4.

Cosmopolitanism and what is

“Secret”: Two Sides of Enlightened
Ideas concerning World Citizenship

Andreas Önnerfors

This chapter investigates the links between cosmopolitanism and

secrecy. According to the classical definition of the German histo-
rian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), the secret and the public
constitute a major dichotomy of the Enlightenment.1 Koselleck
claims that within the ‘secret’, private spheres of Enlightenment
significant elements of the forthcoming secular modernization of
society were already being practiced. Secret societies, clubs, draw-
ing rooms and coffeehouses thus constitute the vanguard of bour-
geois emancipation during the 18th century. This secrecy was nec-
essary in order to prepare for the revolution of public engagement
and the creation of a public sphere of discourse.
In my chapter, I try to trace the roots of enlightened ideas on
world citizenship back to the normative foundations of freemasonry
that were formulated in the 1720s and 1730s. Freemasonry saw
itself as an heir to an esoteric tradition: the ideology and symbolic
practice of it is said to have been communicated at all times and in
all cultures, and its symbolic language was said to be universally
comprehensible. The organization spread transnationally; within
the ideal of the brotherhood is a universal solidarity. Fifty years
later, on the eve of the French Revolution, the potential link be-

1
On the relationship between what is secret and publicity, see Reinhart Kosel-
leck, Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt
(Freiburg i. Br. 1959, 2nd edition, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 49–
81.

65
tween cosmopolitanism and secrecy was discussed in a totally dif-
ferent public surrounding. Claims were made that cosmopolitanism
is not a secret, and that it is not possible to organize it formally like,
for instance, a secret society.
The texts investigated seem to prove Koselleck’s theory. The
public debate can claim a public accessibility of a concept. Within
freemasonry, cosmopolitan ideas were formulated and practiced
very early on, but these ideas were a part of a joint European socia-
bility that remained closed for those who were not initiated into it,
whereas five decades later the field was open for public delibera-
tion, with cosmopolitanism now occupying a political dimension in
the liberation process of the bourgeois.

Freemasonry and its cosmopolitan values

The political discourse of the 17th century was dominated by an
aggressive dichotomy between the two branches of West European
Christian belief, Catholicism and Protestantism. During the nego-
tiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, however, theo-
ries of natural law had an important impact upon the concepts of
European space that were predominant at least until the Vienna
Congress in 1815. One basic element of political theory was the
European territorial state, with its right of self-determination and
independence. Along with that line of ideas, it had to be explained
intellectually how and why European states could differ from each
other. Self-determination becomes explanatory only when it is
based upon difference, and difference (to make any distinction be-
tween the qualities of the One and the significant Other) is a key
element of identity and identification.
Unlike such concepts and ideas, counter-concepts evolved dur-
ing the age of Enlightenment, all containing the basic ingredient
similarity, or rather egalité. Their general idea was that human be-
ings without difference are receptive to one all-embracing moral
message, and that many branches of religions and philosophies lead
back to one single and uncorrupted source of knowledge of the true
divine, prisca teologia. In 1717, four freemason lodges in London

66
announced the establishment of a Grand Lodge. The organizational
and ideological roots of freemasonry in Europe, prior to that event
are not clear, but could date back to the 17th century or even ear-
lier. In 1723, the Presbyterian minister James Anderson (1679–
1739) published a book of constitutions, which was a mythical his-
tory of freemasonry as well as detailing its rules and regulations.
The Constitutions can be regarded as a construction of a mythical
and heroic past, as a narrative that construes a consistent history
back to the childhood of man, as it stresses that this knowledge was
passed on in all traditions and times, codified within the symbolic
language of freemasonry. One of the last paragraphs reads:

In short, it would require many large Volumes to contain the many

splendid Instances of the mighty Influence of Masonry from the
Creation, in every Age, and in every Nation, as could be collected
from Historians and Travellers […]2

Le monde entier n’est qu’une grande république…

– Ramsay’s 1736 ‘Oration’
If the early concepts of autonomous territorial states are based upon
mutual excluding qualities, the concept of freemasonry implies a
mutual integration of mankind under a joint ideological roof. This
cosmopolitan approach becomes perfectly clear in an oration held
at a lodge meeting in Paris in 1736 by the Scottish nobleman André
Michel de Ramsay (1686–1743). Like Anderson, in his Discours he
dates the origin of freemasonry back to pre-historical and biblical
times. But Ramsay links the narration about the Temple of Solo-
mon from the Book of Kings in the Old Testament with the Chival-
ric Orders of the Crusades. Scotland was the cradle of modern
freemasonry, Ramsay claimed, and its true secrets were kept there.
But it is rather surprising that cosmopolitan ideas were formulated
in the context of a society that is regarded as one of the most secre-

2
Quotation from the 1734 Benjamin Franklin edition of the Constitutions of the
Free-Masons, accessible online, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/
25/, p. 41f.

67
tive, mysterious and even esoteric during the Enlightenment.
Where is the connection between cosmopolitanism and secrecy?
Did secrecy pave the way for the later popularity of cosmopolitan-
ism among European elites?
First of all, Ramsay rejects the ability of political rulers to estab-
lish enduring institutions for the benefit of mankind as a whole:

Lycurgus, Solon, Numa and all the other political legislators never
could make their institutions last long; however wise their laws
may have been, they could not spread to all countries and through-
out the centuries. As they only had in view victories and conquests,
military violence and the raising of one people above another, they
could not become universal, nor could they suit the genius and the
interests of all nations, they were not founded on philanthropy. Ill-
understood love of one’s homeland, carried to excess, would often
destroy in these warlike republics the general love of mankind.3

To use a modern term, good governance, in Ramsay’s view, is

comprised of long-lasting institutions, wise laws, and order that are
spread to all countries, and survive from generation to generation.
The focus of good governance occurs on a global scale, involving
universalism and an attempt to fit the genius and interest of all na-
tions. To establish good governance requires moral qualities, phi-
lanthropy, and a general love of mankind. A ‘failed state’ is based
on military aggression, the violent expansion of its territory, a striv-
ing for hegemony, and an ill-understood patriotism. In Ramsay’s
view, each nation has its own genius and its own interests. How-
ever, in the subsequent part of the text it becomes perfectly clear
that these differences do not constitute a definite dividing line:

3
André Michel de Ramsay, ms 1213 Bibliotheque Municipale de Toulouse, in
Georges Lamoine (ed.), Discours prononcé à la réception des Francs-Maçons
(Toulouse: Éd SNES, 1999), pp. 38–45. The translation into English quoted is
Georges Lamoine, ‘The Chevalier de Ramsay’s Oration 1736–37’, Ars Quatuor
Coronatum, Vol. 114 (2002), pp. 230–233. For a free French version of the text,
see also: http://misraim.free.fr/textes/discours_Ramsay.pdf#search=%22%22
André%20Michel%20de%20Ramsay%22%22 and http://www.freemasons-
freemasonry.com/bernheimfr.html for a selection of brilliant texts on Ramsay
and his oration.

68
 Men are not essentially distinguished by the difference of the lan-
guages they speak, of the clothes they wear, of the countries they
occupy, or the dignities with which they are adorned. The whole
world is but a vast republic, each nation of which is but a family,
and each particular person but a child.4

The idea of a global republic is combined with the metaphor of the

particular nation as a human subject – or rather, in this case, a col-
lective subject, a family. ‘Personification of the state’, write the
authors of Organising European Space (2003), ‘is a basic meta-
phor, which guides our thinking about international relations’.5
Each individual is regarded as a child of the national family. Thus,
there seem only to be three levels when moving from the local to
the global: the individual, the collective, and the universal collec-
tive. Ramsay goes on that it ‘was to revive and take up again these
ancient maxims borrowed from nature’ that freemasonry was estab-
lished. The goal is to unite men of an enlightened mind so that

the interest of the Fraternity becomes that of mankind, where all

nations can borrow sound knowledge, and where all the subjects of
the different kingdoms may conspire without envy [the French
original has “conspirer sans jalousie”, however “conspire” has a
rather negative connotation in English, perhaps “cooperate with the
same spirit” would fit better], live without discord and cherish one
another without renouncing one’s homeland.6

Ramsay is of the opinion that the ‘ancient maxims’ of philanthropic

cosmopolitanism are based upon ‘nature’ (a typical figure in the
context of the debate on natural law and human rights of the pe-
riod) and that they have declined or even disappeared. He does not
specify further in what ancient period they were alive, but he might
be referring to ideas of a golden age, when mankind still was pure,
perhaps before the Fall of Man. The potential return of the Golden
Age is a distinctive feature of Utopian thought – thus Ramsay sees
freemasonry as a vehicle in order to realize a latent Utopian poten-

4
Lamoine, Discours prononcé à la réception des Francs-Maçons, p. 230.
5
Christer Jönsson, Sven Tägil, Gunnar Törnqvist, Organizing European Space
(London: Sage, 2003), p. 14.
6
Lamoine, ibid, p. 230.

69
tial among his contemporaries. Once this is realized, all nations can
then ‘borrow knowledge’ from each other, a very interesting state-
ment that will be developed further below. In this paragraph, the
nation/family has evolved into a more political unit yet again: the
kingdom. And, although cooperation between the different people
is the ultimate goal, this does not imply renouncing the ‘homeland’.
Parallel to Anderson, Ramsay subsequently constructs a histori-
cal basis for his cosmopolitan approach to freemasonry, calling the
Crusaders of the Middle Ages its ‘ancestors’:

Our ancestors, the Crusaders, gathered from all parts of Christen-

dom in the Holy Land, wanted to unite thus in an only Fraternity
the subjects of all nations […] with the aim to “form in the course
of time a spiritual nation where, without departing from the various
duties which the difference between the States demands, a new
people will be created who, getting from several nations, will ce-
ment them in a way by the bonds of Virtue and Science.7

This claim is an extraordinary interpretation of the ambitions of the

Crusades. Ramsay formulates an ultimate goal: to unite subjects of
all nations into one fraternity, to create a new people within a spiri-
tual, universal nation. Most certainly, the vision is not a world re-
public in the political sense, but rather an ‘imagined community’
on a global scale. The aim is not to depart from the duties that each
separate state demands of its subjects; however, it would be rather
unlikely to think that such subjects united in a spiritual global fra-
ternity would organize warfare against each other. Rather the oppo-
site is the case: a common morality and science will unite the ‘new
people’. Ramsay terms this morality ‘the Theology of the heart’, a
term whose origin may be located in the context of Protestant pie-
tism. But – in parallel with Anderson’s Constitutions – he also con-
strues a line back to the ‘feasts of Ceres in Eleusis […] of Isis in
Egypt, of Minerva in Athens, of Urania with the Phoenicians, and
Diana in Scythia’ that ‘are all related to our solemnities’. A com-
mon source of the celebration of mysteries is described, and there is
a similarity between all traditions ‘where several remnants of the
ancient religions of Noah and the Patriarchs can be found’. But just
7
Ibid.

70
a few paragraphs later, the universality of the esoteric mysterious is
transformed into a universality of exoteric knowledge in an ency-
clopaedic and enlightened spirit. Ramsay writes:

All Grand Masters in Germany, England, Italy and throughout

Europe, exhort all scholars in the Fraternity to unite together in or-
der to supply the material towards a universal dictionary of all lib-
eral arts and all useful sciences […] there will be explained, not
only technical words and their etymologies, but moreover the his-
tory of particular sciences and arts, their great principle and man-
ner of working. The lights of all nations will thus be united in a
single work that will serve as a general store and universal Library
of what is beautiful and great in the natural sciences and all the no-
ble arts. This work will increase in each century along with the in-
crease of the Enlightenment: a noble emulation will be spread to-
gether with a taste for belles-lettres and fine arts throughout the
whole of Europe.8

Ramsay’s ideas on world citizenship might be interpreted as the

following: in his view, the concord between human beings is rooted
in the natural state of man. When political leadership interfered in
this state of nature by means of aggressive and coercive expansion,
the true unanimity between humans was lost. There is also an idea
of an all-embracing morality that can be experienced by everybody.
Freemasonry aims at a revival of the true state of nature, and works
with the same ambitions as its historical ancestors, the Crusaders,
to create a new people who embrace a universal solidarity. The
roots of this universal solidarity are not only found in a common
spiritual/mythical past, but also in the intellectual challenges of the
future: to collect and to disseminate knowledge for the benefit of
mankind as a whole. In the definitions established by Pauline
Kleingeld, Ramsay’s oration unites several different varieties of
cosmopolitanism.9 Without doubt, we find in it the conviction ‘that
all human beings are members of a single moral community and

8
Ibid., p. 232.
9
Pauline Kleingeld, ‘Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-
Century Germany’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1999, pp. 505–524, where
she makes the distinction between moral, political, and legal reform and cultural,
economic, and romantic cosmopolitanisms.

71
that they have moral obligations to all other human beings regard-
less of their nationality, language, religions, customs etc’ (moral
cosmopolitanism).10 When it comes to ideas of a world state, Ram-
say does not go so far as to advocate a certain model, although he
talks about the whole world as a ‘vast republic’. However, it is
clear that in his view, states that use military power to suppress
others are ‘failed states’. They do not represent the true natural
state of mankind. The universal level of a world state is described
as a ‘spiritual nation’ only, with no political obligations. In this
sense, Ramsay is perhaps already very close to romantic cosmopol-
itanism in Novalis’ style, as he also stresses philanthropy, moral
bonds, a shared faith, and a ‘general love of mankind’. Romantic
cosmopolitanism is fulfilled in the fraternity. Even more striking
are the parallels between Ramsay and Novalis, because both refer
back to the Middle Ages in Europe. Novalis stresses, however, the
unity between the political ruler and religion within Europe. Ram-
say makes a link with the Crusades, where chivalric and religious
orders – outside Europe – could experience transnational similarity
and unity when encountering the significant ‘oriental’ Other. Al-
though Ramsay does not mention anything about a legal frame
which keeps the inhabitants of the world republic together, we can
assume that he is convinced of the existence of a universal concept
of human rights based upon the idea of the true state of nature.
In a sense, Ramsay defends the universal right of each nation to
maintain its diversity, and thus he represents ‘cultural cosmopol-
itanism’. Although languages, geography, clothes, and customs do
not essentially differentiate people, they still are separate families.
They represent different kingdoms, and they have duties that are a
result of the demands of those states. The ‘new people’ are thus not
created as a totally new design of mankind, but instead by a joint
imagination, the universal ‘spiritual nation’ that serves as the ideo-
logical roof of a compartmentalized building where different fami-
lies can live in harmony together without being forced to relinquish
all differences between them. In his oration, Ramsay does not men-
tion anything about the necessity of free trade between people.
However, he adds a distinct trait to his ideas on universality by
10
Ibid., p. 507.

72
stressing the importance of the free transfer of knowledge. When
Ramsay states that ‘all nations may borrow sound knowledge’
(‘toutes les nations peuvent puiser des connoissances solides’), he
apparently refers to his encyclopaedic ideas of a ‘universal diction-
ary of all liberal arts and useful sciences’ (‘Dictionnaire universel
de tous les arts liberaux, et de toutes sciences utiles’). And it is the
bond of Science, along with that of Virtue, that will cement the
‘new people’. Hence, we might identify a new category of cos-
mopolitanism, involving the idea that knowledge should be freely
transferred and disseminated among mankind for the benefit of all.

How did these cosmopolitan ideas become part of the values of a

society that initiates its members in secret ceremonies, and that is
known for the vast use of secret symbols? How compatible are ex-
troverted ideas of a world community with the introverted secrecy
of a restricted group? To address this question, we need to perhaps
look at the tradition of Western esotericism. It has often been as-
sumed that irrational mysticism is incompatible with the project of
rational modernization and the Enlightenment, but it may also be
the case that these two currents in Western thought borrow ideas
from each other. Does secrecy manifest itself in the rituals and
symbols of freemasonry or does it perhaps mirror an approach to
establish a universally comprehensible language? Alexander Roob
writes about the puzzle pictures and linguistic riddles in alchemy
and mysticism:

The tendency towards arcane language in “obscure speeches”, in

numbers and in enigmatic pictures, is explained by a profound
scepticism about the expressive possibilities of literal language,
subjected to Babylonian corruption, which holds the Holy Spirit
fettered in its grammatical bonds. The prehistoric knowledge, the
prisca sapientia that was directly revealed to Adam and Moses by
God, and which was handed down in a long, elite chain of tradi-
tion, had to be preserved in such a way that it was protected against
the abuse if the profane. To this end, Hermes Trismegistus, who

73
 like Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Plato, was seen as a major link in
this hermetic chain, developed hieroglyphs.11

In his Oration, Ramsay expresses this idea of a universal language

for the initiated in the following words:

We have our own secrets: they are figurative signs and sacred
words which make up a language, now dumb, now very eloquent,
to communicate at a very great distance, and in order to greet our
Brethren whatever their language, or country.

Regardless of country or origin, freemasonry has established a uni-

versal language of its own, communicated through secrets. But its
ambition is still to contribute to the perfection of mankind as a
whole, through the dissemination and the transfer of knowledge.

Christoph Martin Wieland and ‘Das Geheimnis

des Kosmopolitenordens’
Are there other ways to combine cosmopolitanism and secrecy?
Fifty years after Ramsay’s oration, in 1788, on the eve of the
French Revolution, the German Enlightenment writer and editor
Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) published his prominent
essay ‘Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens’ (1788) [The Se-
cret of the Order of Cosmopolitans]. The general message of the
text, published in his journal Der Teutsche Merkur, is that cosmo-
politans/cosmopolitanism need neither a secrecy nor an Order. This
is in line with Wieland’s repeated attack on secret societies and
Orders for their concealment. However, it is astonishing that Wie-
land’s and Ramsay’s views of world citizenship correspond to a
large extent. It is even difficult to imagine that Wieland had not
read Ramsay’s oration prior to his essay when looking at the fol-
lowing key passage:

11
Alexander Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism: The Hermetic Cabinet (Köln:
Taschen, 2005), p. 9.

74
 Cosmopolitans carry their name (citizens of the world) in its virtual
and most eminent sense. They regard all people of the globe as the
same branch of one and the same family, and the universe as a state
were they are citizens together with uncountable other reasonable
beings, in order to – under general Laws of Nature – promote the
perfection of the Whole, each of them according to his particular
species and manner industrious for its own prosperity.12

In Ramsay’s oration, the world is seen as a ‘Grande République’,

with the nations as families and the individuals as children. Wie-
land expands this vision even further, to a truly universal scale. The
cosmos is a state that is inhabited by reasonable beings, fellow-
citizens, who are ruled by the laws of nature. Each of these beings
is promoting the perfection of the whole while being involved in
the augmentation of their own wealth. Ramsay and Wieland are
both referring to natural law in their formulations of the cosmopoli-
tan ideal. The mutually integrating approaches between the citizens
of the universe are not based upon territory or concepts of territori-
ality, but instead upon an imagined community, or rather a sense of
unity.

Wieland’s text on the secret of the Order of Cosmopolitans con-

tained in Der Teutsche Merkur is divided into three parts. In the
introduction, he recapitulates the content of the novel Geschichte
der Abderiten [History of the Abderites], which was published as a
series of articles fourteen years earlier.13 The second part of the
essay deals with the ‘secrets’ themselves, whereas the third part is

12
Christoph Martin Wieland, ‘Das Geheimniß des Kosmopolitenordens’, Der
Teutsche Merkur, Weimar, August 1788, pp. 97–115, the quotation is on p. 107:
‘Die Kosmopoliten führen ihren Nahmen (Weltbürger) in der eigentlichen und
eminentesten Bedeutung. Sie betrachten alle Völker des Erdbodens als eben so
viele Zweige einer einzigen Familie, und das Universum als einen Staat, worin
sie mit anderen unzähligen andern vernünftigen Wesen Bürger sind, um unter
allgemeinen Naturgesetzen die Vollkommenheit des Ganzen zu befördern, indem
jedes nach seiner besondern Art und Weise für seinen eigenen Wohlstand
geschäftig ist’.
13
History of the Abderites, trans. Max Dufner (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh Univer-
sity Press, 1993). See also the web page http://lehigh.edu/ library/ lup/ Book-
Pages/ DufnHist.htm?Literature [accessed 04/09/2006].

75
devoted to the political foundations of the cosmopolitans and their
relationship to society. Since the days of the Abderites, the ‘invisi-
ble society’ of cosmopolitans has existed for thousands of years,
Wieland claims. And true cosmopolitans never would organize
themselves in the traditional way. Their ‘invisibility is a result of
the nature of the thing’. From the moment a cosmopolitan enters
another secret society, he ceases to be a cosmopolitan. Hence, it is
not possible to establish a society of cosmopolitans, and Wieland
attacks those who had claimed to represent such an organization
and their secrets (which apparently had been the case). Thus, in the
name of the Order, Wieland now aims to reveal the secrets of the
cosmopolitans so that no one else can claim to represent them.

Can cosmopolitanism be organized?

Wieland places quite a bit of effort into explaining the differences
between ‘real’ secret organizations and the secrecy of the cosmo-
politans. Secret Orders are only secret because they want to be. The
only secret of the cosmopolitans is constituted by the ignorance of
the masses. There will always be people who – regardless of how
open the revelation of the cosmopolitan message is – still would
not understand its message. And it is this inability to understand
which creates its only ‘secret’. Unlike secret Orders, it is not possi-
ble to be initiated into or instructed about cosmopolitanism: ‘you
are in their society, because you are a cosmopolitan. You are born
to be it, and any instruction will not contribute to that more than
nutrition and movement contributes to the growth of the animal
body […]’.
Wieland criticizes secret societies for their habit of demanding
that members take an oath which is unknown to the authorities of
the country in question. In doing so, Wieland places himself into a
very long tradition of anti-Masonic literature. Beginning with the
first revealing articles and texts published on freemasonry in the
1720s and 1730s, this argument against freemasonry was men-
tioned over and over again. How can government authorities be
sure that members of secret societies will not conspire against them

76
if their secret obligations remain unknown? On the other hand, to
be a cosmopolite requires no oath. There is no need to hide secrets,
or to make a secret out of cosmopolitan principles and ambitions.
All humans and, in fact, all beings are regarded as parts of the same
universal community. However, human beings neither play the
most important role nor are subjected to an arbitrary fate. They are
not a blind tool of foreign powers, but as intellectual beings, are
instead enabled to use their will and mind in order to have an im-
pact upon the surrounding world.
From this general anti-deterministic position, Wieland derives a
dual principle: to leave aside what human spirit cannot influence
upon and instead to focus upon what can be changed by reason and
will. The former principle has close connections to Epicurean
teaching, where one of the main principles is to remain unim-
pressed by what we can neither perceive nor affect. The latter prin-
ciple reflects the duty of ‘utmost perfection’, explicitly mentioned
by Wieland. Each human being has received a gift from nature and
it is up to the surrounding conditions to promote the development
and refinement of those unique qualities. There is no excuse for not
trying to improve upon those gifts. These are the foundations of
cosmopolitan virtues, and from here it is possible to make a distinc-
tion between ‘world dwellers’ and ‘world citizens’. World dwellers
are passive – on the same level as animals. The world citizen, on
the other hand, is the one who tries to improve his usefulness in
order to contribute to the best of the ‘grand city of God’.
Cosmopolitans acknowledge no other superiors than necessity
and the law of nature. Wieland mentions here ‘the highest governor
of the universe’, a terminology that is closely connected to that in
freemasonry, where a ‘Great Architect of the Universe’ is often
referred to as the Supreme Being who has created the world.14 But
besides this subordination under the highest governor of the uni-
verse, among cosmopolitans only rules complete equality. Author-
ity and instructions are only taken from nature, and there are no

14
See Charles Porset, ‘Grand Architecte de l’Universe’, Encyclopédie de la
Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2000), pp. 345–347. See
also the formulation in the very first sentence of the Constitutions of Freema-
sons, quoted already above.

77
other degrees than the different steps of capability and inner moral
righteousness. There is no agenda to revive a long-time defunct
Order, to unite churches, or to reform the world according to their
minds. Cosmopolitans do not constitute a state within a state; they
do not require a constitution, or superiors, or secret chancellery, or
joint finances. Without the use of any secret signs, a close unity is
nevertheless formed. The entire secret lies in an affiliation that is in
force universally: ‘A certain natural relationship and sympathy, that
expresses itself in the whole universe among very similar beings,
and in the spiritual bond, with which truth, benevolence and purity
of the heart chains together noble human beings’. This idea is
reminiscent of Goethe’s thoughts on elective affinities between
humans who attract each other (Wahlverwandschaften, 1809). As
the goal of the Order of Cosmopolitans is self-evident, there is no
need to call for any synods or convents where this goal has to be
negotiated. Only one formula is needed to summarize the main
ambition of cosmopolitans: ‘to diminish the totality of evil that
suppresses mankind as much as possible (without creating any ma-
levolence themselves) and to augment the total of good in the
world in accordingly to their best capacity’.
After this formulation of a cosmopolitan code of conduct, Wie-
land in the second chapter of Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenor-
dens discusses the political principles of the cosmopolitans and
their relation to the civic society. A good cosmopolitan is a quiet
citizen. They never use violence to achieve their goals and never
take part in any conspiracy, uprising, civil war, revolution, or regi-
cide. The only weapon of resistance allowed is reason, which also
constitutes the only form of government. In the conflicts between
different parties of the state, the cosmopolitan has to remain neutral
and impartial. However, there are reasons to choose sides, for in-
stance, when one party is threatened by suppression, or when the
other party treats it inhumanely. A cosmopolitan thus never dis-
turbs the public peace, and remains within the legal framework of
the state he happens to inhabit. However, ‘republican enthusiasm’
is also irreconcilable with cosmopolitanism.
All types of patrimony are foreign to the cosmopolitan: ‘What
among the ancient Greeks and the proud citizens of that town that

78
thought to have been founded in order to rule the world [Rome],
was called patrimony, is a passion incompatible with the basic con-
cepts of cosmopolitans. No Roman could have been a cosmopolite,
no cosmopolite could have been a Roman’.
Here again, the parallels with Ramsay’s Oration are most in-
triguing. As we remember, in the very introduction to his speech he
rejects the ‘ill-understood love of one’s homeland’ which destroyed
‘the general love of mankind’. Even more obvious is the similarity
when it comes to the rejection of hegemony. In Wieland’s words, it
is wrong to ‘build the prosperity, glory and grandeur of the father-
land upon intentional over-favouring and suppression of other
states’. Ramsay speaks of the ‘raising of one people above an-
other’.
In a general exposé, Wieland ascribes reason as the main ele-
ment in the formation of the superiority of European culture. How-
ever, the progress of culture and science was not followed by the
progress of governance: ‘the supreme of all arts, the royal art to put
people by means of legislation and governmental administration in
the state of higher felicity’. The term ‘royal art’ is heavily involved
in the sphere of freemasonry. Known as ‘ars regia’, it is not only a
synonym for alchemy. Within the Masonic context, ‘royal art’ is
used to describe the essence of Masonic ideology, as already de-
scribed in the introduction to this essay.15 Wieland’s use of the term
was not meant to defend any real ‘royal’ rights or powers. Subse-
quently, he ardently proposes that a civic society needs to liberate
itself from the last vestiges of the ‘barbarian constitution’, where
there are no clear limits between the rights of the ‘nation’ and the
rights of the ‘throne’. He then attacks arbitrariness in legislation
and jurisdiction, and defends the right of personal property, honour,
freedom, and life of the citizens. There will come a revolution, says
Wieland, but not a revolution that sets fire to Europe. It will be a
revolution of reason, one which has the power to instruct humans
about their true interest, their rights and duties, and the purpose of
their existence.

15
See Eric Saunier, ‘Art Royal’, Encyclopédie de la Franc-Maçonnerie, pp. 47–
48.

79
 From this analysis, it becomes clear that cosmopolitans consider
all existing governments as mere ‘scaffolds for the erection of the
eternally existing temple of general felicity’. Here again, Wieland
employs a terminology widely used within freemasonry, where
architectural metaphors described the purpose of the society.16 Sub-
sequently, Wieland elaborates in a very long passage on the con-
cept of freedom as an integral part of all human development, and
which was suppressed by despotism. The establishment of a consti-
tution based upon reason will be accelerated by ‘the utmost spread
of basic truths, publicity of facts, observations, discoveries, investi-
gations, suggestions of improvements, warnings of negative conse-
quences’. Hence, cosmopolitans regard freedom of the press as the
true ‘Palladium of humanity’ and the last part of Wieland’s treatise
is dedicated to explaining how true journalistic freedom should be
organized in a well-civilized state. His ambition is encyclopaedic in
essence, and elaborates upon what Ramsay already stated in his
Oration: one of the main principles of the Masonic fraternity was
to enable that ‘all nations can borrow sound knowledge’ from each
other. There is a duty of mutual assistance regarding knowledge.
Ramsay proposed a ‘universal dictionary of all liberal arts and all
useful sciences’ that united ‘the lights of all nations […] in a single
work’. He would also have perhaps argued for the freedom of the
press, but, at the end of the 1730s, the press in Europe was still not
as developed as it would be fifty years later.

Why an order of cosmopolitans?

These two chapters constitute the content of Wieland’s Das Ge-
heimniß des Kosmopolitenordens. A continuation that was an-
nounced at the end of the second part was never published, and was
perhaps never written at all. However, Wieland subsequently, de-
spite the horrors of the French Revolution that he strongly rejected,
discussed cosmopolitan topics in his writings. However, it is inter-
esting to pose the question as to why Wieland used a description of

16
See Vladimir Biaggi, ‘Temple’, Encyclopédie de la Franc-Maçonnerie, pp.
850–852.

80
a non-existent or at least invisible Order as a framework for his
ideas on cosmopolitanism. I suggest the following possible reasons.
Within secret societies (such as freemasonry) during the 18th
century there was a development of ideas on human equality, a
principal need for universal solidarity, charity and welfare, dis-
semination of knowledge, and the introduction of sound principles
of government. This general ideological framework comprised the
often-cited ‘augmentation of felicity’ or ‘pursuit of happiness’ for
mankind in the sense of the US constitution. Hence, through a joint
European sociability, a cosmopolitan community was created, yet
open only for the initiated and practiced only in privacy. Although
many ideas of the modern civic society were tried out in the
framework of secret societies such as freemasonry (passports,
membership records and payment of fees/taxes, democratic voting,
etc.), there was never a direct adoption of those principles in soci-
ety as a whole. Wieland surely saw a need for that (he wanted the
royal art to be extended to the field of governance) and thus he
needed to attack the internal preoccupation of the Orders with
themselves and their ‘private’ matters. Wieland thus rejected the
secrecy within the act of initiation, and he states that cosmopolitan
values should be accessible to all (aside from the ignorant Abde-
rites) and should be promoted in public. Another important aspect
of the rejection of secrecy within initiatory societies is the habit of
taking an oath, the content of which remains unknown to the out-
side world, especially governments.
Secret societies and Orders were widely discussed in the 18th
century European press. The 1780s in particular contained many
features that Wieland could draw upon. Already the words secret
and Order were constantly found in the press. One of the reasons
was that a Masonic system called the Strict Observance (SO) had
spread throughout Europe between 1754 and 1782.17 The SO

17
For an introduction to the topic, see René Le Forestiers (1st edition 1970, 3rd
2003) Die templerische und okkultistische Freimaurerei im 18. und 19. Jahrhun-
dert, Teil 1 (und 2), Die Strikte Observanz, 1987. 1999 wurden die Rituale des
hohen Ordens vom heiligen Tempel zu Jerusalem, auch Strikte Observanz ge-
nannt aus dem Jahr 1764 vom ersten bis zum 7. Grad publiziert. See also Alain
Bernheim’s papers on the SO http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/
bernheimfr.html [accessed 01/10/2006].

81
claimed that it had inherited the right to re-establish the defunct
Order of the Knights Templars, and thus founded provinces and
chapters in many European countries. Around 1,600 members be-
longed to the Inner Circle of Knights, including many prominent
people from high nobility or royal families, well-known writers,
academics, etc. The leader of the SO also claimed that he had re-
ceived his instructions from a group of ‘secret superiors’ the names
of whom he was unable to reveal. Within the framework of the SO
some of the most utopian and most irrational traits of enlightened
culture can be found. On the one hand, the knights of the SO
worked to realize certain groundbreaking innovations such as an
all-European pension fund, financed by the contribution of its
members and by investments in industrial production. On the other
hand, mysticism and alchemy flourished as, for instance, in 1767,
the supposed ‘Clerical branch’ of the Order revealed its existence
and started to practice a very esoteric interpretation of Christianity.
The involvement of a substantial part of especially the German
working elite in the SO was repeatedly discussed. In 1782, a con-
vent was established in Wilhelmsbad that abolished the supposed
connection to the Knights Templars. And in the aftermath of this
event, several books were published, such as St. Nicaise (1786) and
Anti-St. Nicaise (1786–1788), Versuch über die Beschuldigungen,
welche dem Tempelherrenorden gemacht worden, und über dessen
Geheimniß (1788), or Noch etwas über Geheime Gesellschaften im
protestantischen Deutschland (Berlinische Monatsschrift, 1786). It
was also during this time that the famous Order of Illuminati began
to be active in Germany, dedicated to a rational reform of society,
with ‘Count Cagliostro’ hypnotizing the educated drawing rooms
of Europe with his ‘egyptomanian’ metaphysical science. Secrecy,
whether involving rationality or irrationality, was always on the
agenda. Orders, their history, and their organizations were dis-
cussed and questioned. With this context as a background, a seman-
tic field was laid open for use by a mind like Wieland’s. It was easy
to make references to a general discourse of the time and, as we
have seen already, there are plenty. Especially when Wieland talks
about the qualities of true cosmopolitans, he uses well-established
terminology from the discourse of secret societies such as ‘war-

82
rant’, ‘instruction’, ‘degrees’, ‘secret plan’, ‘secret connections’,
‘defunct Order’, ‘unification of churches’, ‘common interest of an
Order’, ‘honourable supreme’, ‘secret chancellery’, ‘common
treasure’, ‘Shibboleth’ and certain ‘signs’.
In the preface to his treatise, Wieland describes how a person
who was raising funds believed the Order of Cosmopolitans was
real when he addressed his request to them. This already seemed to
prove their existence, Wieland writes satirically, and it fuelled mis-
use by others. ‘Pseudo-cosmopolitans’ now seized the name for
their purposes, and awarded themselves the cosmopolitan title.
They believed that being a cosmopolitan meant achieving the ‘Im-
perium orbis’. However, to be a cosmopolitan is not a label, and
requires no organization: ‘the invisibility of cosmopolitans follows
from the nature of the thing [my Italics]’. However, the misuse of
the word and of the pretend organization forces Wieland to both
explain and reveal its real purposes. ‘Invisibility’ is a concept that
had been used in several contexts, and is interesting to elaborate
upon further. Jesus is known as the ‘representation of the invisible
God’ and the ‘invisible church’, and Ecclesia invisibilis is the uni-
versal Christian community as a whole, united through its shared
faith. The article on ‘Unsichtbare Kirche’ in Zedlers’ aforemen-
tioned encyclopaedia states that:

all humans [that accept the revelation of the Bible] are not only
united with Christ, but also mutually with each other, and hence
they are parts of the same society. Secondly, because this union in
essence is an inner and spiritual, and hence is not perceivable with
the eyes, the society is called an invisible church, even if the peo-
ple who constitute the same are visible and their community with
Christ and each other must be perceivable through their actions.
Thirdly that the invisible church in the society of all believers or
true Christians exists on the whole surface of the world […]18

This definition of an invisible global community sounds much like

Wieland. Invisibility is a prerequisite of cosmopolitanism; any at-
tempts to make the organization visible will corrupt its essence.
The concept of the invisible church as a representation of true and

18
Zedlers Universallexicon, Vol. 49, pp. 1020–1021.

83
universal Christianity was widespread in Protestant theology. The
predecessor of the Royal Society was called the ‘Invisible College’,
because as it is stated in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) a
college, the Salomon’s house, is devoted to the exploration of new
knowledge. Today, we can see a revival of the term Invisible Col-
lege to describe non-governmental, non-profit organizations de-
voted to the free dissemination of knowledge: ‘The Invisible Col-
lege refers mainly to the intrinsic ideology of the free transfer of
thought and technical expertise, usually carried out without the
establishment of designated facilities or authority structure, spread
by a loosely connected system of word-of-mouth referral or local-
ized bulletin-board system, and supported through barter (i.e. trade
of knowledge or services) or apprenticeship’.19 In the 2006 Swedish
election campaign, an ‘invisible party’ carried out political actions.
On its website the party explains that there is an ‘invisible commu-
nity of class’, ‘all we did was to say what previously was invisible,
and now will become invisible again’. The negative aspects of
capitalism had been brought out during this campaign, but this was
also ‘the greatest limitation, because when the invisible is presented
in light and made visible, it at the same time is disarmed. It is
turned into politics […]’.20
Invisibility has thus become a term that has developed from a
sacred connotation in Christianity to a part of pre-Enlightenment
science (perhaps the essence of the likewise invisible Republic of
the Learned) and an ingredient of cosmopolitanism. In a post-
modern context, the term has returned as a label for spontaneous
political action. And it is the principle of invisibility Wieland de-
fends and claims as the invisible Order of Cosmopolitans, whose
secrets have to be understood without making them visible.

19
See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Invisible_College&printable=
yes
20
Translated from the party’s website, http://www.osynligapartiet.se.

84
Summary
This article deals with the relationship between secrecy and cos-
mopolitanism within the discourse of the 18th century. In the first
part, the affinity between freemasonry and cosmopolitanism is in-
vestigated. The 1736 ‘Oration’ of André Michel de Ramsay is ana-
lyzed and discussed as an example of a very early statement of
cosmopolitan values within the framework of secret societies. In
the second part, the famous work of Christoph Martin Wieland on
the secrets of the Order of Cosmopolitans (‘Das Geheimnis des
Kosmopolitenordens’, 1788) is presented and discussed. Wieland
uses the terminology and treatment of the topic within the context
of an intensive debate on secret societies and Orders on the eve of
the French Revolution. In his ‘secret’, Wieland reveals that cos-
mopolitanism requires no organization, and that it is a morality
potentially conceivable by all. The comparison between Ramsay
and Wieland can be interpreted as proof of Koselleck’s idea that
secrecy and the public constitute a dichotomy within Enlighten-
ment thought and that the resulting public discourse was prepared
within the secret, private spheres of 18th century enlightened cul-
ture.

References
Biaggi, Vladimir, ‘Temple’, Encyclopédie de la Franc-Maçonnerie
(Paris: Librairie générale française, 2000).
Franklin, Benjamin (1734) Constitutions of the Free-Masons:
digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/25/
Jönsson, Christer, Tägil, Sven, Törnqvist, Gunnar, Organizing European
Space (London: Sage, 2003).
Kleingeld, Pauline, ‘Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eight-
eenth-Century Germany’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1999.
Koselleck, Reinhart, Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der
bürgerlichen Welt (Freiburg i. Br. 1959, 2nd edition Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1973).
Lamoine, Georges, ‘The Chevalier de Ramsay’s Oration 1736–37’, Ars
Quatuor Coronatum, Vol. 114 (2002).

85
Le Forestier, René, Die templerische und okkultistische Freimaurerei im
18. und 19. Jahrhundert, Teil 1 (und 2), Die Strikte Observanz
(Leimen, 1987).
Osynliga partiet http://www.osynligapartiet.se
Porset, Charles, ‘Grand Architecte de l’Universe’, Encyclopédie de la
Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2000).
de Ramsay, André Michel, ms 1213 Bibliotheque Municipale de Tou-
louse, in Georges Lamoine (ed.), Discours prononcé à la réception
des Francs-Maçons (Toulouse: Éd SNES, 1999).
Ramsay’s Oration: http://misraim.free.fr/textes/discours_Ramsay.pdf#
search=%22%22Andr%E9%20Michel%20de%20Ramsay%22%22
On Ramsay and his Oration: http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/
bernheimfr.html
Roob, Alexander, Alchemy & Mysticism: The Hermetic Cabinet (Köln:
Taschen, 2005).
Saunier, Eric, ‘Art Royal’, Encyclopédie de la Franc-Maçonnerie (Paris,
2000).
Wieland, Christoph Martin, History of the Abderites, trans. Max Dufner
(Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1993).
Wieland, Christoph Martin, ‘Das Geheimniß des Kosmopolitenordens’,
Der Teutsche Merkur (Weimar, 1788), pp. 97–115 and pp. 121–
143.
Zedlers Universallexicon, Vol. 19, Leipzig 1739, column 2207–2209.
——, Vol. 49, Leipzig 1745, column 1020-1021.

86
5. Cosmopolitanism in Swedish
Nobility in the 18th Century:
Educational Practices and Cultural
Strategies in the Intersection of
Patriotism and le Grand Monde

Jessica Parland-von Essen

After the death of the warrior King Charles XII and the collapse of
Sweden as a Great Power after the Great Nordic War, the power of
the weakened monarchs was seized by the nobility, and the country
entered the so-called age of freedom. This period of Swedish his-
tory covers the years from 1719 to the coup of Gustavus III in
1772. The nobility had been deprived of its strength during the long
and costly war at the beginning of the century, and it soon became
largely dependent on foreign subsidies, especially from France. The
importance of France, during the 18th century especially the elite in
Paris and Versailles, was indisputable, both politically and cultur-
ally. The French language was not only the language of diplomacy,
but also became a lingua franca of all elites and of those who
wanted to claim citizenship in the république de lettres. The Swed-
ish, and also, e.g., the Russian, nobility was swift to adapt these
cultural signs of elitism. It was not only a question of language.
The nobility also copied fashion and manners, and theatre and liter-
ary practices with impressive speed. Soon the nobility had (at least)
two mother tongues, since children were taught French during their
first years. The aristocracy even began to speak about France as
their second country. Many Swedish young men went to France to
serve as officers in the Royal Suèdois, a Swedish regiment serving

87
the French king, and lived there for years. In the mid-18th century,
serving ‘Le Roy’ in a letter actually referred to the French king.
When serving Sweden, one was simply serving the fatherland.1
This loyalty to the French king was an expression of a universal
patriotism, and the culture of the nobility was not a manifestation
of treachery to one’s country, but something else. It was a state-
ment of superiority, a strategy of a threatened elite to claim mem-
bership within a cosmopolitan fellowship of nobility. And nobility
implied superior virtue, including patriotism. But even if these val-
ues were not, in this culture, opposites per se, but instead parallels,
they could sometimes create conflicts in actual life. The noble cul-
tural cosmopolitanism and way of life resulted in situations where
choices had to be made between different loyalties. Part of the core
of Swedish patriotism, besides loyalty to the other traditions of the
fathers, was Protestant conviction. The monarch of Sweden was
weak, and could easily be overridden by the noble families, and
their own interests could therefore be associated with the interests
of the fatherland. These elements of patriotism became distinctive
and important during this century. The great influences of French
culture, politics, and money on Swedish politics did not pass unno-
ticed in Stockholm, and there was heavy criticism, even within the
nobility. Despite this, the strong French influence continued during
the reign of Gustavus III until his death in 1792.
Similar trends in the culture of nobility can also be found in
other European countries during this period of time. Even if the
monarch was strong, as in Russia, the privileged position of the
nobility created tensions within these societies. French culture was
adapted all over Europe by the noble elite as a way of creating a
distinction and of excluding a growing number of well-educated
and wealthy people whom in France were called the third state. An
important part of this culture was, of course, its regeneration. Edu-
cational practices are revealing, especially when studying highly
exclusive and aesthetically defined cultures like the noble culture
of the late 18th century.

1
See Charlotta Wolff, Vänskap och makt. Den svenska politiska eliten och upp-
lysningstidens Frankrike (Helsingfors, 2004). Wolff has studied the Swedes
living in Paris and presents illustrative examples, esp. pp. 285–334.

88
 Aesthetics was perceived to be almost equivalent to ethics. The
important virtues were closely linked to outer signs of nobility. The
sword, fine clothes and graceful polite behaviour were directly
connected with and dependent on noble virtues in a strictly hierar-
chic society. The exclusive elite culture masked its norms and rules
in politeness and gallantry. It considered outer signs of social con-
ditions inseparable from inner virtue, and it was therefore possible
to argue for political and economic privileges by adapting certain
tastes and manners. Thus, sign and meaning were fixed, non-
negotiable, and non-arbitrary. On the other hand, this firm relation-
ship eventually resulted in an obsession with the outer signs, the
look of things, which again turned things on their head. This devel-
opment was augmented by trends in philosophy and educational
methods during the 18th century. Writers like Condillac, inspired
by John Locke, explained that the mind as well as the character
were mostly created by impressions. The outer world modelled the
soul and the personality, while experience formed the inside and
thus signs created meaning. The famous Madame de Genlis
strongly recommended using theatre as a method of character
building.2 Learning virtuous lines by heart and performing exem-
plary moral behaviour in plays inevitably, she thought, resulted in
good morale. Etiquette was not only nice, it was also educational.
Enhancing one’s personal sensibility for the fine arts and adapting a
graceful appearance came to be considered central purposes of
education. In the end, this obsession with signs opened up for the
concepts of play and performance in everyday life.3 The noble life
within the Swedish court was consequently filled with theatre
plays, games, and masquerades as in so many other European
courts of the time.
The education of boys and girls was, of course, different during
this period. The boys were trained for the military, and they also

2
Madame de Genlis, Théatre a l’usage de jeunes personnes Tome premier
(Paris, 1785), pp. ix–x. See also Chantal Thomas, ‘“Ce-pays-là” Introduction to
Madame de Genlis’, De l’ésprit des etiquettes de l’ancienne cour et des usages
du monde de ce temps (Mercure de France, 1996), p. 8.
3
Juri Lotman has made a very elusive analysis of this culture in his book Uni-
verse of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (New York: I. B. Tauris Pub-
lishers, 2001), see esp. pp. 54–62 and 258–259.

89
had to be taught, for instance, rhetoric and Latin to be able to be
competent representatives of their families in politics. But they also
had to be different from the sons of the priests and other learned
men, condescendingly called pedants. So, the sons of the nobility
had to transcend the civilization they – due to a lack of their own
elite schools in Sweden – had to receive at the universities. They
consequently received tuition in dancing, music, and of course,
French. Finally, if it was possible to arrange, they had to leave for a
Grand Tour or perhaps some period of service in the Royal Suèdois
or some other foreign regiment. There they would be able to refine
their manners, make valuable contacts and also, if possible, earn
military degrees as a result of fighting in battles.
The girls evidently received a different kind of education from
their brothers. Although the cultural aims of the upbringing of girls
were similar to those of boys, the practice of raising girls was less
influenced by classical humanistic tradition, at least concerning
form. Still, it would be a mistake to think of their education as un-
important. On the contrary, they were, to an increasing degree, con-
sidered important carriers of the special character and superiority of
the nobility. The interest of the Enlightenment in educational ques-
tions influenced the Swedish nobility in underlining the importance
of women as mothers. Furthermore, one should not underestimate
the personal interest of parents in their children and their happiness.
Poor young men of the nobility were often tempted to marry rich
and well-educated bourgeois girls. As it was important to get mar-
ried for networking, independence, and status, it was an adequate
reaction of the women, and of fathers as well as brothers, to claim
that the noble women were superior in their qualities to their bour-
geois rivals. This required commitment to their education.

In 1777, the Swedish count Fredrik Sparre wrote in his diary about
the education of his daughters. He was troubled by the circum-
stances in which he was to raise them. Being a widower he had
made the decision to take his daughters out of boarding school in
Stockholm, and bring them to his house in the countryside. He con-
cluded that ‘the most important duty of parents is to live with their

90
children and that this also was in the best interest of the children’.4
Under the care of Madame de Chantillon in the city, the girls had
learnt French, history, arithmetic, music, declamation, and to read
and dance. This education seems to have been an ordinary educa-
tion for the daughters of the nobility during this period in the north-
eastern parts of Europe.
Unity and exclusiveness of culture were of great importance to
the continued influence of this elite. Classical virtues were an im-
portant cultural argument for a continued privileged position. The
delicate and ambitious hônnete homme was expected to constantly
strive for a greater perfection as a Christian. On the other hand, the
great importance attached to aesthetics – etiquette and taste – made
an individual variation of the contents of an education possible.
This is why education consisted mainly of aesthetic studies; girls
studied music, dancing, fine arts, epistolary skills and also the art of
polite conversation. There was also a demand for enlightenment,5
and it was often possible to aspire to personal political and social
ambitions, which made competition in all skills necessary for the
daughters as well.
Schools and their classical teachings were not meant for girls
and their education often took place in their homes, with private
teachers. Teaching girls was not regulated, nor were its aims for-
mulated in official documents. It was an exclusive, secretive, pri-
vate business of the nobility. Few things were written at all, espe-
cially not rules or norms. Literary sources for this kind of education
can instead be found in, for instance, the works of Madame Le
Prince de Beaumont, Madame d’Epinay, Madame de Genlis and
Charles Rollin. A use of French language and literature was an im-

4
Fredric Sparre’s diary 1777, Ericsbergssamlingen, the National Archives of
Sweden, Stockholm (my translation).
5
Some of these ideas have been presented by Penny Russell, ‘An Improper Edu-
cation? Jane Griffin’s Pursuit of Self-Improvement and “Truth”, 1811–12’, His-
tory of Education, May 2004, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 249–265. Important articles are
also to be found in Roland Bonnel & Catherine Rubinger, Femmes savantes et
femmes d'esprit: Women Intellectuals of the French Eighteenth Century (New
York: P. Lang, 1994) and Collette Nativel (ed.), Femmes savantes, savoirs des
femmes. Du crepuscule de la Renaissance à l'aube des Lumières (Genève: Li-
braire Droz, 1999). See also Chantal Greell (ed.), L'Education des filles dans la
XVIIIème siecle (Paris, 2004) on recent research in the field.

91
portant part of the process of exclusion to this elite. Other, perhaps
even more important sources are the letters between parents and
children and papers originating from studies. Diaries and memoirs
also tell us about the practice of education in everyday life, and are
available to a limited extent.
The core of noble elite culture consisted of texts. These served
as statements of norms by using examples which were expressed as
‘good taste’. The way of life was dictated by taste, and moral val-
ues were included in the aesthetic norms through the constant striv-
ing for modesty. Good manners were also correct in an ethical per-
spective. Morality could thus also be taught through etiquette.

Hedvig Charlotte Elisabet, Princess of Holstein, from Eutin, cousin

of Gustavus III of Sweden and Catherine II of Russia, may here be
an example of how classical humanistic culture was transcended
and translated into French salon culture.6 The princess was born in
1760, and her social status was never threatened, as she married the
brother of the king of Sweden. When she became Duchess of
Södermanland she kept a diary, which today is published and con-
sidered one of the finest sources on the court of Gustavus III. Al-
ready as a girl she loved to write, but her orthography was not cor-
rected, which indicates her high status and important noble rank as
opposed to pedantry. She studied quite a bit of moral history, and
the use of history is very interesting in her education.
The princess read many of moral tales from different historical
settings, and may thus serve as an example of what could be called
‘salonnization’ of classical humanist tradition that was such a
strong component in the education of the boys. A very good exam-
ple of this cultural integration is David-Etiènne Choffin’s Amuse-
mens philologiques (Halle 1774–1777). In this book, the most im-
portant parts of the noble cultural heritage are presented as short
examples, which also serve as moral education, rehearsal in the
French language and progymnasmata training. The same pattern is
found in the popular books of Madame Le Prince de Beaumont.
Moral education is central, but so is learning the cultural and politi-

6
Hedvig Elisabet Charlotta’s notes, The National Archives of Sweden, Stock-
holm.

92
cal ABCs. For instance, the princess made a detailed table of the
kings and queens of Europe and their counterparts in Roman my-
thology. It was crucial to be able to correctly interpret the frequent
allusions to ancient history during this time. The classic teachings
of the authors of old Rome and Hellas were embedded in French
conversation.

Augusta Armfelt was the daughter of Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt, who

was a favourite of the Swedish King Gustavus III.7 In 1792, the
king was assassinated, and his favourite was removed from all of
his political positions. He was instead appointed minister in Naples,
where he, in his anger, wrote letters about the Swedish regime
which resulted in his being sentenced to death a few years later.
Armfelt fled with his family to Russia, where he hid in the small
town of Kaluga for some years. During these years he spent a lot of
time with his children, especially with his eldest and at the time
only daughter Augusta. In 1798, the family finally could leave and
move to Berlin. There is a diary from this period which Augusta
kept. She was 13 at the time. In this journal, or brouillon as it
sometimes was referred to, she tells about her daily life. During this
period Augusta Armfelt also learned German and Latin. Before that
she had learnt Swedish, French, Italian, English, and Russian. She
also translated a small book on Russian history, which she dedi-
cated to her younger brother. The book was actually printed by the
proud father for political purposes.
Augusta’s days were mostly filled with music and writing. She
practiced on the piano for several hours, and studied musical the-
ory, singing, drawing, history, and mathematics usually seven days
a week. Two days a week she went to a professor to learn experi-
mental physics. An important part of the education was, of course,
attending different social events along with her parents. It can per-
haps be considered symptomatic that the father of a girl took this
much interest in her education, since the context is so extraordi-
nary. He even explained to his brother that it was necessary to give
Augusta a good education, so that she could support herself as a

7
Augusta Armfelt’s journal and Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt’s correspondence, G. M.
Armfelts arkiv, The National Archives of Finland, Helsinki.

93
governess if he lost everything. On the other hand, he often made it
clear that Augusta’s education was to be a lot better than that of
other Swedish women.
In 1799, Augusta and her mother returned to Sweden, and her fa-
ther continued her education by writing letters. In several letters he
discussed the metaphysical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It seems
that Augusta was a quite clever girl, and he was almost afraid of
her being too smart, as he often pleaded with her not to become a
philosopher. In fact, he also used his discussions on Kant to prove
this point. His ideal woman was an independent and wise lady, and
he very much wanted his daughter to astonish the world, but she
was obviously more like her mother and wanted to keep a some-
what low profile. His great expectations for her came to nothing.
Although she married well and was adored by her family, she never
entered a political career. The possibility of women doing that had
passed by the time she was grown, and she wanted a more quiet
life.

Theresia von Stedingk has left a very interesting diary that she be-
gan to write when she was 12 years old in 1806.8 This diary is writ-
ten on a daily basis, explicitly as an instrument of moral education.
This kind of approach to writing a diary may be connected with the
fact that it is written later than the material presented above. Still, it
is evident that the cultural aims are similar to those of the previous
cases. Theresia’s father had quite a meteoric career, and was at the
time the Swedish minister in St. Petersburg. He had quite recently
married his previous housekeeper, who was already the mother of
his five children. His success as a nobleman was based on his very
good personal relations from his youth, and on his good diplomatic
work. His children received an excellent education. Theresia had
full access to it. She had a French governess, who taught her to
write, read and sew. A very good male teacher lived with the fam-
ily, and Theresia also took advantage of his history and geography
lessons. In addition, she took countless drawing, painting, singing,
piano, and dancing lessons, as expected. Nevertheless, she also

8
Sophie Theresia von Stedingks diary, Släkten af Ugglas arkiv, The National
Library of Sweden, Stockholm.

94
studied considerable amounts of geography and history, besides
mathematics, Russian, and Swedish literature. Her diary is written
with the main goal of being honest and introspective – but not emo-
tional – albeit a certain romantic tendency can be noted in her in-
terest in flowers and animals.

The education of these girls, despite differences in place and time,

share the same values and goals. The Lutheran context made home
education the only possibility. As the nobility was subject to great
external political and social pressure, as well as internal division,
the idea of a coherent cosmopolitan culture was essential to elite
identity. Therefore, all of these girls studied French and writing
letters to some extent. Minor findings in the archives support this
assumption. Although sources are not very rich, due to the exclu-
siveness and aesthetic norms of this culture, it can be stated that the
education of girls was important, could contain the study of many
subjects and, in some cases, as a subject of great concern.
The cultural fellowship and idea of a united cosmopolitan nobil-
ity in Europe were central elements in the strategies of regeneration
and the educational practices of the nobility in Sweden. This elite
culture, based on assumptions of superior virtue, was manifested in
an exclusive culture regulated by taste and unpronounced rules.
Cosmopolitanism and patriotism were parallel features, one sup-
porting the other. By being a cosmopolitan, one was a true patriot.

References
Printed sources
Augusta Armfelt’s journal and Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt’s correspondence,
G. M. Armfelts arkiv, The National Archives of Finland, Helsinki.
Fredric Sparre’s diary 1777, Ericsbergssamlingen, The National Archives
of Sweden, Stockholm.
Hedvig Elisabet Charlottas notes, Kungliga Arkivet, The National Ar-
chives of Sweden, Stockholm.
Madame de Genlis, Théatre a l’usage de jeunes personnes. Tome premier
(Paris, 1785).

95
Sophie Theresia von Stedingk’s diary, Släkten af Ugglas arkiv, The Na-
tional Library of Sweden, Stockholm.

Secondary sources
Bonnel, Roland & Rubinger, Catherine, Femmes savantes et femmes
d'esprit: Women Intellectuals of the French Eighteenth Century
(New York: P. Lang, 1994).
Greell, Chantall (ed.), L’Education des filles dans la XVIIIème siecle
(Paris, 2004).
Lotman, Juri, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (New
York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2001).
Nativel, Collette (ed.), Femmes savantes, savoirs des femmes. Du crepus-
cule de la Renaissance à l'aube des Lumières (Genève: Libraire
Droz, 1999).
Russell, Penny, ‘An Improper Education? Jame Griffin’s Pursuit of Self-
Improvement and “Truth”, 1811–12’, History of Education, May
2004, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 249–265.
Thomas, Chantal, ‘“Ce-pays-là” Introduction to Madame de Genlis’, De
l’ésprit des etiquettes de l’ancienne cour et des usages du monde
de ce temps (Mercure de France, 1996).
Wolff, Charlotta, Vänskap och makt. Den svenska politiska eliten och
upplysningstidens Frankrike (Helsingfors, 2004).

96
6. Cosmic Patriotism: Jane Addams
and the Chicago Immigrant’s
Cosmopolitan Ethic and Experience

David Östlund

An absurd phrase from an age of cancelled

cosmopolitanism
In recent years ‘cosmopolitanism’ has become a hotly discussed
topic. Social scientists such as Ulrich Beck and philosophers such
as Kwame Anthony Appiah are trying to define an up-to-date ver-
sion of the concept, and to elaborate on its contemporary rele-
vance.1 A remarkable feature in such considerations is the effort to
strike a balance between seemingly contradicting views and values
– to find syntheses, and to avoid falling in the ditch on either side
of the road. The background involved here is obviously a matter of
experience. The logical and practical consequences of intellectual
excesses in opposite directions have posed the challenge of re-
examining the questions asked and answered: Is there a kind of
ethical universalism possible? One which avoids the implicit eth-
nocentric absolutism that has been the besetting sin of the Western
world, ever since the supposed yardsticks of Christianity or
Enlightenment became entangled with colonialist and imperialist

1
Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006) –
originally published in German in 2004 with the subtitle ‘…or: War is Peace’. I
have used the Swedish edition, Den kosmopolitiska blicken, eller: Krig är fred
(Göteborg: Daidalos, 2005). Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics
in a World of Strangers (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2006).

97
demands of submission? Is a cultural relativism possible? One
which pays full respect to difference, to the substantial otherness of
others – without falling into a particularistic essentialism by treat-
ing real human beings as the prisoners of monolithic and preferably
isolated collective identities? The following pages aim to re-
introduce a voice from the past into this debate – a voice that car-
ried out a somewhat similar balancing act a century ago, and did so
within a dual sociological and philosophical effort to deal with an
ultra-modern cosmopolitan experience, as well as attempting to
phrase cosmopolitan ethics for an emerging new world. True, there
are good reasons to doubt the value of the history of ideas as a kind
of storeroom of wisdoms, applied to contemporary problems with-
out further thought of our own. But there is often something to
learn from the intellectual efforts of the past, especially if our own
aim is to re-examine the presuppositions of established debates, and
to re-examine the way to pose our questions.2
We are going back to a point in time and space where a modern
discussion of cosmopolitanism was usually presented with the rea-
sons for anchoring its starting-point similar to the ancient Greeks:
in the city, polis – in urban culture. At this specific juncture in his-
tory, the economic forces of the second industrial revolution of the
late 19th century had in a very conspicuous way broken the relative
cultural particularity of the polis, turning the emerging giant Me-
tropolis into a veritable Cosmopolis.3 A city like Chicago was not
just a hub of contacts transgressing borders: as if by a stroke of
magic a small trade station had turned into the hometown of over a
million people, most of them having left traditional rural and urban
settings on the other side of the ocean in order to find a better fu-
ture. Such experiences were food for thought a hundred years ago.
2
Cf., David Östlund, ‘Ett manifest för processtolkande idéhistoria: 100 teser om
tänkandet och dess historieskrivning’ [A Manifesto for Intellectual History as
Process-Interpretation: 100 Theses on Human Thought and its Historiography],
Lychnos, 1998, pp. 9–36.
3
I use the term ‘the second industrial revolution’ in the sense of Alfred D. Chan-
dler, stressing the qualitatively new characteristics of the development which had
its breakthrough in the US and Germany in the 1880s, see, e.g., Chandler, The
Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge,
MA & London: Belknap, 1977), and idem, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of
Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap Press, 1990).

98
In stark contrast to our time, however, the beginning of the last
century was hardly a time when cosmopolitanism was a topic of the
day. On the contrary, it was the high tide of essentialist particular-
isms and hierarchizations, e.g., in terms of ‘race’ and sex, and, of
course, in terms of national identities and the nation state. Two
‘cosmopolitan moments’ are said to have occurred in modern intel-
lectual history before the current rediscovery: the late 18th century
and the years after World War II.4 The years in focus here were
probably the most ‘non-cosmopolitan’ of all of the years in be-
tween. In 1907, for example, the historian Friedrich Meinecke de-
clared the word ‘weltbürgerlich’ to be completely depreciated or
‘cancelled’ (entwertet).5 Although Meinecke partly attempted to
rehabilitate the term, by stressing the positive links between a gen-
eral notion of Humanitas and sound forms of patriotism, his Cos-
mopolitanism and the National State nonetheless delineated the
developments in the case of German intellectual history from the
age of Wieland and Kant to that of Bismarck and von Treitschke –
the story which soon, in the wake of the major clash between in-
dustrially armed patriotisms in World War I, would end up in the
quintessential negation of every imaginable variety of cosmopol-
itanism in the spirit of the Third Reich.
In the same year as Meinecke’s book was published, one of the
most eloquent intellectuals of the era, Jane Addams, was almost at
a loss for words.6 Shrewdly though, she immediately turned her

4
‘Cosmopolitan moments’: Beck, Den kosmopolitiska blicken, p. 80. Concerning
gender essentialism – feminist as well as sexist versions – see, e.g., Barbara
Caine & Glenda Sluga, Gendering European History 1780–1920 (London:
Leicester Univ. Press, 2000) (wherein the topic is related to colonialism and
racism in an instructive way), and concerning the decades around 1900 as the era
of ‘Race is All’, e.g., Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West
(Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996).
5
Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat [1907], (München: R.
Oldenbourg Verlag, 1962), p. 23.
6
Modern historical research on Addams began in the 1960s, especially as Chris-
topher Lasch made her the key figure in his still thought-provoking The New
Radicalism in America 1889–1963 (New York & London: Knopf, 1965), in
parallel with editing a commented anthology of key texts by her, The Social
Thought of Jane Addams (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). In recent years the
literature has grown into vast proportions. Concerning Addams’s personal devel-
opment up to the turn of the 20th century, Louise W. Knight has meritoriously

99
own uncertainty concerning terminology into a rhetorical tool –
challenging her readers to think for themselves. This happened as
she was summing up the moral of a pretty strange book of hers.
Newer Ideals of Peace: The Moral Substitutes for War was obvi-
ously intended as a discussion of international relations. It was a
treatise on war and peace. But in fact the contents of the book
mainly dealt with social problems – at a local level. And in connec-
tion with this it dealt with politics – at the municipal level. Basi-
cally the book grappled with the depth of the problems, the chal-
lenges and also the hopes of the ultra-modern, industrialized big
city. Addams more or less explicitly discussed her hometown Chi-
cago as a concrete example of the modern metropolis, and as such
as a kind of test case regarding general trends of development.
What was the connection then, between the dilemmas of local poli-
tics and social reform in the modern city on the one hand, and the
issues of global relations, war, and peace on the other hand? What
was the point of more or less ignoring the level of the nation and
the state, jumping from the local to the global without mediation at
a level that was the obsession of most social thinkers of the era –
long before anyone had ever heard of ‘glocalization’?
Addams was trying to outline a ‘new internationalism’ which
she had found to be developing from local experience in Chicago –
the place which due to its completely overwhelming majority of
new immigrants was the cosmopolitan city. This particular cosmo-
politan humanitarianism, as she also called it, was something quite
different than the old ideals of peace. Those ideals included the
purely negative critique of war, based on sentimental pity for the
victims (her personal hero Leo Tolstoy was hinted at as one of the
examples of this), as well as prudent worries about the waste of

returned to the sources in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), although Knight’s general pattern
of interpretation appears pretty problematic to me (especially with regard to the
issue of intellectual continuity or discontinuity 1889–1895). Knight stresses the
role of rhetoric in Addam’s thinking. Merits and problems of a quite different
nature are to be found in Mary Jo Deegan’s studies concerning Addams’s role in
social science: Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School 1892–1918
(New Brunswick & London: Transaction Books, 1988) and Race, Hull-House,
and the University of Chicago: A New Conscience Against Ancient Evils (West-
port: Praeger, 2002).

100
resources through an arms race and combat.7 Although she claimed
there was ‘something active and tangible in this new international-
ism’ she admitted it was rather difficult to make clear. She contin-
ued:

… and in our striving for a new word with which to express this
new and important sentiment, we are driven to the rather absurd
phrase of “cosmic patriotism.” Whatever it may be called, it may
yet be strong enough to move masses of men out of their narrow
national considerations and cautions into new reaches of human ef-
fort and affection.8

Addams was toying with something very close to a plain contradic-

tion in terms – ‘cosmic patriotism’. But as in all shrewd rhetoric,
the apparent paradox was dependent on the perspective of the
reader, and Addams strove, as she always did in her texts, to open
up new ways of seeing things for her expected audience – the edu-
cated Anglo-Saxon upper- and middle class.
In her role as a figurehead for the left wing of the ‘progressive’
reform movement of her age, Addams had developed a strategy for
ushering people with backgrounds similar to her own into seeing
things from the point of view of others, who then often learned
surprisingly bold lessons as a result. Basically, she placed the privi-
leged within society in school in her texts – which were often
elaborations of speeches and lectures given to middle-class audi-
ences – using the underprivileged as their teachers, and herself as
an interpreter of the different languages, thought-worlds, and ex-
periences. As an exponent of philosophical pragmatism in Ameri-
can intellectual life who developed her position in mutual exchange
with her close friend John Dewey, among others, she used to claim
that the ideas, especially the moral concepts in a broad sense, of her
own social and ethnic category tended to be outdated. They were
no longer adapted to the changed world they were put to use in, and
were often not only bad tools for thinking, but also noxious ones.
New and adequate concepts were something that developed out of

7
Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace: The Moral Substitutes for War, [1907]
(Chester, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–17.
8
Ibid., p. 145.

101
new experience. And Addams, like Dewey, used the term experi-
ence in a very broad and active sense, often interchangeable with a
concept of culture.9
Privileged people – the ones who in practice were those in
power, even in a formally egalitarian and democratic society such
as the United States – lacked the experience from which to develop
the intellectual tools needed for dealing with the modern situation
especially when it came to ethical ideals. Thus it was important to
place the privileged in school, so to speak, making the underprivi-
leged their teachers. This was especially important if the aim was to
turn a merely formal democracy into a real democracy – or, as Ad-
dams used to phrase the idea, to make democracy social.10 A condi-
tion of reaching such a goal was to replace the monologue of the
powerful and wealthy with a dialogue in which every experience
had its voice. Addams’s informal but subtle sociological analyses
were hence strongly connected with her philosophical and political
agendas. To fight prejudice, and to make the logic of the life and
thinking of those who were identified with ‘the social question’
accessible and understandable, had a moral intent. It was treated as
a lever of change. This attitude was not only mirrored in her own
texts, but also in much of the work of the early Chicago school of
9
For the case of Dewey, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American
Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). The intellectual inter-
play between Addams and Dewey (whose daughter, by the way, was named after
the friend of her parents) has also recently been thematized by Louis Menand in
his widely read The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), Chapter XII. This was also stressed by Chris-
topher Lasch in 1965, who even generalized the point and claimed that ‘[t]he
settlement movement and the movement for progressive education ran parallel at
every point’ (New Radicalism, p. 158). Dewey was heavily involved in the ac-
tivities of Hull-House (already before moving to Chicago in 1894), and after
1904 he was associated with the Henry Street Settlement in New York.
10
Locus classicus for this theme in Addams’s writings is the lecture ‘The Sub-
jective Necessity for Social Settlement’ from 1892, which she later integrated in
Twenty Years at Hull House (Chapter 6). It was republished together with its
tandem lecture from the same occasion in 1892 (‘The Objective Value of a So-
cial Settlement’) by Christopher Lasch in The Social Thought of Jane Addams,
and its status as a classic text has, e.g., been confirmed by David A. Hollinger
and Charles Capper, who used it in the second volume of The American Intellec-
tual Tradition: A Sourcebook, Second Edition (New York & Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1993).

102
sociology, e.g., George Herbert Mead and William I. Thomas,
whose mentor she was in certain respects (very much in tandem
with Dewey).11
Newer Ideals of Peace was basically a sequel to an earlier book,
Democracy and Social Ethics from 1902.12 Addams thus continued
to apply a certain style of sociological analysis and reflection in
order to, softly but expediently, shake up her readers within their
solid and narrow outlook. This time Addams followed the argu-
ment from the earlier book to what seemed to her to be its logical
conclusion: its application to transnational and global issues. Be-
tween the lines she was now addressing an opinion that not only
saw Anglo-Saxon middle-class culture (and perhaps the Anglo-
Saxon branch of the Aryan tree of races) as the spearhead of civili-
zation, but which also saw war and colonial expansion as a vitaliz-
ing force in the internal development of the nation.13 Addams had
been a pacifist in the spirit of Tolstoy since the middle of the
1880s, but it was in connection with the Spanish-American War in
1898 – the debut of the United States in the role of a colonial power
in the conventional sense – that she started her public career as an

11
See especially Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School
1892–1918, and Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago, and Kathryn
Kish Sklar, ‘Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women’s Work in
the 1890s’, in M. Bulmer, K. Bales & K. K. Sklar (eds.), The Social Survey in
Historical Perspective 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991).
Sklar’s article is particularly relevant in the context of our theme, as the trailblaz-
ing survey study Hull-House Maps and Papers focused on the ethnic and social
physiognomy of one of the neighbouring districts; see especially the literally
multicoloured maps from the original study reproduced with Sklar’s text. The
close links between Hull-House and the University of Chicago are mentioned
within a wider context in Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 226–227. Cf., Ulrich
Beck’s invocation of the Chicago school and its way to study urban culture as a
means to ‘cosmopolitan renewal’ in connection with the theme of glocalization.
Beck, Den kosmopolitiska blicken, p. 144.
12
Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, [1902] (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard U. P., 1964).
13
This aspect of the argument, compared with the parallel discussion by William
James in 1904 when the theme of the subtitle ‘The Moral Substitutes for War’
was introduced, is stressed by Linda Schott, ‘Jane Addams and William James
on Alternatives to War’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 54:2 (1993), pp.
241–254.

103
anti-militarist and anti-imperialist.14 Her activities as the unrivalled
leader of the women’s international peace movement during and
after World War I would later on render her the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1931.15 In Newer Ideals of Peace, seven years before the major
European war, she introduced the intellectual code that would re-
main visible underneath her commitment until her death in 1935.
She did so while trying to let the residents of the slums of the mod-
ern kosmopolis teach her hubris-stricken fellow members of the
privileged strata of American society a lesson in this new moral
attitude which she – with a smile on her lips – toyed with calling
‘cosmic patriotism’.

The Hull-House experience: transgressing the

front of social war
Before I briefly outline what this lesson was, and in what sense it
was supposed to teach a kind of ‘patriotism’, I will include just a
few words on the specific position from which Addams spoke – a
position which is essential to comprehend in order to understand
what she spoke about. At least this was her own view of the matter.
In the preface to her most read book, the autobiographical Twenty
Years at Hull House from 1910, she begged her readers’ pardon
because the ‘conclusions of the whole matter’ could be found to be

14
Knight, Citizen, pp. 394–395. The importance of the Spanish-American War
as a background is also mirrored in Schott, ‘Jane Addams and William James on
Alternatives to War’.
15
Concerning Addams’s highly controversial position during and after World
War I, see especially her own writings: Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch, & Alice
Hamilton, Women at the Hague, [1915] (Amherst, NY, 2003), and Jane Addams,
Peace and Bread in Time of War, [1922] (Urbana & Chicago, 2002). For the
context see, e.g., Leila J. Rupp, ‘Constructing Internationalism: The Case of
Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888–1945’, The American Historical
Review, 99:5 (1994). Addams was awarded the Nobel Prize together with one of
her antipodes in the American political landscape, Nicholas Murray Butler. I
have discussed this (among other things) in an unpublished paper for a seminar
at the Nobel Museum, Stockholm, February 2006: ‘Fred på rättfärdighetens
grund: ömsesidighetsideal från Addams till King’ [Peace Based on Righteous-
ness: Ideals of Mutuality from Addams to King].

104
very similar to those of her earlier two books, but she claimed that
in those texts she had attempted to ‘set forth a thesis supported by
experience’, while she in the third volume endeavoured to ‘trace
the experiences through which various conclusions were forced
upon me’.16
Being the daughter of a rural small industrialist, Addams had
embarked upon her way to fame at the age of 29, with the founding
of an institution. In 1889, Hull-House opened in a Chicago slum
district as one of the first ‘social settlements’ in the United States.
Hull-House immediately became the flagship of the American set-
tlement movement, which soon came to outgrow its slightly older
British counterpart. The basic idea of a social settlement was that a
group of wealthy and educated people settled in a house or an
apartment in a working-class district of a city in order to share eve-
ryday life with the people whose distress constituted the substance
of ‘the social question’. The settlers certainly came out there to
help their new neighbours – and the endeavour was in that sense
philanthropic. But more fundamental was the knowledge dimension
of the project. The ambition was to let knowledge flow in two di-
rections over the immense social and cultural chasm of the age: the
gap between the working class and the bourgeoisie. The aspect of
the effort that was connected to popular education on the one hand
aimed at democratically distributing the cultural capital that was
seen to be the privilege of the rich. The aspect of analyzing the so-
cial problems and understanding them ‘from the inside’, on the
other hand, aimed at refining the reform zeal – and it was in this
context that the settlement movement came to be an important link
between the academic social sciences and practical endeavours.
Especially in the US many settlements were seen as ‘social labora-
tories’ with more or less formal links to university departments. In
order to achieve this dual transmission of knowledge it was impor-
tant for the settlement to be an open meeting-place for people of
every different walk and view of life. It was not intended to be a
missionary station for Christian faith (even if many settlers were
believers) or for middle-class culture (although it was essential to

16
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes,
[1910] (Signet Classics, 1961), p. xxii.

105
the task that the settlers avoided all pretence of being anything
other than they were).
This vision was far from being always consistently applied. In
practice, many settlements actually tended to be hubs for spreading
middle-class habits and values among the working class. Even
Hull-House occasionally showed tendencies towards this direction,
and there were ambiguities in the attitudes and statements of Jane
Addams as well. But it is safe to say that Hull-House and its leader
were among the most consistent exponents of the settlement vision,
and thus of a certain way of thinking about the social question, that
is, a certain way of perceiving and approaching the overriding tan-
gle of the problems of the day. They embodied a style of thought
which I have proposed calling ‘the ideal of mutuality’.17 This par-
ticular thought-style should basically be seen as a contrast to, and a
reaction against, the many contemporary forms of patronizing be-
nevolence, which tended to move top-down from conscientious
industrialists and modern philanthropists.18
The contrast was notable in the case of Jane Addams, who sel-
dom missed an opportunity to challenge the priggish paternalism of
her own class – in most cases softly, but nevertheless with an
edge.19 This was particularly obvious in her apologetic analyses of
the goals, means, and experiences of the labour movement. She
never posed as a spokesperson for it, but acted as an interpreter –
translating foreign experience and values into the frames of refer-
ence of people of her own kind. A useful resource in doing this was

17
David Östlund, Det sociala kriget och kapitalets ansvar: Social ingenjörskonst
mellan affärsintresse och samhällsreform i USA och Sverige 1899–1914 [Social
War and the Responsibility of Capital: Social Engineering Between Business
Interests and Progressive Reform in the USA and Sweden, 1899–1914] (Stock-
holm Univ., 2003).
18
I use the term ‘thought-style’ (Denkstil) in the sense of Ludwik Fleck; see
David Östlund, ‘Our Preeminently Social Activity: Ludwik Fleck and Thought in
History’. In Det sociala kriget I treated ‘the ideal’ or ‘idealism of mutuality’ with
a particular stress on contrasts and similarities with an alternative, but closely
related thought-style, viz. that of ‘reform-philanthropy’, which had its centre in
the Charity Organization movement.
19
See, e.g., the ironic reference to ‘organized charity’s’ terminology of ‘wor-
thy’/‘unworthy’ already in (the earlier mentioned) preface to Addams, Twenty
Years, p. xxi.

106
the fact that she was not uncritical. But her criticism did not for a
moment consist of concessions to the regular fears of organized
labour of her era. On the contrary, she criticized the trade unions
for deceiving their democratizing mission by creating new privi-
leged groups out of the skilled, male Anglo-Saxon workers at the
cost of female workers, new immigrants, and African-Americans.
In this sense, her strictures were quite close to the ones of many
Marxist socialists, although she distanced herself from what in the
eyes of the philosophical pragmatist seemed to be a cage of abstract
dogmatism on their account, and from what she felt was a mirror
image of a repressive militarist society in their attitudes to violence
as a means to force change.20
One of the most fascinating aspects of Addams’s radicalism was
her way of linking her feminism to her support for the labour
movement and its new ethic of internationalism and self-sacrifice
for justified collective goals (the latter was, of course, one of her
points of reference when she spoke of cosmic patriotism in 1907).
She explicitly connected her own experience of actually being part
of one underprivileged group in society – women – to her efforts of
interpreting the workers’ struggle for justice. In a striking way she
paralleled the fatherly paternalism of the ‘family claim’, which
chained upper- and middle-class girls to the private sphere, with the
paternalism of benevolent employers and philanthropists, who
doled out gifts of ‘charity’ or ‘welfare’ in order to receive gratitude
and discipline in return.21 It has been claimed that the philosophical
20
A fine example of Addams’s stance with regard to the labour movement, be-
sides the ones in Democracy and Social Ethics and Newer Ideals of Peace, is to
be found in Addams, ‘Trade Unions and Public Duty’, The American Journal of
Sociology, Vol. 4:4 (1899). This text also exemplifies the use of war-metaphors
in social issues, directly connected with the Spanish-American War.
21
The key text in this respect, and thus in Addams’s writings generally, is the
essay ‘A Modern Lear’, which was written in the wake of the Pullman conflict of
1894 (a drama in which she played an active role), but never published until
1912, when it appeared in The Survey, 2 November – although the main contents
had been delivered orally in many contexts before that. It was also reprinted in
Lasch (ed.), The Social Thought of Jane Addams. For an analysis of the text with
focus on the issue of industrial paternalism, see Östlund, Det sociala kriget, pp.
73–83. For an analysis of Addams’s experience of, and role in, the dramatic
events in Chicago 1894-95, see Knight, Citizen, Chapter 13-14. Knight also
elucidates the relation between the argument in ‘Lear’ and the development of

107
pragmatism of Jane Addams – with its stress on the need to replace
the monologue of the privileged with a dialogue between different
experiences – thus became a precursor of the feminist standpoint
theory of the late 20th century.22
A telling characteristic of the style of thought embodied in the
most consistent manifestations of the settlement movement, aside
from the anti-paternalist stance, was its overlaps with the zeal for
peace of the era. Strikingly many of the settlement activists and
sympathizers were pugnacious critics of militarism and armaments,
and were prominent advocates of solving international conflicts
through the means of negotiations and international law.23 In this
sense they were often somewhat the heirs of the cosmopolitanism
of Kant’s Perpetual Peace. Underlying this was a quite simple par-
allel. The state of affairs in the industrialized world was seen as a
state of war between labour and capital: a war between the two
paramount forces of the current historical development, each mobi-
lizing resources of power in order to confront the other in the big
clash of interests of the modern world. Occasionally the latent war
manifested itself in labour conflicts – strikes and lockouts – which
frequently threatened to degenerate into literal violence. Many ad-

Addams’s feminist analysis in terms of ‘the family claim’ vs. ‘the social claim’.
At the same time as she wrote ‘Lear’ she was, e.g., prepared to discuss this in
explicit terms of power, using terms connected with her anti-militarism: women
were not entering politics and public life, she claimed, because ‘…they have
been chained down by a military code whose penalty for violation is far worse
than the court martial’. Knight, Citizen, p. 350. Knight has not observed though
that the themes from ‘Lear’ also reappeared in Democracy and Social Ethics,
although the analogy with the classic tragedy in this context had become re-
served for the issue of young women and ‘the family claim’, while the Pullman
conflict was discussed separately and without singling out names, i.e., without
the provocative image of George Pullman in the role of Shakespeare’s mad old
father/king. Addams’s ‘A Modern Lear’ has also recently been discussed in
relation to Dewey’s Chicago experience in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, pp.
289–316. (Cf., Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, pp. 86–104,
and Lasch, New Radicalism, p. 158, as well.)
22
See, for example, Mary B. Mahowald, ‘What Classical American Philosophers
Missed: Jane Addams, Critical Pragmatism, and Cultural Feminism’, The Jour-
nal of Value Inquiry, 31 (1997), pp. 39–54.
23
Addams is the most obvious case, but Herbert Stead (William Stead’s brother)
in Britain and Nathanael Beskow in Sweden offer a pair of instructive and
probably quite disparate European examples.

108
herents of the ‘ideal of mutuality’ made an explicit point of the
analogy between their stance towards this war and other kinds of
war. In each case the goal was to substitute the logic of the right of
might with dialogue aiming at justice. True and lasting peace could
not be the result of one party conquering its adversary and unilater-
ally determining the conditions; it had to be the outcome of a proc-
ess in which all parties concerned were heard, and all claims were
seriously taken into account. With regard to the ‘social war’ of in-
dustrial capitalism, this attitude included a broad range of more or
less radical visions of social justice and real democracy, envision-
ing a future societal condition in which no one longer had a justi-
fied interest in changing the basic rules of the game, especially as
the fruits of modern industrialism and its amazing potential capac-
ity of satisfying human needs actually would serve all.
This was, of course, also a major theme in Jane Addams’s Newer
Ideals of Peace. The book ended with a solemn appeal to found
‘the cause of peace upon the cause of righteousness’, and a vision
of a future in which, ‘under an enlightened industrialism, peace
would no longer be an absence of war, but the unfolding of world
wide processes making for the nurture of human life’.24 She also
applied the theme in more specific contexts, for example, when
criticizing the contemporary United States for responding with
militarist repression – with police and troops – when organized
labour challenged the petrified 18th century principles of individu-
alism and private property with their new ideals of collective soli-
darity and demands for equality with regard to power and re-
sources. She also quite provocatively mocked the US, the supposed
model of democracy, for actually lagging behind the German Em-
pire – the quintessential militaristically authoritarian state – in
terms of making headway towards essential elements of real egali-
tarian democracy by means of social policies and legislation.25 A
key problem was the American ruling elite’s comparative lack of
perception and intellectual flexibility in a changed world: it kept on
meeting the challenges of the 20th century with the conceptual
tools of the age of the Founding Fathers. Notions such as the abso-

24
Addams, Newer Ideals, p. 145.
25
Ibid., pp. 53–55.

109
lute sanctity of private property were implemented against the le-
gitimate interests of labour through court decisions and legal vio-
lence.

Solidarity among strangers: the immigrants’

exposure and ethics
In making her most distinctive argument for a new, positive, active,
and creative ideal of peace, however, Addams actually left the
analogy between international conflicts and the state of war be-
tween labour and capital out of the picture. In the pivotal parts of
Newer Ideals of Peace she returned to a theme she had dealt with in
Democracy and Social Ethics as well. This was the problem of
power in connection with city reform in a modern cosmopolis like
Chicago, where the overwhelming majority of the population were
‘new’ immigrants – mainly of the kind which English-speaking
‘old’ Americans regarded as ‘the scum of Europe’.26 In the eyes of
the establishment these ‘hyphens’ (Polish-Americans, Italian-
Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc.) were the main objects of
Americanization, if not of eugenic measures and restricted immi-
gration laws. They were targets of the seemingly hopeless task of
turning them into reliable American patriots with modern habits
and values – that is to say, Anglo-Saxon habits and values. In her
earlier book, Addams had shocked her audience by celebrating the
relative virtues of the corrupt city district boss in comparison to the
morally unassailable reformer from the opposite corner of the
city.27 The difference was that the ordinary ward boss – as a model
she actually used an Irishman she had personally been fighting
against for years – was familiar with the complex conditions and
problems of the area as the local people saw them. He knew this
26
Addams opened Chapter 3 in Newer Ideals, ‘Failure to Utilize Immigrants in
City Government’, the key chapter from our point of view, with mentioning the
phrase ‘the scum of Europe’ as an example of ‘loose talking in regard to Ameri-
can immigration’. Characteristically she used the inclusive ‘we’ form in order to
open communication with her target audience (‘we do much loose talking…’,
‘we use the phrase…’).
27
Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, Chapter VII (‘Political Reform’).

110
well enough to use it in his own interest and also managed to serve
a certain minimum of his voters’ interests, thus gaining their confi-
dence. The progressive reformer, on the other hand, which they
refrained from voting for, never had the slightest clue, and his calls
for change were thus viewed as irrelevant and patronizing, without
regard to how obvious they may have seemed from his own point
of view, i.e., from the perspective of his own corner of the city.
The moral of this story –an instructive example of Addams’s pe-
culiar style of sociological analysis – was that leaving room for
self-government among the people of the district was essential in
order to really make life better for those who lived there. A wise
reformer had to listen and understand in order to assist people in
making changes under conditions decided by those who knew best,
viz. those concerned. True democracy was not the same as forcing
the new immigrants to live and think like the established citizens of
the democratic republic. Real democracy showed respect for peo-
ple’s different experiences, accepting and appreciating the various
and continually changing cultures people lived with. Genuine de-
mocracy offered them a chance to form their own destinies.
In Newer Ideals of Peace this conspicuously local theme was
expanded, and was given significance in regards to transnational
relations. In doing this, Addams fell back on her highly personal
readings of a pair of European thinkers from the preceding century.
Far from being a Comtean positivist, she had nevertheless in her
youth been fascinated by Auguste Comte’s vision of a future relig-
ion of humanity, fostering universal ‘altruism’. In 1907, she implic-
itly hinted at a more specific aspect of this line of thought: the re-
construction of historical developments according to which a van-
ishing military-aristocratic society once had been kept together by
its peculiar code of ethics – including the military ethic of self-
sacrifice for the sake of the group, destroying its enemies. In the
eyes of the philosophical pragmatist, such values had been func-
tional (in the Darwinian sense) in an earlier stage of social evolu-
tion. The society in which such sentiments thus had made sense in
modern times had left room for an industrial society. Now this new
social formation (in line with the main plot in Comte’s scheme)
needed its own functional code of ethics: a similarly active, poten-

111
tially self-sacrificing, but also constructive social ethic aimed at
serving human needs – in Addams’s terminology for ‘the nurture of
human life’, rather than killing human life in order to secure the
survival of a particular group (a family, a tribe, a nation).
She combined this idea with a more explicit reference to the
radical national ideals of Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini was a quite
significant figure in Addams’s world. In Twenty Years at Hull-
House she recurred to ‘that greatest of all democrats’ in two con-
texts. On the one hand, in connection with her settlement’s interac-
tion with the many Italian-Americans living in the neighbourhood,
e.g., the Chicago branch of the Society of Young Italy, which pre-
sented Hull-House with a ‘heroic bust’ of him [Giuseppe Mazzini]
during the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of his birth in
1905.28 On the other hand, Mazzini’s name came up in connection
with her own personal development, specifically, her reading as a
young woman and her experience as a child. Mazzini was closely
associated with the two foremost American embodiments of the
ideals of democracy and republican virtue in her personal imagina-
tion, Abraham Lincoln and her own father. Her father’s tears at the
news of Mazzini’s death in 1872 had made her ashamed, she
claimed, for her own ‘meager notion of patriotism’, as for the first
time she realized that it was possible to share hopes and desires
over national borders – even across an ocean – and that there were
parallels between efforts like ‘trying to abolish slavery in America’
and ‘[throwing] off Hapsburg oppression in Italy’. As a result of
her father’s grief over the Italian revolutionary, ‘impersonal and
international relations’ were shown to be ‘actual facts and not mere
phrases’.29
But Mazzini had made a more indirect but crucial impact on a
very peculiar trait in her thought as well, although never mentioned
in Twenty Years in connection with her reading of his Duties of

28
Addams, Twenty Years, p. 279 (‘greatest of all democrats’) and pp. 169–170
(hundredth anniversary). The bust seems to have been a token of gratitude to
Addams for teaching a group of Italian men a course on Mazzini’s Duties of
Man (apparently in part given as a course in English, free from ‘Americaniza-
tion’ in the conventional sense). Knight, Citizen, pp. 205–206.
29
Ibid., p. 14; for Addams’s early reading see ibid., p. 50.

112
Man in the 1880s.30 This link is of interest in order to understand
the argument in Newer Ideals of Peace. Mazzini had namely con-
trasted the individual citizen’s private, egoistic duties to himself
and his family with his social duties to the nation, hence forming a
better future for a unity beyond the limits of self-interest, and
stressing the relative importance of the latter in relation to the for-
mer. This theme had actually been an important springboard in
Addams’s articulation of a non-essentialist variety of feminism.
She had begun to state that ‘the social claim’ in a very broad sense
(she discarded the term ‘duty’ in this context) was just as urging for
female citizens as it was for male ones, and that young women who
gave priority to this claim at the cost of ‘the family claim’ hardly
could be accused of being egoistic – although this was the estab-
lished middle-class view of the question. It was a democratic right
as well as a duty, for men and women alike, to participate in the
creation of a good life for a larger group than oneself and one’s
own kith and kin. The question for the philosophical pragmatist
may then have been how the destructive dimension of such a patri-
otic call from the 19th century – the outdated form of self-
sacrificing virtues of fighting other nations for the sake of one’s
own – could be dropped on the rubbish heap of history. But Mazz-
ini was a fitting thinker to take as a starting point in this respect.
Quite consistently he had treated the national project as a step to-
wards a socially and politically democratic world, analogous with
the step from the duties to one’s own family to national responsibil-
ity, and hence a world wherein the freedom of the people of each
nation was dependent on the freedom of other peoples.31 In Twenty
Years Addams thus spoke of ‘this man who, with all his devotion to
his country was still more devoted to humanity and who dedicated
to the workingmen of Italy an appeal so philosophical, so filled

30
Knight, Citizen, pp. 142–143, 256.
31
For an analysis of those aspects of Mazzini’s (in a certain sense ‘anti-
nationalist’) thinking that were particularly relevant to Addams’s notion of
‘cosmopolitan humanitarianism’, see Nadia Urbinati, ‘“A Common Law of Na-
tions”: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Democratic Nationality’, Journal of Modern Italian
Studies, 1:2 (1996), pp. 197–222. (I am grateful to Ann-Cathrine Jungar for
drawing my attention to this article.)

113
with a yearning for righteousness, that it transcended all national
boundaries and became a bugle call for “The Duties of Men”’.32
In short, patriotism in the spirit of Mazzini had more to do with
an active, forceful (indeed revolutionary) and practical readiness to
sacrifice narrow personal interests for the sake of the interest of
strangers – ultimately for all of mankind – than with a collective
egoism directed against ‘others’ of one or the other definition.
Later on, Addams would be given reason to reflect on two distinct
faces of the phenomenon of national fervour. In the immediate
wake of World War I she would travel around in Europe (among
other things presiding over the founding congress of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, which probably is-
sued the first analysis claiming the Treaty of Versailles to be a dis-
aster). Comparing her experience of the 1880s with that of 1919,
she noted that the radical, positive, and constructive variety of pa-
triotism that she had often met east of the Atlantic in her youth now
had been completely substituted by the embittered, hateful, and
collectively egoistic patriotism that bore the obvious contours of
rising Fascism and Nazism already in her text from 1922.33 But in
1907 it was still possible for her to toy with naming the new inter-
nationalism or humanitarian cosmopolitanism which she vindicated
cosmic patriotism. This was the kind of global social ethic required
to take the good out of industrialism while leaving the bad behind.
This was the ideal of peace that in her mind was positive, active,
constructive, and even aggressive.
But, returning to the distinctive argument of 1907: In what sense
were the immigrants of Chicago suited to teach this attitude, when
Addams now attempted to place the privileged of her era in school?
In what way did the neighbours of Hull-House, in her eyes, appear
to make it possible to discuss international relations in terms of
local conditions, without paying much regard to the level of the
state and the nation? The precious resource of the people of the
districts around Hull-House was their experience. According to the
philosophical pragmatist, new and adequate concepts, suitable tools
to think with, were something that developed out of new experi-

32
Addams, Twenty Years, p. 169.
33
Addams, Peace and Bread, pp. 98–99.

114
ence, and the Chicago immigrants had this asset in abundance. In
most cases they had been leaving a rural life in their old home
countries behind, with fears and hopes – hopes which, to a large
extent, were crushed – and been forced to live their everyday lives
close together, in spite of the huge contrasts in terms of world-
views, habits and values. This had hardly made these people more
peaceful than anyone else. If they shouted for anything it was war
rather than peace, she claimed, as their hatred of an unjust society
grew in strength.34 But they had learned to live with each other, to
accept the differences and respect them, although they didn’t un-
derstand them. And out of this shared experience a new social
ethic, a new humanitarianism, which was also founded in the ex-
perience of what was universally human – basic needs for food,
shelter, safety and company – was growing. In spite of cultural and
social gaps, the people of the modern multi-ethnic city slum were
prepared to show a remarkable degree of altruism, or, as Addams
preferred to say, plain human kindness. Confronted with a shared
exposure to adversity and injustice (shared ‘risks’, Ulrich Beck
would possibly say), the immigrants of the modern cosmopolis had
up to a notable degree developed a positive way of dealing with
their exposure to strangers, i.e., to each other.
This kind of readiness to take responsibility for the needs of oth-
ers than one’s own had nothing to do with the philanthropic be-
nevolence of the upper and middle class, because – and this was
probably the main point of Addams’s rhetorical deed – it was far
beyond their range of experience. Which employer dedicated to
‘welfare programs’ or which lady of a charity organization would
ever be prepared to let a perfect stranger with peculiar habits and
views sleep over on the couch for a few weeks in times of need?
Would they be prepared to do this, even if they were unable to even
imagine what it would be like to have only one crowded room
without water or a latrine for their families? The example of practi-
cal unselfishness, with no thought of reward, among people from
the old, increasingly antagonistic nations of Europe, who had their
patriotic feelings in the conventional sense divided between their
old and new countries, was the true source of hope in the eyes of
34
See especially the key passage in Addams, Newer Ideals, pp. 9–10.

115
Jane Addams in 1907. Her rhetorical challenge to prevalent atti-
tudes certainly contributed to the development of new ways of see-
ing the issues of conflict and coexistence between states and na-
tions. The prominent role she was given among the counterforces
during the spree of militant patriotism in World War I testifies to
that. But in 1907 it was quite strange to make such an argument
without using the state and the nation as the starting point, instead
boldly jumping from the local to the global. Even Addams’s friend
George Herbert Mead had to admit, in his long and enthusiastic
review for The American Journal of Sociology, that he had a prob-
lem with the ‘logical organization’ in Newer Ideals of Peace, al-
though he fully appreciated the analyses and the moral per se.35
Perhaps her jump is less strange a century later?

The same year as Newer Ideals of Peace was published, the Afri-
can-American sociologist, pan-Africanist, and civil rights leader W.
E. B. Du Bois paid one of his many visits to Hull-House. His links
with the network of reformers and social analysts around Jane Ad-
dams were manifold and important. Soon afterwards, for example,
a group dominated by settlement activists, among them Addams,
took up the thread from Du Bois’s Niagara Movement and created
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) in order to fight the most obvious of all deviations from
real egalitarian democracy in the United States of the time, the Jim
Crow system of apartheid. (This was a deviation that very few peo-
ple were interested in challenging at that time.) This project would
soon present Du Bois with a regular public platform, as for the next
few decades he would be the editor of its periodical The Crisis.36

35
George Herbert Mead, ‘The Newer Ideals of Peace. By Jane Addams’, The
American Journal of Sociology, 13:1 (1907), pp. 121–128. Mead is mainly re-
membered as a pretty abstract social thinker, but, in fact, he had other qualities as
well, see, e.g., Dmitri N. Shalin, ‘G. H. Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive
Agenda’, The American Journal of Sociology, 93:4 (1988), pp. 913–951.
36
Besides Deegan, Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago, Chapters 3
and 4, see Gilbert Osofsky, ‘Progressivism and the Negro: New York, 1900–
1915’, American Quarterly, 16:2 (1964), pp. 154–168; Wilson Record, ‘Negro

116
Juxtaposing the spirit of Hull-House in 1907 with the ‘colder,
scanter curiousness’ which he sensed at the University of Chicago,
he chose to characterize its atmosphere in terms of ‘cosmopolitan
catholicity’.37
Obviously this had nothing to do with ethnic diversity among the
residents. Few of those who lived at Hull-House were anything else
than the children of the Anglo-Saxon social elite. Harriet Rice, the
African-American physician who lived there for some years in the
1890s, had been one of the few who left because they did not feel
totally at home (although she returned periodically in the following
decades).38 Rather, Du Bois was probably referring to the atmos-
phere created by the neighbours of every background who filled the
house at all hours, and of the unusual openness the residents appar-
ently showed for listening to these people and learning from their
experience. Perhaps the vision of an emerging cosmic patriotism
was a bit naïve, although it was far from as naïve as it may seem at
first glance. (New readers of Democracy and Social Ethics as well
as Newer Ideals of Peace obviously have to judge for themselves.)
But I suppose that our era, that of armed democracy fighting Mus-
lims from Iraq and the French suburbs (and doing so in a strikingly
naïve way), has something to learn from this peculiar atmosphere
of ‘cosmopolitan catholicity’, with its attempt to strike a delicate

Intellectual Leadership in the National Association for the Advancement of Col-

ored People: 1910–1940’, Phylon, 17:4 (1956) pp. 375–389; August Meier &
John H. Bracey, ‘The NAACP as a Reform Movement 1909–1965: “To Reach
the Conscience of America”’, The Journal of Southern History, 59:1 (1993), pp.
3–30. The most important person out of Addam’s immediate network in the early
NAACP was the Marxist, labour legislation zealot and consumer organizer Flor-
ence Kelley (who had spent most of the 1890s as a resident at Hull-House). See
Louis L. Athey, ‘Florence Kelley and the Quest for Negro Equality’, The Journal
of Negro History, 56:4 (1971), pp. 249–261. When Kelley died in 1932 Du Bois
claimed in The Crisis that ‘…save for Jane Addams, there is not another social
worker in the United States who has had either her insight or her daring, so far as
the American Negro is concerned’. Ibid., p. 249 (also quoted twice in Deegan,
Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago). It may be of interest to note
that a young W. E. B. Du Bois is given a role (although a surprisingly insignifi-
cant one) in Ulrich Beck’s recent appeal for a ‘cosmopolitan vision’. Beck, Den
kosmopolitiska blicken, p. 251.
37
Deegan, Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago, p. 3.
38
Knight, Citizen, pp. 289, 346, 351, 387–388; Ibid., p. 38.

117
balance between an ethics of universal responsibility and a pro-
nounced respect for the genuine otherness of others as well as an
interest in understanding and being enriched by it, but especially by
its eagerness to replace the monologues of the privileged with dia-
logues including all.

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120
7. Rediscovering Kosmopolis in the
Cyber-Information Age? Social
Agencies and Activism in their
Geo-Historical Place

On-Kwok Lai

This paper examines the ideas and cultural (re-)presentations of the

politics of global cosmopolitanism and world citizenship in the
cyber-age, with special focus on social agencies and the strategies
and structures of transnational activism and progressive advocacy
networks. It is argued that the Internet and mobile telephony have
been an important part of the anti-globalization demonstrations
against global capitalism in major cities around the world. The new
identity and actions for global citizenship are represented through
electronically distributed messages, while new cultural representa-
tions argue that the present mode(s) of the WTO/G8/World Bank-
sponsored global projects are not just or fair. The reason for this is
that they are not available to many people in the developing world,
or to underprivileged groups and individuals in the developed
world. This might endanger healthy cultural reproduction.
Articulating the transnational advocacies in general and the anti-
globalization in particular, this paper addresses (i) the synergy of
hyper-modernization with the informational society, (ii) the signifi-
cance of social agencies for the transnational advocacies network
(TAN), (iii) the (re-)presentation of a new identity politics and the
global citizenship, and (iv) the particular historical role of the
socio-cultural dynamics of cyber-activism in shaping the kosmopo-
lis, that is, in constituting the global civil society as well as the new
identity building for social activists and world citizenship.

121
Positioning kosmopolis in a hyper-modernization
trajectory
Thanks to the advanced applications of information and communi-
cation technologies (ICT), within the developed economies produc-
tivity growth has accelerated almost everywhere since 1995.1 The
socio-economic transformations are crucial: free and timely flows
of capital and goods across borders have become the global econ-
omy; technologies are the functional necessity for socio-economic
development. A new epoch of modernization – hyper-
modernization – is on its historical course.

Hyper-modernization in the information age

To characterize the speed and momentum of the technological
changes, as well as the socio-economic changes that follow, and to
juxtapose the high-tech regime of development, the concept of so-
called hyper-modernization is used here. All of the above facilitate
cultural formation and the change of everyday social practice in
various ways.2 The use of hyper-modernity is merely a descriptive
and an indicative, as the controversies about what exactly the pre-
sent (post-)modernity is are still an unfinished project.3
Hyper-modernization is not just characterized by global compe-
tition towards the increasing use of ICT, but also by socio-cultural
transformations. Facing the rapid globalization processes, societies
have been undergoing immense transformations. This is particu-
larly true for East Asia’s newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of
South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and the high-
growth economy of China. Through exposure to the globalizing
‘external’ forces, capital, goods, labour (and jobs) are more mobile
than before. All of these reinforcing hyper-modernization devel-
opments in Asia are exemplified by the Asian Miracle, the rapid
recovery of Asian NIEs after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, as

1
The Economist, 25 October 2003, p.74.
2
Murdock 2004.
3
Bauman 2000; Beck 1999; Beck et al. 2003; Dirlick 2003; Harvey 2003; Mur-
dock 2004; Therborn 2003.

122
well as the two decades of continuous rapid economic development
in China – with an average annual GDP of above 7.9%.4
Presented with an increasing bandwidth utilization, faster
downloads and improved processing power in handsets, and juxta-
posing the increasingly miniaturization of mobile digital phones
and gadgets, 3G allows both producers and consumers to use ex-
tensive and intensive mobile exchanges and the data in/beyond
cyberspace as they could never before in mobile phone environ-
ments, for work, e-learning, and entertainments (see Figures 1 and
2).5

Figure 1. Migration of 2.5G to 3.5G mobile communication

4
Lai and So 1997; ADB 2005.
5
Srivastava 2004; Thornton & Houser 2005; Wieser 2005.

123
Figure 2. World Internet users growth

Transnational advocacies network (TAN) in its

informational spaces
With the advanced application of ICT, the praxis of transnational
advocacies network (TAN), succinctly discussed by Keck and Sik-
kink (1998, 1999) and recently explored in depth by Piper and Uh-
lin (2004), is firmly established and embedded in the new commu-
nicative flows of the new media and the identity politics of social
activists within and outside the cyberspaces. Cyber-politics chal-
lenges the traditional political establishment as well as the behav-
ioural repertoire of a political actor(s).6

6
IDEA 2001; Goldstein and O’Connor 2000; Hick et al. 2000; Hick and McNutt
2002; Stefik 1999.

124
 John B. Thompson (2005) rightly points out that the new media
not only has a strong impact on global politics, but also has become
the weaponry of individuals and groups who have been excluded
from traditional mass media making:

In this new world of mediated visibility, the making visible of ac-

tions and events is not just the outcome of leakage in systems of
communication and information flow that are increasingly difficult
to control: it is also an explicit strategy of individuals who know
very well that mediated visibility can be a weapon in the struggles
they wage in their day-to-day lives. Once again, the war in Iraq
provided us with countless reminders of this fundamental truth: the
macabre beheadings carried out by (among others) Abu Musab al-
Zarqawi’s Tawhid and Jihad group, videoed and shown live on the
Internet and then recycled with varying degrees of explicitness
through the mass media of television and the press, are only the
most dramatic illustration of a new political theatre that is played
out in the world of the media, where spatial distance is irrelevant,
communication instantaneous (or virtually so) and – especially
with the rise of the Internet and other networked media – the ca-
pacity to outmanoeuvre one’s opponents is always present.7

Similarly, James N. Rosenau (1997, 1998) in his seminal work,

Globalized Space, stresses that the new media and their networking
capacities are one of the functional equivalents of democratic gov-
ernance where transnational issues are beyond the control of the
nation state as well as a state-sponsored institutionalized regime,
such as the UN:

The widespread growth of the Internet, the World Wide Web and
the other electronic technologies that are shrinking the world offers
considerable potential as a source of democracy... by facilitating
the continued proliferation of networks that know no boundaries,
these technologies have introduced a horizontal dimension to the
politics of Globalized Space. They enable like-minded people in
distant places to converge, share perspectives, protest abuses, pro-
vide information and mobilize resources – dynamics that seem
bound to constrain vertical structures that sustain governments,
corporation and any other hierarchical organizations.8

7
Thompson 2005, pp. 31–32.
8
Rosenau 1998, p. 46.

125
David Held’s theory of ‘Cosmopolitan Democracy’ (1998, 1999)
argues that in a world of overlapping communities of fate, Cosmo-
politan Democracy is the creation of new political institutions and a
diversity of NGOs in global civil society, with the democratic prin-
ciple and praxis of broad access to avenues of civic participation on
national, regional, and international levels. More specifically for
our discussion here, TAN is the new wave for the democratization
process aided by new electronic communication technology
through various forms of electronic-mobilization.
Here, the ideas (and ideal) of kosmopolis or the questions it fo-
cuses on of liberty, progressiveness and democracy’s extension
beyond the nation state in terms of the articulation of international
(humanity’s) norms and justice call for a more open and participa-
tory regime of global governance. This echoes the ideas of interna-
tional civil societies and social movements for global and local
justices.9 These movements are multi-dimensional, ranging from
local human rights to global environmentalism.10

Re-presenting global citizenship in kosmopolis

The spread of the relevant ICT is vital for transnational activism, as
it highlights the dynamism of world citizenship and constitutes the
global civil society of kosmopolis. For Asia’s hyper-modernization,
four distinct yet inter-related issues need to be examined here.
First and foremost, although the activism derived from and
through the Internet/cyberspace can be described as borderless in
many ways, the networks are sometimes geographically confined to
global cities of the developed world. More specifically, the loca-
tional choice of TAN agencies is still important, although the activ-
ism itself can shape regional affairs beyond the local base of the
activists.11 In other words, the cross-border advocacy is by no

9
Archibugi and Koenig-Archibugi 2003.
10
Lipschutz 1996; Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000; Piper and Uhlin 2004; Wapner
1996.
11
Keck and Sikkink 1998, 1999.

126
means borderless or non-territorial, as the specific location or mode
of protest organizing and social mobilization is still very much
geographically specific. Cities and micro regions with a high con-
centration of information flow and knowledge exchanges as well as
capital and economic activities12 usually attract international non-
governmental organizations (NGOs). These places, among others,
also have a comparative advantage in terms of the availability and
functionality of ICT – and this gives the seemingly borderless,
transnational activism a geo-cultural political fix.
Secondly, despite the promising development of TAN on a
global scale, severe obstacles to cyber-activism remain, not least
the state’s control of the Internet in the case of Asia.13 In addition,
digital deficiencies and divides remain problematic in Pacific Asia.
The communicative backbone (the Internet) is still controlled by
developed economies: 50% of the Internet communications among
Asian countries are routed via US infrastructure. The ratio of the
Internet population in Southeast Asia compared with the total
population in the above area is about 0.5%, in East Asia it is 0.4%,
and in South Asia 0.04%. For the OECD countries (except the US),
the figure is 6.9%, and for the US it is 26.3% (UNDP 1999). The
gap within Asian countries is also very wide: around 20% of the
adults in the wealthy part of Asia (for instance, the four Asian ‘lit-
tle dragons’ of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong)
are online but less than 1% of the people in the poorer parts (such
as the South Asian countries of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan)
use the Internet (ITU 2000). These figures confirm the digital di-
vide inside and between regions and countries in Asia. An over-
whelming majority, especially poor people in poor countries, are
deprived of the benefit of the Internet and are therefore not active
participants in the globalization process.14
Thirdly, new identity formation and progressive political praxis
by the information revolution are contingent upon a complex con-

12
Like London, New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong; cf., Downey and McGuigan
1999; Hick and McNutt 2002; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Sassen 1998.
13
Hong 2001.
14
Kenny et al. 2000.

127
figuration of dynamic socio-economic factors.15 The prospects for
the greening of global/regional civil society, in the Asian case, are
further shaped by the differential state-society conflict and intra-
socio-cultural fault lines in the region, in addition to varied forms
of undemocratic praxis which need to be challenged. Democracy,
political liberalization for an open society, and environmentalism
are as important as the economic miracle for Asian societies.16 Fur-
thering democratization is the way to go. Given the rise of Asian
digital power and the expansion of cyberspace, the strategic use of
the Internet can thereby foster transnational activism and social
capital building across local, regional, and global spaces. On the
other hand, there are powerful forces to slow down the scope of
transnational activism. Asian states/societies are deeply divided
along religious lines (Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and
Islam), political ideologies (democracy, authoritarianism, and mar-
ket socialism), colonial heritages (British, Japanese, and Ameri-
can), boundary disputes (between India and Pakistan), and security
tensions (in the Taiwan Strait and on the Korean Peninsula). All of
this might provide a pretext for the state’s control over civil forces,
and for its exerting its hegemonic banner of nationalism and cul-
tural-political correctness in and out of cyberspace, challenging the
e-liberalized communicative politics.17
Lastly, the disadvantages of the ‘information society’ should be
stressed.18 Even advanced societies are still characterized by more
or less high levels of segregation, diversity, and hierarchies with
regard to the level of information gained through the Internet. More
specifically for Asia, this has, to a large extent, to do with the
dominance of the English language and American culture.19 In the
long term, the domination of the English language in global com-
munication might bring about a serious crisis regarding the exis-
tence of minority languages. Furthermore, the US lifestyle, movies,
comics and other visual popular culture, and the ‘manufactured’

15
Waller et al. 2001.
16
Lee and So 1999; Sachs 2001.
17
Comor 2001; Dryszek 1999.
18
Castells 1996, 2000; Luke 2000; Menzies 1996; Schiller 1999.
19
Main 2001.

128
news and documentaries (the US version of the ‘war against terror-
ism’ represents such a case) could be seen as cultural manifesta-
tions of a global imperialism. As long as the Internet is based on
existent power structures, it will likely reinforce cyber-
imperialism.20 How to confront cyber-imperialism will be the chal-
lenge for transnational activists.

The globalization project versus cyber-activism in

the information age
To discuss the multifaceted and complex manifestations of tensions
between local and globalizing forces, the rest of this chapter exam-
ines the socio-economic logics of communicative actions in (anti-)
globalization processes.

Competitive globalization
The ideological driven neo-liberal global project, i.e., the creation
of a global free market by the G8, the IMF, the World Bank and the
WTO, and cheered on by transnational corporations (TNCs), en-
ables further deregulation, privatization, and structural adjustment
programmes, and also limits governmental power.
Yet globalization processes are problematic, and tend to polarize
the socio-economic life opportunities of people – this has been con-
firmed by the Report of the World Commission on the Social Di-
mension of Globalization (WCSDG 2004). There are two compet-
ing views on the globalization project: globalization might be re-
garded as a benign and automatic force that fosters better economic
benefits for everyone; even the poorest group can be better off.
This is in strong contrast to the political extremes of the Left and
Right. According to the Left, unbridled capitalism produces an ex-
ploitation of the weak and socio-ecological degradation; for the
Right the malignant forces of globalization engender xenophobia

20
Ebo 2001; Lai 2004a/b, 2005; Ogura 2001; Wyatt et al. 2000.

129
and the loss of people’s jobs, culture, language, and hence identity
at a local level.21
Since the early 1990s, most of the nation states have adopted the
international financial institutes’ (the IFI, the World Bank, and the
IMF) recipe for reform in macro-economic policies in order to
make their economies more competitive. Their strategies are the
deregulation of international capital flows and trades, and the re-
making of (the once protected or socially guaranteed) labour mar-
ket into a deregulated (less rigid, more dynamic and more flexible)
one. With the exception of the Asian Industrializing Economies
(South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) and China, most
developing economies are not adjusting well to the globalization
project. On the other hand, most of the developed capitalist econo-
mies have suffered from the sluggish economic growth, which
ironically resulted from the deregulation of capital markets, and
which weakened the relationship between banking and industry.22
Taking the globalization discourse seriously has also helped to
reinforce the political ideologically-driven reform of the so-called
welfare state in the developed economies, but most of the reforms
are not deemed as successful by their fellow citizens.23 In the case
of most developing economies, the globalizing forces have not ac-
tually helped them much, and with the exception of China, global
poverty did not diminish during the early globalization era.24 The
number of poor (less than US$1 per day) did fall in Asia, but rose
elsewhere; rising by 50% in Africa (see Figure 3).

21
Milanovic 2003.
22
Navarro et al. 2000.
23
Huber and Stephens 2001.
24
Milanovic 2003, p. 679; Ravallion 2004, p. 65.

130
Figure 3. People living on less than US$1 per day25

To recapitulate our present state of digital capitalism, economic

productivities have been much improved for the developed econo-
mies, but the aggregate progress of the ICT-aided globalization
project has not achieved its intended purpose for a better and just
world. And it is within this context that the anti-globalization
movement, a quest for kosmopolis in the global arena, is articu-
lated.

Economic globalization-driven social polarization

The instrumental role of the ICT in a free global market is crucial
and referred to as ‘digital capitalism’ – the condition where ICT
networks are directly generalizing the social and cultural range of

25
Source: WCSDG 2004, p. 45.

131
the capitalist economy as never before.26 Digital capitalism there-
fore is predominantly a global corporate-led market system. It is
also free to physically transcend territorial boundaries and, more
importantly, to take economic advantage of the sudden absence of
geopolitical constraints on its development.
Globally speaking, the present form of informatization of peo-
ple’s work and societal (virtual) encounters has reinforced a di-
vided as well as a dual society: the informational-based informal
economy is juxtaposed with a down-graded labour-based informal
economy resulting in a spatial structure: a city which combines
segregation, diversity, and hierarchy.27 The ICT enhances a flexible
production regime, generating more wealth and global economic
activities. Yet far from developing an equitable and better society,
our ICT-driven post-material society has produced more social dis-
asters in the period 1960–1990 than ever before (see Figure 4). All
of these are part of the globalization processes. Not without excep-
tion, all developing economies aided by TNC networking have
been integrated hierarchically into the global system of capitalism,
and the process of integration widens gaps and causes divisions
among communities, countries, and regions.

26
Schiller 1999.
27
Castells 1996, 2001; Lai 2004b.

132
Figure 4. Income inequality28

Kosmopolis: Global and flexible mobilization of

socio-political actions
In contrast to the liberal and progressive ideas of Kosmoplis, Tech-
nopolis, with high-tech development in the Information Age, is
much championed by most nation states. Technopolis has become
the iconography for a futuristic high-tech 21st century society. In
Asia, such projects are aimed at enhancing national competitive-

28
Source: WCSDG 2004, p. 44.

133
ness in the global system, and are initiated by strong and/or devel-
opmental countries such as China, Japan and Singapore.29

Global protests against economic liberalization: Global

norm-setting
Cosmopolitanism is occurring again, not just at annual 1st May
anti-globalization demonstrations, but also through other protests
against global capitalism in major cities around the world. Their
message is loud and clear, namely the present mode(s) of the
WTO/G8/World Bank-supported global project is not just or fair
for many people in the developing world, or for those who are un-
derprivileged within developed countries. Most of these social mo-
bilizations are mobile and Internet network coordinated.
The ‘Battle in Seattle’ (demonstrations against the 1999 WTO
ministerial meeting) marks the beginning of a new epoch of global
activism, aided by ICT. Since then, global activism has shaped de-
cisions regarding locations for IFI meetings, which are attempting
to move away from cities and the transportation hub. Yet increas-
ing amounts of e-mailing and mobile phone text messaging have
become a central tool for e-mobilization: just before the Seattle
meetings, about 1,500 NGOs had signed the anti-WTO declaration
using e-mails and SMS text messages.30 The more recent example
is the global peace campaign against the US calling for war against
Iraq: with the full-fledged utilization of ICT, the Internet/Web and
mobile multimedia, over 12 million protesters were on the march in
hundreds of cities around the world on 15th February 2003. All of
this ICT-enhanced global activism therefore give leverage to ordi-
nary people, resource-poor activists, and protest agencies to fight
against the establishments, governments, big businesses and the
mass media. All types of ‘anti-’information and ideas in cyberspace
which bypass the mass media can turn into global real-time social
actions.31

29
Downey and McGuigan 1999; Lai 2004b.
30
Bennett 2003; Brecher 2000; Held and McGrew 2002.
31
Anti-globalization protest networking, see: http://www.indymedia.org, and
http://www.wtohistory.org.

134
 On the other hand, but with the same logic, the developing coun-
tries are gathering momentum to fight for a more equitable and fair
regime of trading – highlighted by the recent rebellious move by
the Group 22 to walk out of the Doha Round of the WTO trade
negotiations in Cancun (September 2003)32 – this is in line with the
call for a reinvention of global governance for fair globalization.33
Retrospectively, as the rich countries’ concessions to the poor
ones were too limited, the NGOs’ communicative actions in the
mass and cyber media were highly exploitive and instruments for
the collapse of the WTO Cancun negotiations. Shouting loud and
long enough in various media enables the strong provocative com-
municative power to ‘re-frame’ the anti-rich country sentiments,
which eventually forced the Group 22 trade negotiators to take a
decisive and radical stand against the present global project run by
the WTO and the rich countries.
Obviously the WTO has been learning quite a bit from the com-
municative global actions of NGOs – and until recently, the WTO
(like the World Bank) initiated activities for the participation of
NGOs mainly in consultative sessions prior to an important trade
summit. But these are more or less a form of public relations cam-
paign, as the real multi-lateral trade negotiations are the preroga-
tives of nation states.34 Through moral and ethical criticism of the
globalization project, the cosmopolitan forces use a mobile com-
municative network to empower the (presumably) powerless
NGOs, and the global civil society has learned quickly, adopting a
wire and wireless communication set-up to champion their project
in cyberspace and the mass media.35

32
The Group 22 includes the following developing countries: Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala,
India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, South
Africa, Thailand, and Venezuela.
33
WCSDG 2004.
34
Ullrich 2002.
35
Hajinal 2004; van de Donk et al. 2004.

135
A rejuvenation of Kosmopolis – rediscovering humanity
For social agencies and NGOs at both the local and the interna-
tional levels, there are two major issues (or more specifically, dy-
namics) of anti-globalizing processes. They challenge the unfair
and unjust economic processing as well as the consequences of
global poverty and environmental degradation resulting from the
globalization project and the ideological struggles against the he-
gemony of (US-led) global power. In short, it is the search for hu-
manity.
In mid-August 2003, mobile communicative actions – the use of
all wired and wireless media of communications in both cyberspace
and in real communications – enabled over 200,000 people to par-
ticipate in a three-day anti-globalization rally in Larzac, France.36
Like other anti-globalization demonstrations their target was clear:
it was the WTO Summit in Cancun, Mexico, one month later. The
rally (or better put, a carnival-like anti-globalization’s media plat-
form) turned out to be informative and a communicative diversity,
highlighting actions, knowledge, performance, and entertainment
as well as new cultural praxis for the anti-globalization project.
The multi-media performing and expressive aspects of the anti-
globalization campaign highlighted that it involves not only anar-
chic and violent clashes between the police and demonstrators, or
the mob against transnational corporative symbols like McDonald’s
and international banks – actions we normally watch on television
– but also represents a new politico-cultural praxis for an anti-
globalization campaign as expressed through fine and performing
arts as well as multi-media representations. New media definitely
enhance the dissemination of the alternative agenda for the anti-
globalization project – in some way, the mobile communicative
actions constituted the creation of a new social capital of network-
ing.37

36
The Economist, 14 August 2003, online edition.
37
Katz and Rice 2002.

136
Kosmopolis as an unfinished project
In contrast to the 20th century’s pro-growth yet unsustainable de-
velopment, the 21st century’s challenge is not just the economic
crises and ecological sustainable development, but also the survival
and rejuvenation of cultural diversity in a globalizing world – the
project of kosmopolis.
The reality of global capitalism is more chaotic and not as posi-
tive as the neo-liberal economics’ discourse tells us: the perma-
nence of global poverty, regional economic problems, and social
exclusions coupled with the vulnerable social protection plus eco-
logical degradation all push for the demands for ethical and norma-
tive terms for globalization processes and highlight the quest for
equitable, fair, and just trading and an economic exchange regime.
For this, TANs should be championed for the empowerment of
people at large (the global civil society) (Keck and Sikkink 1998;
Piper and Uhlin 2004; van de Donk et al. 2005). The idealism of
the kosmopolis project is as yet unfinished. Mobile communicative
actions in a progressive mode which support these initiatives are
particularly important, and will provide the leverage for the re-
source-poor and/or under-privileged groups in articulating their
justifiable demand for a fair and equitable life.
Despite its sporadic success in mooting the critical issues of
global development, such as human rights and environmental sus-
tainability, the extent of the impact of global civil society is much
constrained by international governmental institutions. Craig Cal-
houn rightly questions the new media (the Internet in particular) in
the formation process of new human communities, and to what
extent the solidarity of the communities constitutes or makes cos-
mopolitanism more conducive to global civil society.38
Yet two obvious limitations of the new media need to be noted
here: both (i) the strong in-group identity for the participants and
(ii) the ownership structure of the content (in the name of intellec-
tual property rights) and conduits (ownership and subscription
channels) can limit the formation of any imaginative global civil
society for justice and equity mobilization. The latter can be shown

38
Calhoun 2003; see discussion by Kennedy 2006.

137
by the fact that the media giants Google and Yahoo! are both much
constrained by the regulatory framework in the US and its counter-
part in China – their offerings of unlimited access and freedom of
communication in cyberspace are contingent upon a set of socio-
political conditions which are neither equitably nor fairly allocated.
Against the problematic marketization and informatization of the
socio-economy, the new global project should therefore not only
focus on economics, but on the reinvention of cultural specificity,
the promoting of social equity, and the safeguarding of people’s
control over socio-cultural development. The ICT-enhanced (wired
and wireless, stationary and mobile) communications are a double-
edged sword: the Net and mobile networks can likely be a good
facilitating agent for global, cross-cultural communications but at
the same time can reinforce the existing fault lines between the
lingua franca and the extinct indigenous languages. Needless to
say, there is a normative dimension for its further development:
equal opportunity, social justice, e-equity and e-inclusion.
In the hyper-flexible globalization processes, two differential lo-
gics to embrace (versus challenge) global free market capitalism
are obviously shown by the IFI-sponsored regime of economic lib-
eralization and the ICT-enhanced global/transnational activism of
TAN. They will confront each other, and their communicative ac-
tions will be in and beyond the cyberspaces as long as the struggles
for an equitable, fair, and just regime of global governance – the
ideals of kosmopolis – continue. It is therefore incumbent on both
the IFI and TAN to work out feasible routes for the humanization
of the globalization project – the recent yet belated attempt by the
IFI and the WTO to adopt TANs as their developmental dialogues
is a welcoming one.

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8. The Cosmopolitan Foundation of
International Law

Peter Kemp

The crisis of international law

Since 11 September 2001 many people have begun to believe that
international law as we have known it – that being since Francisco
Vitoria (1483–1546), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Samuel
Pufendorf (1632–1694) and up to the international agreement on
the Charter of the United Nations in 1945 – is in a deep crisis. A
military intervention has been carried out against Iraq without the
required permission from the Security Council of the United Na-
tions, and prisoners from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have
been transferred to prison camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere.
These prisoners have, furthermore, not been given the right to a fair
trial according to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their later sup-
plements.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. It is true that terrorism and
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction appeared as new
reasons for the use of force in the defence of the state, which was
not a consideration when the United Nations Charter was made and
when the Geneva Conventions concerning the protection of civil-
ians and the rights of soldiers were ratified. But the crisis does not
only concern warfare; it concerns the entire world order.
It is a crisis for the state itself, as it has been conceived since
Jean Bodin (1529–1596) who defined sovereignty as ‘the absolute
and perpetual power of a State’. This sovereignty, which means the

143
command over a territory and over the people belonging to that
territory, is today increasingly fragile – not because it can only be a
power within limits (it has always been), but because many new
players in addition to the states and across all state borders have
appeared.
There have always been religious movements and institutions
who were alternative players, and there have been insurgency
movements, etc.; however, it is the religious movements in particu-
lar which have become stronger and stronger today – sometimes
out of the states’ control. But at the end of the 19th century and
throughout the 20th century transnational players have emerged,
including international employers’ and workers’ organizations,
multinational corporations, global banks, non-governmental or-
ganizations, and, particularly, international courts.
This means that political, economic, and legal decisions today
are not only determined by governments and parliaments, but also
by these new players who, rather than being universally accepted
by the states, are sometimes in direct conflict with the states.
Moreover, this is possible because the main political problems to-
day are global problems.

Let me mention three of the complex, profound problems that con-

cern the world today:
First, the problem of financial globalization. Transnational cor-
porations and international banks function today thanks to the
enormous telecommunication system, including the Internet and e-
mail, which has transformed the world into a global market where
the power of national states is limited. Therefore, a more or less
open fight exists between this global system and the individual
states. However, global financial problems cannot be handled by
any one state alone, and states must recognize that they need inter-
national institutions and organizations if they want to control finan-
cial globalization.
Second, the problem of intercultural coexistence. Different cul-
tures are currently discovering each other, and the dialogue, which
is still very difficult, has just begun in encounters between people
from different cultures. Many prejudices and biases have to be re-

144
considered, and they can be found not only in the so-called Third
World, but also in highly developed countries, such as my own
country, Denmark. Moreover, reconciliation between cultures, and
especially between Islamic and Judeo-Christian cultures, will never
take place unless both parties refrain from trying to resolve their
differences through the humiliation of or violence against the other.
We must learn to show respect not only for local and national cul-
tures, but also for the great symbols of the religions.
Thirdly, the problem of the physical sustainability of the Earth.
Human beings not only increasingly use up some of the planet’s
most accessible but non-renewable resources without the capability
of replacing them with renewable resources, but we also use pro-
duction methods that may permanently destroy the natural condi-
tions for human life. We may therefore leave future generations
with a world that has material conditions inferior to those known to
us. We need a global democracy that includes a responsibility to-
wards the Other in a future world where human beings should not
have to blame us for the exploitation of the world’s physical capi-
tal.
To add to these complexities of common global problems, we
must consider that peace in our world today requires a legal order
that can punish global crimes, which include not only the smaller
crimes within trade, over the Internet, etc., but also the major
‘crimes against humanity’ such as war crimes, as in the cases of the
Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals just after the Second World War,
or crimes against the future of humanity through the pollution of air
and water, etc.
Therefore different international courts (both permanent and ad
hoc) have been established. Further, as a consequence of the World
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which was ratified by all
member states of the United Nations, a court of human rights was
created in Europe that allows a single individual to bring a lawsuit
against his or her own state.
This is quite new in international law which, since Grotius and
Pufendorf, was mainly law that regulated the relations between
states and did not allow an individual to be considered as a legal
subject.

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 It is this limitation of the role of the state on the international
scene that is the real and profound reason for the current crisis in
international law. We are now obliged to look for a new legal order
that can take into account the new players in international politics
and law. And my question is, therefore: What should be the basis of
the new rules for a new international order if this order should be
accepted by all people around the globe?
My answer is that this basis must be cosmopolitan. I shall now
try to explain what that means.

The cosmopolitan
The concept of the cosmopolitan or citizen of the world is quite old
in European history, originating in ancient Greek Cynic and Stoic
philosophy. The first philosopher who called himself ‘cos-
mopolitês’ or ‘citizen of the world’ was the Cynic Diogenes of
Sinope, who lived from 412–323 BC, i.e., the time of Plato and
Aristotle. If someone asked him where he came from, his only re-
ply was: ‘I am a citizen of the world’.
Three centuries later, the Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43
BC), and a little later Seneca (AD 4–65), developed the idea of a
societas generis humani, a society of humankind as the most exten-
sive society to which human beings belong. Thus, every human
being belongs to two societies: the society into which they are born,
and the society of the world. Even a head of a major state could
thereby understand himself to be a member of a more comprehen-
sive social reality than his own state.
This was the case with the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius
(AD 121–180), who wrote in his Meditations: ‘I am a member of
the enormous organism of Humanity’ (VII). This membership,
however, had a purely spiritual or personal character. It was the
feeling of belonging to a community of thought between all human
beings, even individuals who, as Marcus wrote, were ‘interfering,
ungracious, insolent, full of guile, deceitful and antisocial’ (II.1). In
practice, this meant openness to everyone irrespective of whether
they lived close by or far away. Marcus wanted to put himself in

146
everyone else’s shoes: ‘Accustom yourself not to be inattentive to
what another person says, and as far as possible enter into his
mind’ (VI, 53). As Martha C. Nussbaum points out in her book
Cultivating Humanity (1997), this idea thought by a powerful poli-
tician could only diminish his anger towards other individuals and
cultures he spontaneously disliked and rationally criticized.
However, the Stoic citizens of the world were not united by
common political and cultural problems, only by general human
conditions. Their cosmopolitanism remained on the purely personal
level and was not concerned with global peace.
This changed in modern times when Kant proclaimed in his
work The Metaphysics of Moral that the cosmopolitan law is more
developed than the law of peoples.
The law of peoples – das Völkerrecht (Section 53–61) – was at
the time considered by Kant to be a law of states or nations in rela-
tion to one another, i.e., their right to go to war with one another,
the conditions they must fulfil in order to wage war, how as victors
they must and must not treat their enemies, and how they may
make alliances in order to renounce war. According to this concept
of ‘the law of peoples’, which was rather a ‘law of states’, the citi-
zens of a state tolerate citizens of other states, even though they
have no concept of belonging to a common world. Jeremy Bentham
introduced the name international law to replace the term ‘law of
peoples’ in order to prevent the misunderstanding that it was any-
thing other than a law for the relation between nations or states.
In contrast, the cosmopolitan law – das Weltbürgerrecht according
to Kant (Section 62 of his Metaphysics of Moral) – presupposes
that every human being has the right to be treated as a member of
the common human community, and hence that perpetual peace is
not – as with the law of peoples– an unachievable idea. A parallel
exists between the moral law for the individual and the cosmopoli-
tan law for the citizen of the world: both have universal validity
and must be able to guide practice. Kant sees the reason for the
latter in the fact that human beings as ‘citizens of the Earth’ origi-
nally inhabit a community of land forming a globus terraquens (the
globe of the world), and as reasonable beings must therefore adopt

147
the idea that they have the right to live together in peace and con-
duct commerce with each other in all regions of the world.

Cosmopolitanism versus nationalism

and liberalism
Today we must apply this idea of the cosmopolitan to the question
of the basis of international law and, thus, to the basis of reason
regarding the invention of new rules for a global legal order. We
can only overcome the crisis in international law that involves the
reliability of international institutions and rules if we can refer to a
normative basis which legitimates them. This legitimacy must be
based on a conviction that can create a good and just global social
life under the given conditions. Further, the conviction must consist
of the commitment to a vision about the good, or rather the best
possible world, in the same sense that we speak about a vision of
the good society.
After Kant and Fichte, cosmopolitanism disappeared from phi-
losophical and political discourse, and nationalism, based on the
romantic ideal of the individual and the people, was mostly op-
posed to cosmopolitanism, as can be seen in Max Weber’s inaugu-
ral address when he received the chair in national economy in
Freiburg in 1895. Later, during the 20th century, a cosmopolitan
often became tantamount to a national traitor, and the most violent
accusations against the cosmopolitans came from Nazi Germany:
they considered the Jews in the concentration camps to be cosmo-
politans.
However, cosmopolitanism was also seen as being in opposition
to liberalism, according to which the relations between states were
based on competition and trade agreements.
Therefore, during most of the 20th century there was no discus-
sion about cosmopolitanism.
After the Second World War, the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribu-
nals were certainly judging the criminals in the name of humanity,
but these tribunals were creations of the victors; the defeated were
condemned by the victorious. They were not tribunals created by

148
an international jurisdiction, as were the later international courts
concerning the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which were cre-
ated by the UN Security Council in 1993 and 1994. So in 1946 the
recognition of the fascist war criminals at the Nuremberg and To-
kyo tribunals was not an occasion for real cosmopolitan thinking.
On the contrary, at that time the conflict between East and West
had already begun.
However, the situation changed in the 1990s. Before that time no
philosophers and no sociologists, at least of whom I am aware, dis-
cussed the cosmopolitan. But suddenly Habermas, Derrida, Nuss-
baum and others began to defend cosmopolitanism, and sociolo-
gists such as David Held and Ulrich Beck presented analyses of the
societies which showed that the idea of cosmopolitanism was the
only idea that could guide people in our time to develop democracy
on a global scale. Democracy and Global Order: From the Modern
State to Cosmopolitan Governance is the title of David Held’s book
from 1995.
What has happened since cosmopolitanism took the floor again
after nearly 200 years of silence? It is true that the complex prob-
lems mentioned here have become more and more urgent, but envi-
ronmental problems were also discussed before the 1990s without
ever raising the question of cosmopolitanism.
What then has happened? A great political event indeed: the end
of the East-West conflict was symbolized by the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989. Before this point, it was virtually impossible not to
be caught up in the focus on the fight between the so-called free
world in the West and the Communist world in the East. After the
fall of the Berlin Wall, people discovered that the real issue was not
a clash between two superpower spheres but rather a plurality of
conflicts crossing various borders. In Europe, we had the Balkan
conflicts, in the Middle East the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, in Iraq
the Kurdish-Iraqi conflict, and so forth. Furthermore, these con-
flicts were not only military; they were also economical and cul-
tural. The anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s was a re-
volt against worldwide financial repression, and the demonstrations
in 2006 against 12 cartoons in a Danish right-wing newspaper re-

149
veal a wide gap between common people in the Islamic world and
common people in the Christian world.

A global contract
If we aim to find a global agreement on a world order that all peo-
ples and all individuals might be able to accept we must, first of all,
agree to a cosmopolitan basis, which means an idea of belonging to
two citizenships: the national and the cosmopolitan. But the cos-
mopolitan citizenship must have a content, just like the national
citizenship has. And how do we express this content? It must be a
vision that can be formalized to an idea about rights and duties, as
we have a vision and an idea about rights and duties within a single
society.
Moreover, the ultimate end for the cosmopolitan must be supe-
rior to the ends of a particular society. If this were not the case, it
would thus be meaningless to be a citizen in the world at the same
time as one is a citizen of one’s own country. Further, if this end
should be more than a dream, then it must refer to the tasks and
challenges that a particular state cannot handle alone and therefore
must be dealt with through institutions aiming at an international or
transnational order: for example, politically through the United
Nations, legally through international courts, economically via a
world bank and various global trade organizations, and culturally
through societies and networks of researchers, artists, philosophers,
etc.
In European political philosophy the reason for social coherence
has been expressed by the idea of the contract. For instance, the
philosophers of the Enlightenment – except Rousseau – all com-
bined the idea of the contract with their cosmopolitanism. This is,
in particular, the case in the works of the great pre-Kantian phi-
losopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Kant himself. They de-
veloped the idea of a global contract.
The idea of a social contract first appeared in the 17th century in
Thomas Hobbes’ work, although his idea of a social covenant only
referred to the coherence of the state and the dependence of the

150
citizens on the state’s power, the Leviathan. The idea was trans-
formed, as has been shown by Francis Cheneval in his great work
Philosophie im weltbürgerlicher Bedeutung from 2002, by Abbé de
Saint-Pierre and Leibniz, wherein it became a contract between
states or princes, and then by Wolff and Kant therein becoming the
great fiction (‘ens fictum’, said Wolff) by which a people can ex-
press not only that they accept the order of their society, but also a
real world order.
Some lawyers have claimed that this transfer of the idea of the
social contract from the particular society to the whole of humanity
is not reasonable, because the contract is only conceivable for small
societies, such as Rousseau claimed. But what could prevent this
transfer? It cannot be the fictive character of the contract, because a
social contract for a small society is no less fictive than a contract
for a world community. The idea of the social covenant does not
presuppose that it was concluded at a certain moment in historical
time. Even small societies have often been created by violence and
not by a real contract.
Thus, the social contract only supposes that its citizens behave
as if they themselves or their ancestors had instated the contract.
All ideas about the formation of the contract are, in principle, fic-
tive, regardless of some possible evidence of historical events in
the representation of the social community. As mentioned, Chris-
tian Wolff called the contract an ‘ens fictum’. Also in his work The
Social Contract from 1762 Rousseau does not claim that the con-
tract is other than fictive. The reason why he did not believe in a
global social contract was that he could not accept representatives
in the governance of a society. But Wolff and Kant did not have
these hesitations with regard to a representative system of govern-
ance, and they could therefore very well imagine a world commu-
nity based on a global social contract.
When today we ask about the legitimacy of international law, it
may be fruitful to again discuss this connection between contractu-
alism and cosmopolitanism. However, it will indeed not be the con-
tract we find in the work of Thomas Hobbes, who assumed that all
human beings ‘by nature’ are in a ‘war of all against all’. On the
contrary, it will be the contract that presupposes the Aristotelian

151
idea about the human being as ‘a social animal’ and expresses the
knowledge that all people live in a common world, as when Kant
reminded us that we are living on a globe and have to live here to-
gether.
Thus, there are two possible basic reasons for the formation of
social life: the desire to escape death, as we find it in Hobbes’ work
and in the 20th century in the work of Carl Schmitt and others, and
the desire to live together in peace, as we find it in the work of Ar-
istotle, Wolff, Kant, Ricœur and others. Only the latter desire can
motivate the conviction that we are citizens of the world and have
rights and duties as such. Thus, we must make a choice between the
two ideas of a social contract. We must choose between Hobbes
and Kant.

Towards a new world order

The concept of state, however, has changed since the Enlighten-
ment and, consequently, so has the role of the states on a global
scale. Therefore, the idea of a global contract has to be applied in a
different manner than in the work of Wolff and Kant. Although by
using the concept of a cosmopolitan contract they both imagine a
human community on a global level, this concept only embraced
‘hospitality’, i.e., the right to travel and to be kindly received eve-
rywhere in the world, which Kant calls the cosmopolitan law. To
them, the political community on the global scale remained only as
commercial and diplomatic relations between states.
Today the new political actors mentioned in the beginning have
appeared and have reduced the importance of the boundaries be-
tween states. The interests of the states are now entangled in one
another and the great problems of our time can only be handled by
the assistance of other players, like multinational corporations,
NGOs, scientific, legal and philosophical networks, and so forth.
This means that political power today is much more fragmented
than in the past. What is political power? It is the capacity to trans-
form social and physical conditions in different contexts or ‘sites of
power’ (Held, 1995) which yields different forms of power. Thus,

152
there is power in health care and environmental protection, educa-
tion, the market, the media, social and religious institutions, the use
of force by the police, the army and other constraint relations, and
in legal and administrative institutions, which makes the basis of
the state as such – and all these forms of power are intertwined.
The fragmentation of political power consists, in fact, of the state
no longer having absolute control of all these forms of power that
are now more or less in the hands of other players. The state can
only govern in collaboration with other political players, not only
inside the state itself and outside in relation to other states, but also
in relation to international and transnational non-state institutions
and movements.
However, this can only work in a democratic way if states are
ready to recognize a transnational institutional structure that re-
flects the different forms of power which have appeared and accept
a corresponding decision-making process. In other words, the fic-
tion of the global social contract in our time must imply that non-
state companies and institutions, which are decisive for the future
of the world, are given rights and duties in line with their co-
responsibility for the new world order that is to come.
But then the global contract cannot be in accordance with the
idea of Hobbes’ social covenant, which supposes that all power is
given to one political player, the Leviathan. This, on a global scale,
can only mean a form of governance that gives few states or one
single state all the power, or rather a world government that all
other political players give all power to out of fear of mutual de-
struction.
The global social contract on which international law today must
be founded and that includes the recognition of different political
players and makes possible a democratic control of all use of
power, can only be a contract based on the desire to live together
with all other people in dialogue and generosity. International law
is then not only the law by which cruelty and violence are sanc-
tioned, but also the law by which international understanding, the
good life and generosity are promoted in the world.
This idea of a new world order does not deny the hard necessi-
ties in politics and the interests of political power. But it supposes

153
that ‘soft ideas’ also can play a role, and that the strongest states
can see their advantages in alliances with other players, even purely
humanitarian players, in order to obtain their recognition.
The cosmopolitan basis of international law means a global or-
der based on democracy. This would be a democracy where the
desire to live together is stronger than the fear of death.

Conclusion
It follows that the citizen of the world must be the ethico-political
ideal for our new century. As an ideal, it has not yet been realized.
It is not simply a product of the state, however, since it aims be-
yond the order of the particular state. It incorporates (or in German
aufhebt) the state in the pursuit of a higher cause rooted in cultural
traditions with a legacy of ideas concerning the good life.
The citizen of the world will always remain such an ideal. In the
same way that the national state cannot become a collective indi-
vidual that abolishes all particular human individuals as such, the
cosmopolitan ideal cannot be realized in a world state that would
abolish all national states.
We have to work on constructing international structures and
networks and enforce a transnational legitimate authority able to
watch the cosmopolitan ideal and coordinate the efforts to arrive at
concrete solutions to our enormous international problems.

References
Aurelius, Marcus, Meditations (London, 1997).
Cheneval, Francis, Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Bedeutung (Basel,
2002).
Held, David, Democracy and Global Order: From the Modern State to
Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, 1995).
——, Democracy and the Global Order (London, 1995).
Kant, Immanuel, ‘The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals’, in Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. and trans. L. W. Beck
(Indianapolis, 1963).

154
Kemp, Peter, Verdensborgeren som paedagogisk ideal: paedagogisk
filosofi for det 21. århundrede (Copenhagen, 2005).
Nussbaum, Marta, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform
in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA, 1997).

155
9. The Tie that Binds: Cosmopolitan
Obligation and the Primacy of
Institutions 1

Lena Halldenius

Cosmopolitanism is one of those terms that seem to be always

around, denoting something vaguely laudable and therefore more
or less up for grabs. It is often used synonymously with terms like
global justice, international justice, or international morality,2 and
so has become a vehicle for expressing the idea of global obliga-
tions of justice.3 No job could be more important. Indeed it is so
important that it cannot be safely left to a rhetoric of ‘global com-
munity’ and ‘humane world order’. Taking the idea of global obli-
gations seriously, I will discuss what kind of theory such an idea
requires.
Leaving the conceptual history to others for the moment, I will
start by presenting what I see as three aspects of modern cosmopol-
itanism conceived as a position within political philosophy. I wish
to emphasize that these three aspects in no way are meant to count
as a definition, nor are they exhaustive, but they are there in the
ongoing debate. What I want to highlight initially is cosmopolitan-

1
This is an extended and much revised version of a text that was presented as a
comment on Peter Kemp’s paper ‘Towards a Global Covenant: The Cosmopoli-
tan Foundation of International Law’ at the conference ‘The Idea of Kosmopo-
lis’, Södertörn University College, 24 March 2006.
2
An example of this is Charles Jones, Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitan-
ism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
3
See Christine Sypnowich, ‘Cosmopolitans, Cosmopolitanism, and Human
Flourishing’, in G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.), The Political Philosophy of
Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

157
ism conceived as a multifaceted position including, first, a certain
attitude or state of mind; the cosmopolitan regards herself as a
member of a global community, tied together by a thin tie of shared
humanity. Second, the cosmopolitan is committed to moral uni-
versalism. The third is an institutional implication. Cosmopolitans
support a global or transnational set of institutions with a degree of
priority over local, national or regional institutions. These three
together seem to form a backbone of contemporary cosmopolitan
philosophy.
Of the three aspects outlined here, the third is often conceived as
a consequence or a fall-out of the first two, as if a sense of a global
community bound to a commitment to universal morality is what
provides the rationale for global institutions. This I will question
for three reasons. First, it is always a mistake in political philoso-
phy to proceed from wishful thinking about people’s state of mind.
Second, universality is indispensable to cosmopolitan thinking but
it is not enough – indeed it is of the wrong kind – to provide a ra-
tionale for obligations that are global in scope. And finally, rather
than regarding the third as a fall-out of the first two, we should re-
gard it as the primary and distinctive feature of cosmopolitanism,
entailing importantly a certain view of justice: justice as dependent
on accountable institutions. But we still need something more, in
addition to universality, to establish the idea of global institutional
obligation. We need a thicker tie to bind us together.

The first aspect of contemporary cosmopolitanism, then, is a state

of mind, a certain moral consciousness. The cosmopolitan regards
himself as a member of a global community – humanity itself –
something great and uncluttered within which borders and bounda-
ries are arbitrary and morally underdetermined. On any reasonable
understanding local ties and relationships are certainly not morally
irrelevant – it is hard to imagine how life could be worth living
without them – but there is a sense of being a member of something
greater, which takes moral priority. We are bound together by the
very fact that we are part of the same humanity. Nothing more than
that is needed; indeed, it is necessary not to say more than that
since as soon as you do, you risk reintroducing things that separate

158
rather than unite. This is a thin tie, in the sense that it is prior to all
those layers that mark people as being this way rather than that,
prior to commitments and loyalties that are personal and local or at
least less than global. In his contribution to this volume, Peter
Kemp seems to have this thin tie in mind as the basis of cosmopoli-
tan obligation. He talks about ‘solidarity with all humanity’ as a
step towards ‘cosmopolitan consciousness’ and ‘the universal
community to which a person belongs merely by virtue of belong-
ing to humanity’.
This moral consciousness – the perception of a thin tie – makes
an intuitive case for accepting the universal status of morality. If
we are all part of a global community which is morally prior to
local communities, then tying people’s moral status and what they
can claim to historical circumstance and varying and unequal local
ways of life will indeed appear illegitimate. So this moral con-
sciousness – the sense of a thin tie, unencumbered by circumstance,
binding all of humanity together – is supposed to work as a back-
drop to the ethical position that morality is universal, which is the
second aspect of the cosmopolitan position, its moral commitment.
Particularly conducive perhaps to the cosmopolitan position is the
doctrine of universal human rights, which not surprisingly is an
established moral language in cosmopolitan theorizing and which
rests easily with the thin tie. Saying that all individual people are
equal rights-holders presupposes that all individual persons inhabit
one moral world in which comparative assessments make sense. If
all children everywhere have the same claims to shelter and educa-
tion, then children denied these things have their rights violated.
We do not need to know anything about them to know that this is
the case. An important point of the thin tie is that it emphasizes that
people do not need to do anything to qualify as members of this
moral community. You are not granted membership as a prize for
good behaviour, nor for anything that is contestable about you or
that you could lose. That again is conducive to the universal doc-
trine of human rights. Membership is automatic; hence, no one is or
can be excluded, and that is indeed important.

159
 For some, the universality of morals and its concomitant com-
mitment to a basic equality between holders of claims4 are regarded
as so integral to cosmopolitan thinking that they have come to de-
fine it. David Held, for instance, argues that the three key elements
of contemporary cosmopolitanism are egalitarian individualism, a
requirement that the status of equal worth is acknowledged by eve-
ryone, and that all claims are treated impartially.5 On this account,
the key elements of cosmopolitanism seem to amount to spelling
out what is here referred to as the second aspect and hence nothing
more (and nothing less) than ethical universalism.
The third aspect is what makes cosmopolitanism political, not
merely moral. It is what puts the polis into kosmopolis. Those indi-
vidual people who constitute the shared humanity within which
each is, and is recognized by all as, equal, are conceived of as citi-
zens of that global order. I will discuss some of the implications of
this aspect, which I will take very seriously. The upshot of this will
tell us something about the tensions between these three aspects of
cosmopolitanism and the job it is supposed to do to secure global
justice.
But let me first make a brief note about the term kosmopolis it-
self. In outlining what a cosmopolitan position might be, the term
comes to our aid in an ambiguous yet challenging way. Kosmos
means world but it also means harmony, order and ornament. Kos-
mos is the world in an encompassing sense – the entirety of crea-

4
It is worthwhile to distinguish between basic equality, that is, that everyone is
equal in moral status and has the same rights and can make the same claims on
the basis of them, regardless of what rights we believe people have, and equality
in application, that is that everyone has an equal claim to whatever it is that the
system of rights is supposed to be a means to, for instance, capabilities or wel-
fare. Basic equality emphasizes similarity; in this respect everyone is the same.
Equality in application requires an acute understanding of when and how people
are relevantly similar or different. Given that people are differently situated,
equality in capabilities is not achieved by treating everyone the same.
5
David Held, ‘Globalization, Corporate Practice, and Cosmopolitan Social Stan-
dards’, in A. Kuper (ed.), Global Responsibilities: Who Must Deliver on Human
Rights? (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 190–194. See also Jones, Global
Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism, pp. 15–17, who stresses cosmopolitanism
as a moral position of impartiality, universality, individualism, and egalitarian-
ism.

160
tion – conceived as orderly, harmonious and, hence, beautiful. Po-
lis is the site of politics, the full members of which are citizens
(polites) who collectively govern themselves. It is the city, a small
self-governing unit. Necessarily bounded and at least partially
closed to the rest of the world, it is defined by its limits. The term
kosmopolis can therefore be regarded as something of a pun, an
oxymoron even, and the cosmopolitan as an empty category. Is not
the very idea of polis – a bounded political unit – in opposition to
kosmos?6 To put it in more contemporary words: Are not national
allegiances – giving priority to ‘one’s own’ – what makes a just and
harmonious world order impossible? And how could you be a citi-
zen of the entire world if the very category of citizenship is predi-
cated on the bounded political unit? Perhaps this is why the term
cosmopolitan in everyday parlance has come to denote not a politi-
cal agent committed to world harmony and global justice through
politics, but an urban dweller, removed from politics at all levels
but vaguely at home anywhere in the world as long as there is a
Gap and a barista.
Let me illustrate: in the movie The Student Prince, set in Cam-
bridge, an American Fulbright Scholar stretches languidly on her
exercise mat in her college room, saying ‘I miss my coffee. I could
kill for a decent non-fat latte’, adding in passing that she was raised
a republican ‘as in Robespierre, not Reagan’. She is completely at
ease, since away from home does not really mean anything if home
is not a place, managing to make a reference to the res publica into
an apolitical piece of small talk. Towards the end of the movie, the
main character – a prince of the United Kingdom, burdened by the
expectations of his appointed role, a prime but unwilling carrier of
national allegiance – renounces his claim to the throne at the May
Ball, shouting ‘I am a citizen of the world’ to an enthusiastic crowd
of intoxicated new graduates. These two characters are representa-

6
On the history and development of cosmopolitanism, see for instance R. B.
Branham and M-O Goulet-Cazé (eds.) The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in An-
tiquity and its Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Mar-
garet C. Jacob Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in
Early Modern Europe (Phil., PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). See
also Sypnowich, 2005.

161
tives of what could be seen to be the only two possible responses to
the oxymoronic pun of kosmopolis: ironic detachment from the
political, from the very idea of being a citizen of anything, or active
denouncement of the obvious, of the primacy of rights and obliga-
tions emanating from a fixed seat of bounded allegiance. What the
latter response amounts to is turning the pun into a challenge, and a
challenge it is, not only in practical, but also in theoretical terms.
What could it possibly mean to be a citizen of the world?
What I wish to emphasize with this digression is that the term
kosmopolis – if we take it seriously – imbues ‘cosmopolitanism’
with an implication which ‘global justice’ and ‘international moral-
ity’ do not have in themselves. This is the third aspect of cosmopol-
itanism.7 The universal moral commitment in relation to the global
community bound together by the thin tie is realized through an
institutional structure of which all are members. And the harmoni-
ous world-order envisaged by cosmopolitanism is a polis, the
members of which are citizens. And citizenship entails rights and
obligations in relation to the institutional order without which it
cannot exist.
If we take seriously – or perhaps literally rather than metaphori-
cally – the implications of the concept of a world citizen, it is cer-
tainly correct to say that in the absence of a globally accountable
institutional order such an entity can exist only in the narrowest
metaphorical sense. Citizenship – at any level – is a status func-
tion,8 dependent for its existence on institutions of a certain kind:
the institution of law, a legislator, and an accountable form of gov-
ernment.
Kemp describes the concept of the cosmopolitan as implying
‘the idea of simultaneous citizenship in two societies: the national
society into which a person is born or admitted, and the universal
community to which a person belongs merely by virtue of belong-
ing to humanity’. But one is not a citizen of a society or a commu-

7
Another implication is an emphasis on the relation between justice and peace
since kosmos is a world order without strife.
8
See John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin,
1995), pp. 37—43, on the assignment of a status function through collective
intentionality as constitutive of institutional reality.

162
nity, on whatever level. One is a citizen of a political system run on
the basis of collective self-government through representation and
the rule of law. A transnational legal order (leaving the specifics of
such an order open) is therefore not only a means for things like
regulating relations between non-global institutional structures,
countering the impact of economic globalization or preserving and
managing peace. It is also necessary for the existence of the cos-
mopolitan.
If cosmopolitanism has a distinctive sharpness of its own, surely
it must be this. This is why cosmopolitanism is not ‘merely’ a the-
ory of global justice. This is also why, as I started out saying, this
third feature of contemporary cosmopolitanism is not a fall-out
from the other two, but primary, which in its turn makes the ques-
tion whether cosmopolitanism requires or justifies international or
transnational law a closed one, answered by the concept itself.
Cosmopolitanism understood in this sense is predicated on a certain
view of justice: justice can only be had through representative insti-
tutions that are accountable to its citizens. That is the difference
between justice and charity. This is the important insight that cos-
mopolitanism brings to the table on matters of global justice. Not
that morality is universal (although that is important as well) but
that a just state of affairs (rather than a vaguely ‘good’ or ‘humane’
one) is a matter of institutional arrangement. Comparatively
wealthy people can make poor people’s lives a whole lot better by
well-targeted donations and they should do that, but, from the point
of view of justice, such charitable actions are neither here nor there.
It is perfectly possible to imagine a world that satisfies a certain
pattern of distribution and where welfare levels are decent across
the board. But where this happy state is a matter of personal be-
nevolence and dependent for its continuation on the goodwill of a
few mighty agents who cannot be held to account by those destined
to lose out as soon as the goodwill fades it is not a state of justice –
when justice is understood in the cosmopolitan sense – since it is
not secured by a set of accountable institutions. So if we are con-
cerned with global justice, then ipso facto we need global account-
able institutions.

163
Now what does this tell us about the first two features of contempo-
rary cosmopolitanism? The cosmopolitan consciousness – the kos-
mos as an imagined community tied together by the thin tie of a
shared humanity – is a nice thought, but what function or status is it
supposed to have? Is it an ideal? Possibly, but why? Is it better in
itself that people regard themselves as thinly human in this way
rather than as workers, environmentalists, women, Swedish, Swed-
ish-Somali, newspaper readers, and human or all of these things at
once in no particular order? Is it a norm? Surely not. We should
resist any attempt at formulating norms about how people should
conceive of themselves. Norms also need to have some resonance
in what people are actually like and a capacity to be action guiding,
which this one is not. Actions are particular to place, time, and cir-
cumstance; a sense of belonging to a totality does not tell us any-
thing about what we should do. Presumably its role is supposed to
be moral in the sense that it is wrapped up in the acknowledgement
that morality is universal. But this is a mistake for two reasons.
First, asserting that morality is universal – that moral principles
are valid equally for all regardless of circumstance – amounts to
not making it dependent on people’s frame of mind, felt affinities
or inclinations. Doubtlessly a cosmopolitan sense of belonging to
the entirety of the world is conducive to an inclination to accept
morality as universal but at the same time morality has its most
important role to play when inclination and solidarity are absent.
This was Kant’s point in saying that an action gains its moral worth
from being done for the sake of duty rather than from inclination,
be it self-interest, benevolence or a wish to do good. Contrary to
popular belief, this is not meant to say that cold-bloodedness is
good while benevolence is for wimps. Rather it is meant to pre-
serve the commanding force of morality also when an inclination to
do good is not there.9 Surely that is when the oppressed and dispos-
sessed need it the most.

9
‘For love out of inclination cannot be commanded; but kindness done from
duty—although no inclination impels us, and even although natural and uncon-
querable disinclination stands in our way—is practical […] and it is this practi-
cal love alone which can be an object of command’. Immanuel Kant, Ground-
work of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. and ed. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper

164
 Second, it is important to acknowledge that universality is a
formal feature of moral principles. It is a test, not of the content of
what we believe but of our way of reasoning in relation to what we
believe. In a recent article, Andrew Dobson has argued that the
problem with framing the tie that binds us together in this thin way
is that although it might be enough to get us to think that cosmopol-
itanism is right, it is not enough to motivate us to act as cosmopoli-
tans, since a shared humanity is not compelling enough as a source
of obligation.10 This strikes me as correct, but the problem for the
cosmopolitan is more fundamental than that.
The intuitive pull of the cosmopolitan state of mind is that we –
all humans – are all each other’s concern, in the sense that rights
and obligations are the same for everyone. I cannot claim some-
thing for myself if I am not prepared to accept that everyone else
has the same entitlement to it. Conversely, I cannot place obliga-
tions on others that I am not prepared to shoulder myself, and this
goes for everyone wherever or whoever they are. The point to em-
phasize is that this is a formal feature that does not in itself tell us
anything about what rights and obligations there are or how far and
to whom they extend. One can be a perfectly consistent universalist
without believing for a moment that rights and obligations are
global in scope. ‘Everyone should give priority to their compatri-
ots’ is a universal principle. It satisfies the formal feature of apply-
ing equally to all, but it is not an obvious cosmopolitan principle.11
A perfectly reasonable, perfectly universal principle says that par-
ents have both a right and an obligation to give priority to their own
children’s welfare (up to a point). Given what people are like and
what they value, extending the universal principle of parental re-
sponsibility to a principle which is also global in scope (‘Parents

Torchbooks, 1964), p. 67. The Groundwork was first published as Grundlegung

zur Metaphysik der Sitten in 1785.
10
Andrew Dobson, ‘Thick Cosmopolitanism’, Political Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1,
2006, pp. 168–169.
11
It can be a cosmopolitan principle given the assumption that some cosmopoli-
tans make that the outcome on a global scale will be better for all if there is a
moral division of labour along national lines, but it survives as a cosmopolitan
principle only as long as and to the extent that the assumption is well-founded.

165
have an obligation to look after all children’s welfare equally’)
would be unreasonable as well as unworkable.
We can take the human rights doctrine, a quintessential univer-
salist theory endorsed by many cosmopolitans, as an example.
There is an intense debate going on at the moment about the dis-
juncture between the universal system of human rights and the
global justice it is supposed to serve. Thomas Pogge has put it suc-
cinctly. There are two senses, he says, in which human rights are
universal: ‘Human rights are equally possessed by, and are also
equally binding upon, each and every human being. These two fea-
tures are compatible with a “nationalistic” interpretation of human
rights, according to which any person’s responsibility for the ful-
fillment of human rights is limited by the boundaries of his or her
society’.12 In international human rights law individual rights-
holders have claims against their own governments, and govern-
ments have obligations in relation to their own population. There
are no global carriers of obligation in relation to individual rights-
holders. Nothing in this detracts from the universality of the system
– and the system itself as expressing a world community of rights-
holders certainly is in congruence with the cosmopolitan state of
mind – but given that states as the primary bearers of obligation
differ so greatly in resources, competence, ideology and will, it
most definitely is a problem of global justice. There is nothing un-
cluttered about the actual circumstances in which claims can be
made.
Needless to say, many cosmopolitans know this and worry about
it. The international human rights system falls short of the require-
ment embedded in the institutional implication of the cosmopolitan
position but neither of the other two aspects of cosmopolitanism
explain why. Universality – a formal feature – is not the same thing
as global reach – a substantial feature. And we certainly cannot
12
Thomas Pogge, ‘Human Rights and Human Responsibilities’, in Kuper (ed.),
Global Responsibilities, pp. 17–18. It is worth noting that ‘universal’ and ‘cos-
mopolitan’ are often used synonymously to mean ‘encompassing all humans’ (an
example is Onora O’Neill’s contribution to the same volume, ‘Agents of Justice’,
in Kuper (ed.), Global Responsibilities, p. 37), which is not wrong but makes it
more difficult to conceptualise the tension between the universal status of a prin-
ciple and its substantive global reach.

166
base the case for global obligation on psychologically and anthro-
pologically unfounded notions about the sense of a thin tie. If it is
there it could still not be action guiding. And if it is not there, then
that is testimony to how badly we need a more stable foundation
for global obligation. For that we need a thicker tie, not merely for
the sake of motivation (even though that seems true as well) but for
the sake of the global reach of obligation.

So, for cosmopolitanism to provide a principle of action that takes

seriously the idea of one global community of citizens, the thin tie
needs to be supplemented by something thicker, capable of ground-
ing obligations that are global in scope but still reasonably action
guiding and which hold independently regardless of whether people
happen to feel solidarity with all of humanity or not. Surely, as
Kant reminds us, obligation has its most important work to do
when inclination is absent.
In Perpetual Peace Kant says that through colonization and
trade ‘[t]he peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying de-
grees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point
where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt every-
where’.13 Colonization and trade are not what establishes the uni-
versal category of right and its violation. It might establish a moral
consciousness of right being violated in places where we have
never been and do not know anybody. If it does then we might ac-
quire some sort of ‘cosmopolitan state of mind’ but that does not
establish the universal category of right and its violation either,
even if it might smooth the way for its general acceptance. What
colonization and trade do, however, is to support the case for global
obligation, obligations that are not only universal in character, but
also global in scope, since colonization and trade globalize cause
and effect of what we do and don’t do. Here is the missing thick tie,
and really it is not that thick. It is a matter of identifying proper
circumstances of justice, in appreciation of the fact that with a

13
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch in H. Reiss (ed.),
Political Writings, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), pp. 107–108. Perpetual Peace was first published as Zum Ewigen
Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf in 1795.

167
global reach of the effects of what we collectively do and don’t do,
responsibility is globalized as well. This responsibility is collective,
not necessarily irreducibly so but still. If there are global obliga-
tions, as the thick tie entails, then we are obligated to set up and
support those institutions necessary to realise the object of our ob-
ligations. We do not need to have a cosmopolitan state of mind for
this to be true.
So what is the thick tie? When Rawls, following Hume, makes
the striking point that for issues of justice and injustice to make
sense, certain circumstances have to obtain already, he proceeds
from the category of a society, understood as a ‘cooperative ven-
ture for mutual advantage […] typically marked by a conflict as
well as an identity of interests’.14 In the absence of conflicting in-
terests and desires in relation to moderately scarce resources, where
cooperation is both necessary and possible, ‘there would be no oc-
casion for the virtue of justice’. I do not wish to assess the merits of
Rawls’s principles of justice (he himself had surely a bounded and
closed society in mind), nor his later contribution to the debate on
global justice. I merely wish to insist that the foundation of global
obligations of justice is in fact found here. Not in a vague idea of a
shared humanity, nor in the formal feature of morality as universal,
but in a certain view of what role is played by justice and what its
subject is. The thick tie is the cooperative and conflicting venture
of agents who depend on and compete with each other and that tie
is certainly global no matter how people conceive of themselves.
That tie is the circumstances of global justice.

I have argued that what I started out describing as the third aspect
of cosmopolitanism is really its distinctive feature. It makes it not a

14
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp.
126–128; see also p. 4. Cf., David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A.
Selby-Bigge, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Book III,
Part II, Section ii: ‘I have already observ’d, that justice takes its rise from human
conventions; and that these are intended as a remedy to some inconveniences,
which proceed from the concurrence of certain qualities of the human mind with
the situation of external objects. The qualities of the mind are selfishness and
limited generosity: And the situation of external objects is their easy change,
join’d to their scarcity in comparison of the wants and desires of men’.

168
theory of a ‘good world’ or a ‘humane world order’ but primarily a
theory of a just set of global institutions within which individual
agents are citizens in the sense that they have the status function of
being carriers of claims and obligations in relation to the set of in-
stitutions which is accountable to them. This is in acknowledgment
of the fact that the tie that defines the circumstances of justice is
indeed global. This certainly presupposes moral universalism, but
so do lots of other theories. It makes the cosmopolitan state of mind
largely redundant since the circumstances of global justice are
partly defined by the absence of it.

I have, of course, said nothing about what a cosmopolitan theory of

justice would or should look like. I have merely discussed what
kind of theory it is. This leads me to make a few concluding re-
marks about a choice that Peter Kemp, in his contribution to this
volume, presents to us as a stark one, between Hobbes and Kant in
relation to peace, which in cosmopolitan thinking is intrinsically
linked to justice.
Kemp points out that in Hobbes’s state of nature everyone is at
war with everyone else. From this he seems to conclude that the
covenant – the transformative acting ‘as if’ that constructs the
commonwealth – is an expression of a wish to avoid death. This is
in alleged opposition to Kant, for whom the social contract is an
expression of a wish to live together in peace. But framing this as a
stark choice is misleading. After all, Hobbes’s first law of nature is
not ‘avoid death’ but ‘seek peace and follow it’.15 There are, of
course, any number of choices to be made between Hobbes and
Kant,16 but the choice whether or not we wish to live in peace is not

15
Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, Edwin Curley (ed.) (Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), Part I, Chapter xiv, Paragraph 4. Leviathan
was first published in 1651.
16
One important difference of opinion between them concerns whether there can
be peace without subordination to a sovereign power, something that Hobbes
flatly denies (Leviathan Part II, Chapter xvii, Paragraph 4). If we think about
cosmopolitanism, and its commitment to peace, in terms of a global covenant, a
Hobbesian global covenant (to the extent such a thing seems palatable) would
have to be a covenant constructing a world sovereign. A Kantian global cove-

169
one of them, nor is the idea of what kind of state a peaceful state is.
In fact, there are striking and in this context quite important simi-
larities between Hobbes’s and Kant’s ideas about peace. They both
describe the state of nature – a state unregulated by law, defined by
its absence of law as an institution – as a state of war, not because it
is characterized by actual strife and violence but because whatever
tranquility might be enjoyed in it is always unstable, precisely be-
cause there are no institutions capable of guaranteeing its continua-
tion. Both Kant and Hobbes maintain that peace is impossible
without adequate institutions and that is our reason for establishing
institutions capable of ending the natural state of war. But both also
make the existence of adequate institutions a definitional feature of
peace.17 A state of peace must be formally instituted and guaran-
teed, which requires a lawful state. In the absence of institutions
there can be no such thing as peace, only temporary armistice and a
lot of fear. In an important aspect, this concept of what peace is that
we find in both Hobbes the authoritarian and Kant the republican
ties in with what I have said about the institutional implication of
cosmopolitanism being its primary and distinctive feature. Just as
we cannot talk about justice in the absence of proper institutions we
cannot talk about peace in the absence of proper institutions be-
cause both justice and peace are functions of institutional struc-
tures. It is interesting to note how similar Rawls’s description of the
circumstances of justice is to Hobbes’s description of the state of
nature.18 Both are situations of absent or at least limited goodness
and solidarity, but that is not the problem – indeed it is part of the

nant, however, involves no subordination – Kant makes that clear in Perpetual

Peace (pp. 102–105).
17
‘A state of peace among men living together is not the same as the state of
nature, which is rather a state of war. For even if it does not involve active hos-
tilities, it involves a constant threat of their breaking out. Thus the state of peace
must be formally instituted’. Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 98. ‘[D]uring the time
that men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that
condition which is called war […] so the nature of war consisteth not in actual
fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no as-
surance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE’. Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I,
Chapter xiii, Paragraph 8.
18
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 126–127; Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 1, Chapter
xiii, Paragraphs 1–3.

170
human condition – and, importantly, more of these admirable
things would not be the solution. The solution is adequate institu-
tions. I absolutely do not mean to make any comparisons here other
than this very general one: goodness and benevolence are fickle
companions, and in matters of justice and peace fickleness is an
anathema.
A thin tie is easily broken. A thoroughly institutionalized one is
not. Members of a global community can be regarded from differ-
ent vantage points and what they are will vary correspondingly. It
might be difficult to shake the oxymoronic feel of ‘the global city’.
But it is not very difficult to figure out what is meant by regarding
everyone as a citizen in relation to the global effects of what we do
and do not do. A citizen is not a recipient of benevolence but a
maker of claims in relation to accountable institutions. If we want
kosmos – a harmonious world order – it had better be organized
along the principles of a polis. That does not answer the question of
what a just world would look like and how it is achieved. But it
does answer the question of how to conceive of the people in it.
That is the insight that cosmopolitanism brings to the table in mat-
ters of global obligation.

References
Dobson, Andrew, ‘Thick Cosmopolitanism’, Political Studies, Vol. 54,
No. 1, 2006.
Branham, R.B. and M-O Goulet-Cazé (eds.) The Cynics: The Cynic
Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000).
Held, David, ‘Globalization, Corporate Practice, and Cosmopolitan So-
cial Standards’, in A. Kuper (ed.), Global Responsibilities: Who
Must Deliver on Human Rights? (New York: Routledge, 2005).
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1994).
Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (2nd
edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Jacob, Margaret C. Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cos-
mopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Phil., PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

171
Jones, Charles, Global Justice: Defending Cosmopolitanism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001).
Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed. and trans.
H. J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964).
——, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in H. Reiss (ed.), Politi-
cal Writings (2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991).
Kemp, Peter, ‘Towards a Global Covenant: The Cosmopolitan Founda-
tion of International Law’, Paper presented at the conference ‘The
Idea of Kosmopolis’, Södertörn University College, 24 March
2006.
Kuper, A. (ed.), Global Responsibilities: Who Must Deliver on Human
Rights? (New York: Routledge, 2005).
O’Neill, Onora, ‘Agents of Justice’, in A. Kuper (ed.), Global Responsi-
bilities: Who Must Deliver on Human Rights? (New York:
Routledge, 2005).
Pogge, Thomas, ‘Human Rights and Human Responsibilities’, in A. Ku-
per (ed.), Global Responsibilities: Who Must Deliver on Human
Rights? (New York: Routledge, 2005).
Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1971).
Searle, John R., The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin,
1995).
Sypnowich, Christine, ‘Cosmopolitans, Cosmopolitanism, and Human
Flourishing’, in G. Brock and H. Brighouse (eds.), The Political
Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005

172
Note on the Authors

Rebecka Lettevall is Associate Professor of Intellectual History

and Research Leader at the Centre for Baltic and East European
Studies at Södertörn University College. She defended her doctoral
thesis entitled En europeisk kosmopolit: En idéhistorisk studie av
Immanuel Kants Om den eviga freden och dess verkningshistoria
in Lund in 2001, a study of Kant’s work Zum ewigen Frieden.
More recently, Dr. Lettevall’s research has focused on Kant’s po-
litical philosophy and on the history of the concept of peace and
cosmopolitanism.

My Klockar Linder is a Ph.D. student at the Department of His-

tory of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University. She is currently
working on a doctoral thesis investigating the formation of a Swed-
ish cultural policy in the early 1970s.

Hans Ruin is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University Col-

lege. He has published Enigmatic Origins: Tracing the Theme of
Historicity through Heidegger’s Work (1994), Herakleitos Frag-
ment (with H. Rehnberg, 1997), Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpreta-
tion (co-edited with D. Zahavi and S. Heinämaa) and En kommen-
tar till Heideggers Varat och tiden (2005). He is involved in a re-
search project on the concept of Bildung entitled ’Det egna och det
främmande – om bildningsbegreppets aktualitet’.

Carola Häntsch has been an academic teacher and philosophy

researcher at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University of Greifswald
since 1985. Her thesis discusses the influence of the Hegelian phi-
losophy in Finland, exemplified by the Finnish philosopher and
politician J. V. Snellman. Her research focus is on the philosophy
of Northern and Eastern Europe, especially on the interpretations of
the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in Sweden and Finland (1800–
2000). She is preparing an anthology and a monograph on the
Swedish exile-philosopher Thomas Thorild (1759-1808).

173
Andreas Önnerfors defended his thesis entitled Swedish Pomera-
nia – Cultural Encounters and Identification 1720–1815 in Lund in
2003 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department
of Cultural Studies at the University of Lund in Sweden. He is con-
ducting a research project on eighteenth-century Swedish freema-
sonry and its continental connections, and he is also working on an
edition of the writings of the Swedish exile-philosopher Thomas
Thorild. Dr. Önnerfors teaches courses in European and Scandina-
vian Area Studies.

Jessica Parland-von Essen is Acting Lecturer at the Department

of History at the University of Helsinki. Her Ph.D. thesis treats the
education of the daughters of the nobility in Northern Europe in the
late 18th century. She is a research librarian at the Swedish Society
of Literature in Finland. Her current research occupation is on the
HENRIK database (books and their owners in Finland up to 1809).

David Östlund teaches Intellectual History at Stockholm Univer-

sity, and has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and
Södertörn University College, Stockholm. His research has mainly
dealt with the interplay between ideas of social reform and ideas of
business management from the end of the nineteenth century to the
mid-twentieth century in the US and in Sweden, and with theoreti-
cal and methodological problems within the historiography of
ideas.

On-Kwok Lai is Professor at the School of Policy Studies, Kwan-

sei Gakuin University, Japan, with an honorary professorship in
Social Policy and fellowship in Urban Planning at the University of
Hong Kong. He has taught and researched in Germany, China and
New Zealand. He has published over 100 journal papers/book-
chapters on environmental, social and urban issues in Asia and
Europe, and has been invited as a speaker for UNESCO and WHO
conferences.

174
Peter Kemp is Professor of Philosophy at the Danish School of
Education, University of Århus. He has written articles and books
on a number of subjects and languages and has introduced modern
French philosophy in Scandinavia. Besides bioethics he has re-
cently been working on the connection between education, global-
ization and cosmopolitanism and on the philosophy of international
law.

Lena Halldenius was awarded her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Lund

University in 2001. She is a Torgny Segerstedt Pro Futura Fellow
at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala,
Associate Professor of Ethics and Human Rights at Malmö Univer-
sity, and Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

175
Index

A D
Addams, Jane, 10, 97, 99, 100, 101, Derrida, Jacques, 41, 149
102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, Dewey, John, 101, 102, 103
109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, Diogenes Laertius, 18, 35, 36, 40
116 Diogenes of Sinope, 5, 18, 40, 42, 44,
Alexander the Great, 44 146
Anderson, James, 67, 70 Dobson, Andrew, 165
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 97 Du Bois, W.E.B., 116, 117
Aristotle, 19, 34, 38, 40, 41, 42, 146,
152 E
Armfelt, Augusta, 93, 94
Armfelt, Gustaf Mauritz, 93 Epictetus, 44
Arrianus, 44 Epinay, Madame d’, 91

B F
Bacon, Francis, 84 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 148
Bauman, Zygmund, 28 Forster, Georg, 17
Beaumont, Madame Le Prince de, 91, Fougeret de Monbron, 8, 21, 22, 23, 24,
92 25, 28, 29
Beck, Ulrich, 6, 13, 97, 115, 149
Bentham, Jeremy, 147 G
Bismarck, Otto von, 99 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 16, 17
Bodin, Jean, 143 Genlis, Madame de, 89, 91
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 78
C Grotius, Hugo, 143, 145
Calhoun, Craig, 137 Gustavus III, 87, 88, 92, 93
Catherine II, 92
Cavallar, Georg, 14 H
Chantillon, Madame de, 91 Habermas, Jürgen, 55, 149
Charles XII, 87 Hedvig Charlotte Elisabet, Princess of
Cheneval, Francis, 151 Holstein, 92
Choffin, David-Etiènne, 92 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 45,
Cicero, 146 46, 47, 48, 54
Comte, Auguste, 111 Held, David, 126, 149, 160
Condillac, Ètienne Bonnot de, 89 Heraclitus, 8, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40,
43, 45, 49
Hesiod, 36

177
Hobbes, Thomas, 150, 151, 152, 153, R
169, 170
Homer, 35 Ramsay, André Michel de, 9, 67, 68,
Hume, David, 168 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80, 85
Rawls, John, 54, 168, 170
Reagan, Ronald, 161
K Rice, Harriet, 117
Kant, Immanuel, 8, 9, 15, 16, 21, 24, Ricœur, Paul, 152
25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 41, 46, 47, 51, Robespierre, Maximilien de, 161
52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, Rollin, Charles, 91
62, 94, 99, 108, 147, 148, 150, 151, Roob, Alexander, 73
152, 164, 167, 169, 170 Rosenau, James N., 125
Keck, Margaret E., 124 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 25, 150, 151
Kemp, Peter, 159, 162, 169
Kierkegaard, Sören, 49 S
Kleingeld, Pauline, 17, 71
Koselleck, Reinhart, 9, 10, 16, 17, 65, Saint-Pierre, Abbé de, 151
66, 85 Schlereth, Thomas J., 15
Kotzebue, August, 20 Schmitt, Carl, 152
Seneca, 146
Sikkink, Kathryn, 124
L Simon, Josef, 9, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59, 61
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 151 Sparre, Fredrik, 90
Lincoln, Abraham, 112 Stedingk, Theresia von, 94
Locke, John, 89
T
M Terence, 33
Marcus Aurelius, 43, 44, 45, 48, 146 Thomas, William I., 103
Marx, Karl, 31, 52 Thompson, John B., 125
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 112, 113, 114 Tolstoy, Leo, 100, 103
Mead, George Herbert, 103, 116 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 99
Meinecke, Friedrich, 99
U
N Uhlin, Anders, 124
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 54
Novalis, 17, 72 V,W
Nussbaum, Martha, 13, 147, 149
Weber, Max, 148
Wieland, Christoph Martin, 9, 74, 75,
P 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85,
Parmenides, 36 99
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 54 Vitoria, Francisco, 143
Piper, Nicola, 124 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 18, 54
Plato, 36, 146 Wolff, Christian, 150, 151, 152
Pogge, Thomas, 166 Voltaire, 15
Pufendorf, Samuel, 143, 145
Pythagoras, 35, 36 Z
Zeno of Citium, 39, 40

178
Södertörn Academic Studies

1. Helmut Müssener & Frank-Michael Kirsch (Hrsg.), Nachbarn im

Ostseeraum unter sich. Vorurteile, Klischees und Stereotypen in
Texten, 2000
2. Jan Ekecrantz & Kerstin Olofsson (eds.), Russian Reports: Studies in
Post-Communist Transformation of Media and Journalism, 2000
3. Kekke Stadin (ed.), Society, Towns and Masculinity: Aspects on
Early Modern Society in the Baltic Area, 2000
4. Bernd Henningsen et al. (eds.), Die Inszenierte Stadt. Zur Praxis und
Theorie kultureller Konstruktionen, 2001.
5. Michal Bron (ed.), Jews and Christians in Dialogue II: Identity,
Tolerance, Understanding, 2001
6. Frank-Michael Kirsch et al. (Hrsg.), Nachbarn im Ostseeraum über
einander. Wandel der Bilder, Vorurteile und Stereotypen?, 2001
7. Birgitta Almgren, Illusion und Wirklichkeit. Individuelle und
kollektive Denk-muster in nationalsozialistischer Kulturpolitik und
Germanistik in Schweden 1928–1945, 2001
8. Denny Vågerö (ed.), The Unknown Sorokin: His Life in Russia and
the Essay on Suicide, 2002
9. Kerstin W. Shands (ed.), Collusion and Resistance: Women Writing
in English, 2002, (Also No 1 in the series English Studies)
10. Elfar Loftsson & Yonhyok Choe (eds.), Political Representation and
Participation in Transitional Democracies: Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania, 2003
11. Birgitta Almgren (Hrsg.), Bilder des Nordens in der Germanistik
1929–1945: Wissenschaftliche Integrität oder politische
Anpassung?, 2002
12. Christine Frisch, Von Powerfrauen und Superweibern:
Frauenpopulärliteratur der 90er Jahre in Deutschland und
Schweden, 2003
13. Hans Ruin & Nicholas Smith (red.), Hermeneutik och tradition.
Gadamer och den grekiska filosofin, 2003, (Also published as No 1
in the series Södertörn Philosophical Studies)

179
14. Mikael Lönnborg et al. (eds.), Money and Finance in Transition:
Research in Contemporary and Historical Finance, 2003
15. Kerstin Shands et al. (eds.), Notions of America: Swedish
Perspectives, 2004
16. Karl-Olov Arnstberg & Thomas Borén (eds.), Everyday Economy in
Russia, Poland and Latvia, 2003
17. Johan Rönnby (ed.), By the Water. Archeological Perspectives on
Human Strategies around the Baltic Sea, 2003
18. Baiba Metuzale-Kangere (ed.), The Ethnic Dimension in Politics and
Culture in the Baltic Countries 1920–1945, 2004
19. Ulla Birgegård & Irina Sandomirskaja (eds.), In Search of an Order:
Mutual Representations in Sweden and Russia during the Early Age
of Reason, 2004
20. Ebba Witt-Brattström (ed.), The New Woman and the Aesthetic
Opening: Unlocking Gender in Twentieth-Century Texts, 2004
21. Michael Karlsson, Transnational Relations in the Baltic Sea Region,
2004
22. Ali Haji Ghasemi, The Transformation of the Swedish Welfare
System: Fact or Fiction?: Globalisation, Institutions and Welfare
State Change in a Social Democratic Regime, 2004
23. Erik A. Borg (ed.), Globalization, Nations and Markets:
Challenging Issues in Current Research on Globalization, 2005
24. Stina Bengtsson & Lars Lundgren, The Don Quixote of Youth
Culture: Media Use and Cultural Preferences Among Students in
Estonia and Sweden, 2005
25. Hans Ruin, Kommentar till Heideggers Varat och tiden, 2005, (Also
published as No 2 in the series Södertörn Philosophical Studies)
26. Людмила Ферм, Вариативное беспредложное глагольное
управление в русском языке XVIII века, 2005
27. Christine Frisch, Modernes Aschenputtel und Anti-James-Bond:
Gender-Konzepte in deutschsprachigen Rezeptionstexten zu Liza
Marklund und Henning Mankell, 2005
28. Ursula Naeve-Bucher, Die Neue Frau tanzt: Die Rolle der tanzenden
Frau in deutschen und schwedischen literarischen Texten aus der
ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, 2005
29. Göran Bolin et al. (eds.), The Challenge of the Baltic Sea Region:
Culture, Ecosystems, Democracy, 2005
30. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback & Hans Ruin (eds.), The Past’s
Presence: Essays on the Historicity of Philosophical Thought, 2006,
(Also published as No 3 in the series Södertörn Philosophical
Studies)

180
31. Maria Borgström och Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga (red.),
Gränsöverskridande identiteter i globaliseringens tid: Ungdomar,
migration och kampen för fred, 2006
32. Janusz Korek (ed.), From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland
and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective, 2007
33. Jonna Bornemark (red.), Det främmande i det egna: filosofiska essä-
er om bildning och person, 2007, (Also published as No 4 in the se-
ries Södertörn Philosophical Studies)
34. Sofia Johansson, Reading Tabloids: Tabloid Newspapers and Their
Readers, 2007
35. Patrik Åker, Symboliska platser i kunskapssamhället: Internet, högre
lärosäten och den gynnade geografin, 2008, (Även publicerad som
nummer 2008:1 i serien Mediestudier vid Södertörns högskola)
36. Kerstin W. Shands (ed.), Neither East Nor West: Postcolonial Es-
says on Literature, Culture and Religion, 2008 (Also published as
No 3 in the series English Studies)
37. Rebecka Lettevall and My Klockar Linder (eds.) The Idea of Kos-
mopolis: History, philosophy and politics of world citizenship. 2008

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181
 ■ SÖDERTÖRN ACADEMIC STUDIES 37

The Idea of Kosmopolis

History, philosophy and politics of world citizenship
Contemporary discussions on cosmopolitanism are often based on older
assumptions that have become invisible or hard to unearth. This volume
explores the idea of kosmopolis by placing it into different historical,
philosophical, social, and political contexts. By bringing together different
views on and aspects of cosmopolitanism, the volume aims at contribut-
ing to new understandings of kosmopolis and the resulting cosmopolitan
ideal, and of the fears this concept may generate.
The nine contributors discuss kosmopolis within the contexts of
philosophers such as Heraclitus and Kant, the thoughts and texts of the
nobility, intellectual thoughts from the Enlightenment, contemporary
political institutions, and grass root cosmopolitanism. The intent is to
illustrate how the meaning of »cosmopolitanism« is influenced not only
by its history but also by its specific contexts.

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