has explored this Stoic notion of oikeiosis in relation to the evolution of consciousness. See Wayne Martin, “Stoic Self-Consciousness: Self-Comprehension and Orientation in the Stoic Theory of Oikeiosis”, Sociology and Philosophy Colloquium 20 November 2006, University of Exeter, which has informed this discussion.
For evolutionary studies of ethics, see R. J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006); and Donald M. Broom, The Evolution of Morality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Review of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in Commonweal, 5:180 (22 June 1889), pp. 194–5 in Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883–1890, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. 425. See also William Morris Centenary Essays, eds. Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), p. 17.
See Ruth Kinna, “Morris, Anti-Stalinism and Anarchy”, in Centenary Essays, p. 219.
Peter Kropotkin, Freedom, November 1896, in William Morris: the Critical Heritage ed. Peter Faulkner (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 399–401.
David Rodgers, William Morris at Home (London: Ebury Press in association with the William Morris Society, 1996), p. 117.
As Richard Kerridge (1998) puts it, “an ecological perspective strives to see how all things are interdependent, even those apparently most separate. Nothing may be discarded or buried without consequence. Literature is not leisure, not separate from science or politics, any more than ‘nature’ can be separate from human life, or someone’s backyard be immune from pollution. There are local ecosystems, but all are subject to the global ecosystem, a totality which excludes nothing and can be rid of nothing. This makes environmentalism a vital testing-ground for relations between post-colonial pluralism and new ‘globalisation’.” Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammels, eds., Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998), p. 7.
See Florence Boos “An Aesthetic Ecocommunist: Morris the Red and Morris the Green”, in Centenary Essays, pp. 21–48; Peter Gould, Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land, and Socialism in Britain 1880–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1988; Jan Marsh, Back to the Land — The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880–1917 (London: Quartet, 1982). Frank Sharp has argued that Morris’s socialism actually began with his concern to preserve San Marco’s in Venice, and that preservation of property for the good of all in the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was the key to Morris’s socialism. See Frank Sharp, “Morris, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and Italy”, paper given to MLA Annual Conference (Philadelphia, December 2004). For a full discussion of ecology and globalization in the period, see Regenia Gagnier and Martin Delveaux, “Towards a Global Ecology of the Fin de Siècle”, Literature Compass 3/3 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006): 572–87.
Tanya Agathocleous, “Chapter One: Cosmopolitanism in Victorian Print Culture: Definitions and Circulations” in Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Visible City, Invisible World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Agathocleous for a preprint of the ms.
Sabine Clemm, Map** the World in Household Words: Charles Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood in the 1850s (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Dorothy M. Hoare, The Works of Morris and Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), esp. pp. 2–10 and 27–53.
May Morris, Introduction to The Pilgrims of Hope (from Commonweal I-II [April 1885–July 1886]), The Collected Works of William Morris (London: Longmans, 1911), Vol. 24, pp. x-xi.
In “The Pilgrims of Hope: William Morris and the Dialectic of Romanticism”, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and fully in Lyric and Labor in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Anne Janowitz provides a masterful history of both Romantic traditions of individualism and collectivism, how individual development and communal Progress appeared from the Romantic poets to Morris’s Pilgrims.
William Morris, The Pilgrims of Hope, Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 377–8.
For the personal issues of relationship that Morris was dealing with, before the introduction of the Commune late in the poem’s composition, see Michael Holzman, “Propaganda, Passion, and Literary Art in William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1982) 24: 372–93.
See Florence Boos, “Gender Division and Political Allegory in The Sundering Flood”, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (1992) I.2: 12–23 and “Narrative Design in The Pilgrims of Hope” in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris, co-edited with Carole Silver (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp 147–66.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Middlesex: Penguin, 1971). See especially pp. 51–54.
Goethe describes the “almost magical attraction upon one another” of elective affinities: When they were involved with other things, driven hither and thither by society, they still drew closer together. If they found themselves in the same room, it was not long before they were standing or sitting side-by-side. Only the closest proximity to one another could make them tranquil and calm of mind, but then they were altogether tranquil, and this proximity was sufficient: no glance, no word, no gesture, no touch was needed, but only this pure togetherness. Then they were not two people, they were one person, one in unreflecting perfect well-being... If one of them had been imprisoned at the far end of the house, the other would gradually and without any conscious intention have moved across in that direction. (Ibid., p. 286)
William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, Collected Works, Vol. 16., p. 257.
John Stokes, ed., Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 12.
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). This is also the import of the Global Circulation Project of Literature Compass.
William Morris, Icelandic Journals, with an Introduction by James Morris (Fontwell Sussex: Centaur Press, 1969).
Jacques Derrida, “On Cosmpolitanism”, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 16.
William Morris, unpublished lecture on Communism (drafted 1893), cited in Florence Boos, “Dystopian Violence: William Morris and the Nineteenth-Century Peace Movement”, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (Spring 2005) 14: 27.
Ibid., 17. See also Salmon, ed., p. 509.
Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton, eds. Robert Bellah Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 6. I am grateful to Bellah for also sharing his monumental work in manuscript on the evolution of religion.
Commonweal 6: 217 (8 March 1890); in Salmon, ed., p. 467.
Ibid., p. 29.
See Europe: Macht und Ohnmacht at www.alpbach.org. p. 5.
Cited in André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Prefatory quotations n.p. Even the statement that Herodotus is the Father of History is eurocentric, for he was preceded by many outside the West.
See the Introduction above, especially part 5, and also Gagnier and Delveaux (2006).
William Morris, “How I Became a Socialist”, in Political Writings of William Morris ed. A. L. Morton (New York: International Publishers, 1979), p. 244.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, “Analytic of Teleological Judgment” pars. 62–68 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. 239–64. See also Phillippe Huneman, “Naturalising Purpose: From Comparative Anatomy to the ‘Adventure of Reason,’ ” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2006) 37: 649–74.
Emergence is an anti-reductionist thesis that holds that properties that apply to a whole may not be explicable solely by the properties of the parts, that new properties emerge at different levels of organization. Emergence pertains to the relationship of micro-to macro-behavior and describes collective, self-organizing behaviors. It has important implications for biology in such fields as behavioral ecology, ecosystem studies, genetics and embryology, cell biology, neural networking, the immune system, and evolutionary theory. It also has important implications for Internet software, artificial intelligence, video gaming, print and screen media, financial markets, management theory, telecommunications networking, traffic management, urban design, and social theories of neighborhoods and cities. Emergence also applies to political movements, ethical systems, the evolution of nations, and the spread of ideas, as well as playing pivotal roles in all of the creative arts including poetry and performance. Emergence points us towards new ontological visions in many fields. In contrast to canonical understandings of the world as a fully knowable place, it conjures up a world of openness and becoming that can always surprise us and that we can never fully dominate. See http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/interdisciplinaryinstitute/archive/index.shtml.
Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, Carl F. Craver, “Thinking about Mechanisms”, Philosophy of Science (March 2000) 67: 1–25.
“Cosmopolitanism: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Prina Werbner” March 2006, Film by Haim Bresheeth, 2006. Screened at “Building on Knowledge: Develo** Research across the Humanities and Social Sciences” Conference, Keele University, 12 January 2007.
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Gagnier, R. (2010). Good Europeans and Neo-liberal Cosmopolitans: Ethics and Politics in Late Victorian Cosmopolitanism and Beyond. In: Individualism, Decadence and Globalization. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277540_6
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