this claim with a few examples: Hume is often regarded as a cosmopolitan thinker, an assessment which is primarily based on his famous statement that ‘not only as a man, but as a BRITISH subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of GERMANY, SPAIN, ITALY, and even FRANCE itself’.2 The context of the passage is decisive: Hume argues that jealousy of trade is largely unfounded. The ‘enlarged and benevolent sentiments’ of the cosmopolitan coincide with the self-interest of a particular state’s citizen. Presumably not all communities qualify as potential trading partners, although Hume takes for granted that poorer countries can undersell richer ones, as long as they are industrious and ambitious. At any rate, Hume mentions only European countries. In another famous passage, Hume is blatantly racist. He considers ‘negroes, and in general all the other species of men … to be naturally inferior to the whites’ and praises white civilization as the pinnacle of human evolution.3 Hume is apparently Eurocentric rather than cosmopolitan. If he endorsed cosmopolitanism, then it was its economic rather than its moral version. He was not a narrow-minded Scot (or Briton), but perhaps a narrow-minded European.
The Abbé de Saint-Pierre is another case in point. Often praised as one of the founding fathers of the United Nations, the Abbé in fact focused on European affairs, stating that the aim of his proposed league was to establish ‘everlasting peace amongst all the Christian states’. The designed European Union was supposed to fight the Turks and throw them out of Europe, Asia and Africa. Global peace was not intended.4
Voltaire does indeed refer to ‘the citizen of the world’, but he is in fact a moderate patriot who tolerates other nations and despises inter-state envy, rivalry and aggression. ‘The man who would want his homeland never to be larger, or smaller, or richer or poorer would be a citizen of the world.’ This is an extremely thin notion of moral cosmopolitanism. The main thrust of his article ‘La Patrie’ in the Dictionnaire Philosophique is that most people do not have anything they could legitimately call their ‘homeland’. Either they are suppressed by their leaders and priests, or they are greedy merchants who ‘have no country apart from their stock exchange and their ledgers’, or they are, for instance, ‘pleasure-loving’, narrowminded, arrogant and monolingual Parisians.5 Voltaire’s main focus is on a genuine form of patriotism, and cosmopolitan attitudes apparently serve to counterbalance national pride.
I hasten to add that some thinkers of the Enlightenment were cosmopolitan, but we should stay clear of sweeping generalizations.6 In particular, we should not overlook the category of Europeanism ‘in between’ patriotism and cosmopolitanisms. Another cliché is the assumption of harmless, unpolitical and cosmopolitan theories of patriotism in the eighteenth century, until ‘the fall’ into xenophobic and extreme nationalism triggered by the French Revolution. This assessment is apparently in need of qualification. Some authors, even in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire (which are usually seen as rather backward and provincial, compared with France or England), endorsed a militant, aggressive and brutal form of nationalism long before 1789.7
How can we characterize the cosmopolitanisms of the eighteenth century? I think that we can distinguish several common trends or aspects. First of all, there is a widespread openness towards and fascination with other cultures, especially in art and literature. Typical examples are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder, but there are lesser-known attempts such as Sir William Jones’s translations of Sanskrit poems or the contributions in the journal Der Patriot (1724–6, published in Hamburg).8 It goes without saying that many intellectuals were not free from prejudice (examples abound), but a considerable number at least aimed at open-mindedness, tolerance, and impartiality. For instance, Montesquieu’s theory of oriental despotism, developed in his extremely influential work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), became widely accepted by the end of the eighteenth century. However, even then European intellectuals repeatedly challenged Montesquieu’s claim (which was based on a misreading of Sir John Chardin). An outstanding example is Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who argued in Législation orientale (1778) that the category of ‘oriental despotism’ was biased and unfounded. John Crawfurd visited Vietnam and neither found tyranny nor terror, but a happy population – ‘as if they had nothing to complain of’. Edmund Burke was among those who challenged Montesquieu (see below). Hume’s racism also did not go unchallenged.9
These lively debates took place among intellectuals who saw themselves as members of a transnational ‘republic of letters’ which they deemed as important as, or even more important than, membership of their particular communities. The philosophe could be at home ‘anywhere in the world’, provided that he (sometimes, even, she) could communicate with like-minded intellectuals and exchange ideas in journals such as the Journal encyclopédie. This intellectual cosmopolitanism was not truly global: in fact, the enlightened cosmopolite was at home in western Europe and North America. In principle, the res publica litteraria or Gelehrtenrepublik disregarded social hierarchies and denominational or national differences. It continued a tradition going back to fifteenth-century humanists like Erasmus.10
Lively debates across borders also led to an impressive diversity of attitudes, opinions and theories, and especially with respect to cosmopolitanisms. German-speaking authors are a case in point. I can only hint at this diversity, mentioning two authors. Friedrich Schiller’s cosmopolitanism is moral at its core. He focuses on the emotional development of the individual who aims at the cosmopolitan transformation of her society. While Kant’s political writings serve as Schiller’s starting point, he later moves towards a theory of aesthetic education, believing that beauty paves the way towards (political) freedom.11 Partly following Adam Smith (see below), Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch (1746–1812) espouses market or economic cosmopolitanism, arguing for porous borders, the right to emigrate, the free movement of labour and perpetual mobility. He combines this with a thin form of moral cosmopolitanism, postulating that there are natural human rights and that all humans should be seen (and tolerated) as equal trading partners.12
Finally, Enlightenment cosmopolitans usually tried hard to strike a meaningful balance between patriotism and cosmopolitan obligations. Rousseau opened the debate with his intricate – and often misleading – theory. Rousseau emphatically rejected various forms of cosmopolitanism as deformed, immoral or degenerate, such as cultural or economic cosmopolitanism. He tried to balance defensive republican patriotism with genuine moral cosmopolitanism.13 A string of authors took part in this debate on the proper relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, among them Thomas Paine, Christoph Wieland, Kant, Richard Price, Voltaire and Edmund Burke.14
Types of cosmopolitanism in Locke, Hume, Smith, Paine, Bentham and Burke
I start with an assessment of so-called ‘classical’ or more or less mainstream British authors. John Locke’s vision of international relations (to use a modern term alien to Locke himself) is reminiscent of Hugo Grotius (see the previous chapter): he starts off with the traditional idea that, originally, humankind was one community.15 Later on, people formed separate, smaller and distinct communities. When citizens united to establish ‘one body politick’, these independent communities were still in a state of nature with each other.16 ‘So that under this Consideration, the whole community is one Body in the State of Nature, in respect of all other States or Persons out of its Community.’17
Locke holds that, in general, the state of nature is unbearable and has to be left. Though this condition is characterized by equality and freedom, it is ‘full of fears and continual dangers’ and the enjoyment of property is ‘very unsafe, very insecure’.18 The key argument against Hobbes and Filmer is that the right of individual self-preservation must not be replaced by reasons of state, or the self-preservation of the state itself. For instance, Locke criticizes absolute monarchy as arbitrary because from an individual perspective, it does not overcome the state of nature. As far as individual self-preservation is concerned, absolute monarchy, tyranny, oppression and the state of nature coincide. It would be foolish, Locke asserts in a famous passage,
