Mais, sans la bêtise, point d'intelligence.
La bêtise francaise a de nombreuses facettes. L'une de celles qui m'affligent le plus est la moquerie face à l'anglais. Voilà une nation entière qui a décidé de se moquer de toute personne que essaierait de parler correctement cette langue.
Un petit esprit se doit de tout rapetisser autour de lui pour se sentir plus grand.
Les imbéciles ont besoin de rabaisser l'intelligence en dessous de leur niveau afin de se sentir supérieur.
La vérité des imbéciles s'impose inévitablement car une fausseté simpliste surpassera tojours une réalité complexe.
It is here my contention that the object/concept “nation” appeared in relation to the discourse of natural law, and also in relation to the one of society. There is at the same time the universal dimension of natural law, and the particularist dimension of society present in the conception of nation. The universal dimension is formed by the idea of the nation being the universal civitas of free and equal men notwithstanding any question of origins (ethnic, social, cultural, etc.). As such the nation united all the French, who were hitherto separated into different regions, and also included foreigners. The social dimension is present in the systematic determination of the various nations according to which countries they live in. As such, nations are separated and distinct from each others, forming closed societies.
In France the concept of nation was first understood, as in other countries, in the feudal context. As such there were several nations, identified as peoples, inside a territory. The concept was equal to the German understanding of Volk. During the eighteenth century, this understanding changed towards more conceptual unification understanding the nation around a cultural (language) and political (state) centre.
A seventeenth-century dictionary defines a nation as “ un grand peuple habitant une même étendue de terre renfermée en certaines limites ou même sous une certaine domination”[1] (Delon 1987, 127). Already in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694) “La nation est constituée par tous les habitants d’un même État, d’un même pays, qui vivent sous les mêmes lois et usent le même langage ”[2] (Dann 1997, 762). Another example of this unitary conception of the nation is in Aubert de La Chesnaye-des-Bois’ Dictionnaire historique, III (1767): “This word, in its primitive signification, means a number of families coming out of a same stalk, or born in a same country” (Dann 1997, 761). This could look as a conception of the nation as ethno-nation, but he also adds: “Several peoples form one and only nation (civitas)… the Picard, the Normand, the Bretons, etc. are as many peoples that form part of the French nation” (Dann 1997, 762).
Thus, the word nation becomes associated with the idea of a political community defined by its physical members. The nation is a group of individuals. Despite the diversity of its components, the later are all part of the same nation because they live in the same state, understood territorially as the legal country where the same laws apply. The nation is thus a territorially bounded community. The unity provided by the concept of the nation is not antithetic to the ethnic or cultural diversity of its members. However, this unity is, among other things, based on a single common language. However, not every political community territorially and legally bounded is a nation. Something else is needed since the “French nation” is composed of regional parts, and these regional parts do not constitute several small nations. The concept of nation is attached to the idea of sovereignty over the land, that only the absolute sovereignty of the king could finally claim. This is why the French nation equals the French kingdom; nationals are royal subjects of the king.
The relation between the concept of the nation and absolutism comes to an end during the eighteenth century. This search for a national unity inside a political space is not without connection to the political reality of the time. Absolutists argued that the nation was represented by the king, who acts on her behalf. Against absolutism, philosophers of the Enlightenment developed the idea of a nation detached from the king. So the idea of nation became detached from the idea of people, as Roubaud has it in Nouveaux synonymes: “La nation est le corps des citoyens, le peuple est l’ensemble des regnicoles”[3] (Dann 1997, 763). The “people” is therefore what constitutes the subjects of the king, but the king does not embody the nation anymore. The nation became associated throughout the century with ideas stemming from natural law, a space of freedom and equality. It became a political concept that served the purpose of detaching the king from absolute power. As such despotism (a euphemism for absolutism) is against the idea of nation as the article “Représentant “ in the Encyclopédie, XIV (1765) puts it: “In a despotic state, the head of the nation is everything, the nation is nothing; one person’s will makes law, society is not represented”.
It is essential to understand that the concept of nation could not have developed outside the discourse of natural law. It is just as essential to understand that it developed within the discourse of absolutism, and then left this discourse to be infused by natural law ideas. Even though the new concept of the nation was opposed to absolutism, the regions and their inhabitants did not become nations. The conception of the sovereignty of the prince as the unifying and centrifugal core for defining what the nation is remained. This particularistic tendency, or social tendency was nonetheless mixed with the universalistic conception of natural law. Not only natural law, but also the natural right of revolution, as bourgeois societies became frustrated with the blocking of social promotion. Sieyès claims that the nation is composed of citizens equal in rights, i.e. the people. According to Dann, Sieyès is inspired by Rousseau’s idea of a “revolutionary natural right”, and defines the nation as a “society of free and equal men that organise themselves in an autonomous way” (1997, 764).
If the nation is detached from the king and its royal subjects, what constitutes it then? Sieyès theorised the concept of the nation to civil society with the idea of a “Third state”. “ Le Tiers a en lui tout ce qu’il faut pour former une nation complète… Il est l’homme fort et robuste dont un bras est encore enchaîné”[4] (Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état ?). This became a reality as one could hear in the streets of Paris, during the general states of 17 June 1789: “Vive la nation du Tiers état !”[5] (Dann 1997, 764). The nation is the people that compose the third state, the commoners, as opposed to the nobles and the clergy.
Nation is built around the state; it is a nation-state-building as opposed to e.g. the German Kulturnation. Vattel for instance starts his treatise on the law of nations by defining what he means by “nation or state” (Vattel 1773, 1, §1). Thus state and nation are considered as equal objects. Furthermore, they are defined as being “… political bodies, societies of men, united together…”.
The nation as a political concept becomes then very close to the other concepts of patrie and, later, republic and citizen. As such a good “patriot” defends the nation. Later, the nation is formed in a republic composed of citizens.
As a formed concept, the nation becomes an object of study. As such, Montesquieu investigates the spirit of the laws of various “nations”. Throughout a vast variety of texts nations are analysed as objects. Voltaire attempts a universal history in his Essai sur les moeurs, and, as a strategy for denouncing the Eurocentric conceptions of the not yet “cosmopolitanism” of his time, starts with the nation of China, before attempting the history of other nations. His history breaks with the traditional focus on kings and queens, and focuses instead on nations, i.e. on the individuals that compose them.
This concept/object perpetuates itself discursively, rendering the object yet more real, and the concept more scientific. Especially when embedded in the scientific paradigm described above. Nations are thus “natural” they were formed when man exited the state of nature to enter society.
The French revolution gave a political reality to the concept/object that could then become a real object of study. For the first time in Europe a national constitution is written, and with it a Declaration of Human rights. This marks the triumph of natural law embedded in the concept of the nation, the community of freedom and equality.
Article 3 of the Declaration of human ritghts states that « le principe de toute souveraineté réside essentiellement dans la Nation. Nul corps, nul individu ne peut exercer d’autorité qui n’en émane expressément. »
La nation a signifié tout parmi nous, dès l’instant que nous avons été réellement une nation […] Tout appartient à la nation, donc tout est national. Aussi depuis la révolution notre manière d’être physique et morale est devenue entièrement nationale ; notre costume, depuis la cocarde jusqu’aux boucles, est national […] Notre façon de penser, Dieu sait comme elle est nationale ! [6] (Chantreau, Dictionnaire national ou anecdotique…, 1790) (Dann 1997, 764).
The idea of nation becomes a subject of love and a way of being, and, most importantly, a “way of thinking”.
The concept of nation bares with it a notion of fraternity. A mobilisation in all aspects of social life was felt after the revolution. The revolutionaries nationalised politics, nationalised the state, making it “one and indivisible”. The nation was an all-encompassing notion gathering Frenchmen
However, this does not last, as the concept of natural law is being rejected from the successive constitutions and Declarations of human rights. In the constitution of 1793, the concept of society replaces the concept of nature, and rights can only exist in a society. By the same token, the concept of nation is being replaced by the one of “people”. Sovereignty becomes “popular sovereignty” and not “national sovereignty”. Later on, the “socialisation” of the term nation, or its “de-jusnaturalisation”, reintegrated the national back in the discourse. And, today the dichotomy between “national sovereignty” and “popular sovereignty” is still present in the constitution of the fifth republic as article 3 states: “National sovereignty shall belong to the people”.
Works cited:
Dann, Otto. “Nation.” In Dictionnaire européen des Lumières, edited by Michel Delon, 761-765. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997.
Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. London: Harper Collins, 1996.
Delon, Michel. “« Nation ».” In Nouvelle histoire des idées politiques, edited by Pascal Ory, 127-135. Paris: Hachette, 1987.
[1] “a great people inhabiting a same area of land closed within particular limits or under a particular domination”. My translation throughout.
[2] “the nation is constituted by all the inhabitants of a same state, a same country, who live under the same laws and use the same language”.
[3] ”The nation is the ensemble of citizens, the people is the ensemble of regnicoles”.
[4] “The Third [state] has in him everything that is needed in order to form a complete nation… he is the strong and robust man whose arm is yet in chain.”
[5] “Long live the nation of the Third state!”
[6] “The nation signified everything among us, as soon as we really became a nation… Everything belongs to the nation, hence everything is national. Also, since the revolution our physical and moral way of being has become entirely national; our costume, from the cocarde to the boucles, is national… Our way of thinking, God knows how national it is!”
The method used here is Foucault's archaeology as described in The Archaeology of Knowledge. I consider cosmopolitanism as a discourse composed of objects, concepts, strategies, and "énoncés". The word cosmopolite or cosmopolitan is not taken in relation to cosmopolitanism for diverse reasons explained elsewhere, mainly because cosmopolitanism as a body of theory did not exist at the time - the word "cosmopolitanism" only appeared in French during the second half of the nineteenth century. I consider here the "object/concept" cosmopolite.
The history of the use of the word “cosmopolite” or “cosmopolitain” has been analysed elsewhere by Hazard (1930), whose careful noting of the use of the word is here used. The word appeared in 1560 in De la République des Turcs et, là où l’occasion s’offrera, des mœurs et des lois de tous muhamedistes, par Guillaume Postel, cosmopolite. Guillaume Postel wanted to teach the king about Turkey. In this text, he associates the idea of universal peace between France and Turkey, with the idea of being a “cosmopolite”: it is not possible to accomplish peace in the world without understanding and knowing anything about the enemy. Henri Estienne used the word “cosmopolitain” in his Deux dialogues du nouveau langage françois italinizé (1578), opposing the cosmopolitain to the member of the court, too extricated a world to his taste.
There is thus an idea of being a cosmopolitan when one attempts to go beyond the local, the particularistic, either for learning another culture and promote peace between two countries, or by denouncing a society that is locked, confined within its own self.
The word disappeared during the seventeenth century when it was only sporadically used, in some obscure treatises of “hermetics”. The 1694 dictionary did not mention it. Lenglet du Fresnoy wrote an Histoire de la philosophie hermétique in which he told the story of an Englishman or a Scot, Alexandre Sethon aka Sidon the cosmopolitan. After the death of Sethon the cosmopolitan, his treatise is published in Praga by another character under the title Traité du cosmopolite, où, après avoir donné une idée d’une société de philosophes, on explique dans plusieurs lettres de cet auteur la théorie et la pratique des vérités hermétiques.
It is thus really during the eighteenth century that the word reappears and becomes fashionable even. Trévoux in his 1721 dictionary defines as such the article “cosmopolitain, cosmopolitaine”:
Cosmopolita, cosmopolitanus. On dit quelquefois en badinant, pour signifier un homme qui n’a pas de demeure fixe, ou bien un homme qui nulle part n’est étranger. Il vient de κόσμος, le monde, et πόλις, ville, et signifie un homme dont tout le monde est la ville ou la patrie. Un ancien philosophe étant interrogé d’où il était répondit : je suis un cosmopolite, c’est-à-dire citoyen de l’univers. L’auteur inconnu d’un excellent traité de chimie, intitulé Lumen chymicum, s’est donné le nom de cosmopolitain.
On dit ordinairement cosmopolite; et comme on dit néapolitain et constantinopolitain, l’analogie demanderait qu’on dît cosmopolitain (Hazard 1930, 356).
All the ingredients of the various aspects around which the word “cosmopolite” later evolved are here present: travelling stranger nowhere; cosmos and polis, here the term polis is not yet the political polis but is the city or the patrie; citizen of the universe; unknown authorship; analogy cosmopolitan/national; reference to the philosopher Diogenes of Synope.
The use of the word “cosmopolitan” to designate a traveller dates from the eighteenth century. It is not necessarily an obvious understanding. The references to Diogenes of Synope and Socrates as the origin of the word in Greek, does not imply any notion of travel. They were both strangers in their city, but not wanderers. How the word “cosmopolitan” became associated with travelling is a history to be told elsewhere however. It can be assumed here that understanding a cosmopolite as someone attempting to escape one’s own localism, and to learn other cultures, involves a contact with others, which subsumes travelling. However, here the word designates a constant traveller, someone without a fixed home. The understanding is put in relation to the way the etymology of the word is taken: a man whose town (or patrie) is the world. If the whole world is a town, then the individual countries are homes, in which the cosmopolite lives but moves from. Therefore, he has no fixed town. It is important here to note, that the sense patrie is not yet the one of a political space, but the very local as Valentin Jamerey-Duval understands it (cf. section “Patrie”).
The adjective cosmopolitan is not only used for persons, it also described the transnational nature of things, such as in Lemercier de la Rivière’s Ordre naturel et essentiel des libertés politiques (1762):
Ce décroissement sera d’autant plus prompt, que l’industrie est cosmopolite (t. II, p. 518). Ce terme de cosmopolite ne doit pas être regardé comme une injure ; je parle ici des choses, et non des personnes, de la profession du commerçant et point du tout de ceux qui l’exercent (p. 563) (Hazard 1930, 360).
The adjective “cosmopolitan” thus describes a person or a thing travelling across countries. It is synonymous with what would today be called “transnational”.
It is around that time, according to Hazard, that the word becomes common; from 1760 on the term is widely used albeit in two opposite way, being either pejorative or honorific (1930, 359). My contention is that the reason for this is to be found in the context of that time. The word reappeared during the eighteenth century, as a synonym of traveller. “Touring Europe” is part of the education of the elite, a “must” in order to participate to the “Republic of letters”. The philosophes praise this sense of travelling and relativising one’s own culture and beliefs. The discourse of natural law is making this an honorific title because natural law praises the universality of humankind whose very nature is to be free. As such all men are equal. However, it is also inside the discourse of natural law that this quality becomes a problem: the natural rights can only be preserved within a social contract, a voluntary association necessary for the respect of natural law. The political society created is then a patrie, the political space where the general will is expressed – or where the sum of all particular interests meet and a general interest in then formed – and it can only be defended and maintained by virtuous citizens who love this patrie. Morality is an important part of the political theory, and citizens must be educated to be moral individuals, who cherish the patrie and work to construct and implement it rather than abuse and destroy it. In this context, a person who chooses to travel and thus refuses to adopt any patrie is not a good citizen.
The word became also associated with the philosophes, so much so, that cosmopolitan becomes synonymous with wisdom. In Les Philosophes, comédie en trois actes, 1760, a play about the philosophes of the Encyclopédie two protagonists exchange the following lines:
Cydalise :
Monsieur Dortidius, dit-on quelques nouvelles ?
Dortidius :
Je ne m’occupe point des rois, de leurs querelles ;
Que me fait le succès d’un siège ou d’un combat ?
Je laisse à nos oisifs ces affaires d’État.
Je m’embarasse peu du pays que j’habite :
Le véritable sage est un cosmopolite (Hazard 1930, 359).
In this quote, one must understand the general criticism against the law of nations (jus gentium) that served as a hypocritical veil for princes and kings to conquer one another’s territory. In this sense, wisdom imposes detachment and contempt for these “affaires d’Etat”. Being so detached from a country’s state of affairs is also a cosmopolitan attitude in that a cosmopolitan does not give preference to any country’s fate. One must therefore note that the wisdom is in the criticism of the abusive use of the law of nation, jus gentium, which should reflect the principles of natural law, instead of Machiavelli’s. The play is however sarcastic and criticising the philosophes. In other works dated after 1760, the use of the epithet “cosmopolite” is indeed also related to a certain claim of wisdom, some sort of guarantee that the cosmopolitan speaking is using universal reason (see the paragraph on cosmopolitan authorship).
In the Encyclopédie (1758), it is defined as such:
COSMOPOLITAIN ou COSMOPOLITE, (Gram. & Philosoph.) On se sert quelquefois de ce nom en plaisantant, pour signifier un homme qui n'a point de demeure fixe, ou bien un homme qui n'est étranger nulle part. Il vient de χάσμας, monde, &, πόλις, ville.
Comme on demandoit à un ancien philosophe d'où il étoit, il répondit : Je suis Cosmopolite, c'est-à-dire citoyen de l'univers. Je préfere, disoit un autre, ma famille à moi, ma patrie à ma famille, & le genre humain à ma patrie. Voyez PHILOSOPHE.
There are two dimensions in this definition. The first one is the grammatical use of the word “cosmopolitan” or “cosmopolite”, and the second, is the philosophical one. Grammatically, it is used as specified in the first part of the definition: to designate a person without a stable residence, or who is nowhere a stranger. It is added that it has a playful use, i.e. that nobody really is without a stable residence or nowhere a stranger. The second sense, in philosophy, is new. It refers to Socrates’ answer as to where he came from: being a cosmopolitan, i.e. a citizen of the world. The second reference is to Montesquieu in L’esprit des lois also reintroducing the stoic conception of concentric circles for love to kinds: family, then homeland, then humankind, with humankind as the most important.
A good example of the first meaning of “cosmopolite”, is to be found with Fougeret de Monbron. However, this “cosmopolite” is also associated with some kind of egoism, selfishness, self-centredness as irremediably epitomised by the successful and influential novel Le cosmopolite ou le citoyen du monde (1750). The first sentence is famous, and has been taken by Byron as the epigraph of Childe Harold. But the rest of the paragraph, from which stems the first sentence, has thus been eluded by the fame of this sentence, although it is of primordial importance for the historiography of the word “cosmopolite”:
L’univers est une espèce de livre dont on n’a lu que la première page, quand on n’a vu que son pays. J’en ai feuilleté un assez grand nombre que j’ai trouvées presque également mauvaises. Cet examen ne m’a pas été infructueux. Je haïssais ma patrie, toutes les impertinences des peuples divers parmi lesquels j’ai vécu m’ont réconcilié avec elle (Fougeret de Monbron 1970 [1750], 35).
The novel is a traveller’s tale of some sort, but where the traveller is like Diogenes, searching for the honest man with a lantern, throughout Europe (including Turkey), only to find him nowhere. In a highly moralist tone, close to other moralists writing a little later such as Rousseau, Mably or Mercier, Fougeret analyses humankind, severely judging it. Humankind is united in its wickedness, and dishonour is the most common vice across nations. Fougeret distinguishes himself from the rest by not possessing some of these vices as he does not transvestite his true wicked nature through the traits of a gentilhomme (Fougeret de Monbron 1970 [1750], 59). As a consequence, Fougeret loves but himself : “J’avoue donc de bonne foi que, de toutes les créatures vivantes, je celle que j’aime le plus sans m’en estimer davantage” (Fougeret de Monbron 1970 [1750], 60). So the logical conclusion to draw from Fougeret’s tale is that wickedness being equal around the world, one may just as well love one’s own country. But this is not necessarily the conclusion that other thinkers drew. Another interpretation, and the one that became prevalent was that a cosmopolitan is superficial and not attached to any patrie. Indeed, Fougeret praises the condition of the traveller who is only meeting people long enough to get to know their qualities and make his own ones appreciated, but short enough not to deepen into each other’s defaults.
So in Fougeret’s account, a cosmopolite does despise one’s own country; but after a long journey, and several experiences, a cosmopolite discovers that his/her country was not that bad after all. However, the fact that a cosmopolitan despises his/her country remains. Added to this, other writings of the time used the term to erase any affiliation to any country. One could say with Foucault that by claiming a cosmopolitan “nationality”, the person aims at situating him/herself outside any situated discourse in order to prove a universal point. This is the reason why the dictionary mentioned the cosmopolite as a person without patrie.
A few years later, the word “cosmopolisme” appeared in L’Anglois à Paris. Le Cosmopolisme, publié à Londres….[1] (1770) by V. D. Musset Pathay :
Ce cosmopolite n’aspire nullement à nos honneurs littéraires ; son objet est rempli s’il contribue à maintenir l’intelligence entre des nations moins alliées qu’ennemies, et qui pourroient s’aimer autant qu’elles se craignent et s’estiment (Hazard 1930, 361).
The word is used again much later by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in his Néologie, ou vocabulaire des mots nouveaux, a renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles, year IX-1801 :
Cosmopolisme. Il faut aimer un lieu; l’oiseau lui-même, qui a en partage le domaine des airs, affectionne tel creux d’arbre ou de rocher. Celui qui est atteint de cosmopolisme est privé des plus doux sentiments qui appartiennent au cœur de l’homme.
Qui croirait que l’on peut exercer à Paris le Cosmopolisme, encore mieux que dans le reste de l’univers ?
Cosmopoliter. Parcourir l’univers (Hazard 1930).[2]
Thus the understanding that a cosmopolitan necessarily is a traveller without patrie, without a homeland, becomes accepted. There is even a “disease” associated to this: cosmopolism. A person who is “cosmopoliting” too much risks suffering from “cosmopolism”. But this definition is already long after 1795, outside the scope of this study, even if it illustrates very well the disqualification of cosmopolitans due to the growing necessity to love the patrie in order for morality to thrive in the newly instituted public institutions.
Indeed, why the cosmopolite is also perceived as a bad citizen is due to the evolution of the debate on political institutions. Here the grammatical use and the philosophical meaning became one. As Hazard notes (1930), it is in Rousseau’s writings that the word “cosmopolite” took a meaning in political philosophy. It can be added, that it is also due to Rousseau, that this meaning became negative, as a consequence of a) the confusion between the grammatical and the philosophical meanings of the word – the cosmopolite is a perpetual traveller without fixed residence, his patrie is the world – and b) his elaboration on the idea of moral and virtue as the necessary basis for the patrie – loving one’s patrie is important for the functioning of the state, so if a person is without any and constantly changing, this person is not a good patriot and therefore bad for the functioning of the state. This explains why in Rousseau’s thought, there is what has been called an “evolution” from a positive to a negative opinion on cosmopolitans. This requires a quick digression on Rousseau’s political thought.
Rousseau developed the idea that in order to function, institutions must be based on values and morals that members of a society must cherish, in particular in Discours sur les sciences et les arts[3] (1750), Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes[4] (1754), and the Discours sur l’économie politique[5] (1755). One must however here remember with Darnton (1996) that Rousseau was not widely read, and therefore his ideas were not as influential yet as they then became after the revolution. However, Rousseau’s ideas were not so idiosyncratic, and although he made his own concepts with the “general will” and the introduction of citizenship in relation to popular sovereignty, he is representative of the ideas of that time. If traditional historiography places him as a pre-romantic too early for his time, it is also because it is a nationalist historiography that did not consider the cosmopolitan elements in Rousseau’s political thought. So if Rousseau was not so influential, others like Mably were, expressing more or less the same ideas.
Rousseau’s thought is fundamentally cosmopolitan, in the philosophical sense, in line with the thought of the time. However, still in line with his time, it is anti-cosmopolitans. It is cosmopolitan because Rousseau’s political thought was meant to be a general system of government that he unfortunately did not manage to achieve. The general system included the social contract as an element of the whole directed at what we today call “international relations”. For the first, Rousseau is following the criticism of his time in complaining that natural law had disappeared from the law of nations (jus gentium), which is only composed of a few conventions between societies. In this sense, only civil law is effectively applicable to men as citizens. No other law, and unfortunately not natural law, is applicable. Between societies, the law of nations has lost all strength, and it only exists in the mind of a few cosmopolitan souls:
Le droit civil étant ainsi devenu la régle commune des Citoyens, la Loy de Nature n’eut plus lieu qu’entre les diverses Sociétés, où, sous le nom de Droit des gens, elle fut tempérée par quelques conventions tacites pour rendre le commerce possible et suppléer à la commisération naturelle, qui, perdant de Société à Société presque toute la force qu’elle avoit d’homme à homme, ne réside plus que dans quelques grandes Ames Cosmopolites, qui franchissent les barrières imaginaires qui séparent les Peuples, et qui, à l’exemple de l’être souverain qui les a créés, embrassent tout le Genre-humain dans leur bienveillance (Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes 1964 [1754], 178).
In this sense, “cosmopolite” refers to a person caring for humankind, and considering borders between societies as imaginary, in comparison to the reality of the unity of humankind. It was the same meaning that Musset Pathay used in the work above mentioned.
The second argument for the cosmopolitanism of Rousseau’s political thought, is that it, still in line with the political thought of his time, includes the understanding of a general society – of humankind – composed of all the particular societies – of nations. Through the concept of “general will”, Rousseau introduces the fact that the “political body” is a moral person with a will of its own, which always aims at the conservation of its members. This principle stops for other “political bodies” because for them, this general will is then a particular will. However, justice is still applied because it finds its source in natural law:
… car alors la grande ville du monde devient le corps politique dont la loi de nature est toûjours la volonté générale, et dont les états et peuples divers ne sont que des membres individuels[6] (Rousseau 1964 [1755], 245).
However, saying that Rousseau’s political thought is cosmopolitan is not contradictory with the fact that he despises cosmopolitans and does not mean that he is favouring cosmopolitans. Because of the duality of the word “cosmopolite”, it is at the same time a positive (perceived as positive) philosophical position in which a consideration for humankind is taken, and a negative sense for a person travelling without attachment to any patrie. As the patrie becomes the value for a republic, as Montesquieu famously stated in L’Esprit des lois (Montesquieu 1951 [1748], IV, 6 p. 266-267), the cosmopolite becomes an anti-republican, a bad citizen. Indeed, citizens must be educated to develop the cardinal republican virtue: love for the patrie and the laws. Hence in Rousseau’s treatise on education L’Emile, I:
Défiez-vous de ces cosmopolites qui vont chercher au loin dans leurs livres des devoirs qu’ils dédaignent de remplir autour d’eux.
A new reproach is addressed to the philosophical cosmopolite: there is a double morality in looking too much for the good of the general society of humankind, a highly theoretical and improbable project, while forgetting to fulfil their duties in the particular society they live in. Again it is the constant traveller without patrie that is being reproached, but the philosophical notion is being mixed with this one. Again in the Social contract Rousseau
This is why and how the word entered the dictionary with less and less difference between the grammatical and the philosophical meanings. The official acceptance of the word in French arrived in the fourth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762); the second (1718), and third (1740) editions did not register the word. It shows how this duality in the use of the word is being reproduced, with even less evidence in the distinction:
Cosmopolite. S. m. Celui qui n’adopte point de patrie. Un cosmopolite n’est pas un bon citoyen (Hazard 1930, 360).
The cosmopolite is a constant traveller who does not have a patrie, and since loving the patrie is an important moral act of the citizen for the political functioning of society, the cosmopolitan is therefore not a good citizen. One has to note here, that the dictionary refers to “adopting” a patrie, implying that it is a matter of individual choice. Before the nationalisation of the concept of patrie, it is still possible to think that a person is not given by birth or by blood a patrie, without a possibility to choose. What is reproached to the cosmopolite, understood as the constant traveller, is to refuse to choose any. Another point to note is that the definition of the dictionary is much less focusing on the philosophical side of the word, which seems to have disappeared completely. As to the common use of the name – being a constant traveller – it only remains as the part in which it has a philosophical consequence: not having a patrie. This consequence is now taken solely as the definition of a cosmopolite, which entails another one: not being a good citizen in a time when the love of the patrie became an important moral and political aspect of political thought.
Works cited:
Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. London: Harper Collins, 1996.
Fougeret de Monbron, Louis-Charles. Le cosmopolite ou le citoyen du monde. Paris: Ducros, 1970 [1750].
Hazard, Pierre. “Cosmopolite.” In Mélanges d'histoire littéraire générale et comparée offerts à Fernand Baldensperger, 354-364. Paris: Libraire ancienne Honoré Champion, 1930.
[1] The Englishman in Paris, Cosmopolism, published in London…
[2] “Cosmopolism. One has to love some place; even the bird, who possesses in share to domain of the air, favours this
[3] Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.
[4] Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.
[5] Discourse on Political Economy.
[6] “… as then the great world city becomes the political body of which natural law is always the general will, and of which the various states and peoples are but individual members.”
The most pretentious piece of pseudo intellectual crap I have ever seen in my not so long life. There should be a law enforced to give a movie-goer the right and the possibility to actually claim the time wasted in watching such nonsense back to the producer. The only good side of this movie is to give you the thirst for living more intensely in order to achieve something that shall erase the blank void it irremeably left in your life.
A glimpse of the movie: It is a post-modern patchwork of some sort about all the types of revolutions and totalitarian regimes that have ever existed, brought to you in a single meaningless collection of clichés, stereotypes, images d’épinal, and lieux communs. Everything from absolutism, to communism, through Islamism, fascism and Nazism is involved, without the possibility of seeing any further elaborated political thought than “totalitarianism is a bad thing”, and “violence necessarily leads to more violence”, so “revolutions too are a bad thing” you know.
To sum up: unless you have recently come across a new word in your vocabulary that is “politics”, and had no clue that these things indeed were bad things, and unless you think that a patchwork of cinematographic, historial and literary references are the material to make a good movie, this movie will be a waste of time and probably will damage any intelligent thought you may have had immediately before the film started.
La culture générale, c'est la pop culture des classes moyennes.
I wrote a series of three articles about a so-called "West-Islam dialogue" last August for the Austrian e-zine Freies Magazin 5. There has been some mistake in the edition. It should be read in the following order: first, "For a West-Islam dialogue instead of cartoons"; second, "Islamophobia as neo-orientalism"; and, third, "Dialogue with true moderates".
My friend Djamel commented on the last one:
"
Define what the West is
It is not all clear to me what you mean by the West. Please clarify. Just another comment : what is at stake here ? The so-called "modern" West on the process of learning to share the world with other major societal groups (call them Muslims, or what-not) or on the process of imposing its "modern" ways to the rest of the world, because the "West" believes it had already grown from the extremely religious society it is used to be to an all-technology-info-flowing one (which in my opinion has some very adverse and destructive effects) ? The "West" is a waste based society which feeds on the the world resources. On the other hand, we still have in the world many people willing or accepting to live according to secular rules, some of them often barbaric. What is the real point ? imposing the Human Rights chart to all corners of the world as fundaments of future societies ? If so, we are still far from it. One thing that is hard to deal with when it comes to Islam is the fact that it is a way of life, it ciments a whole society from everyday routine to the whole social hierachy, etc. This is something that is not exactly paralleled in the "West".
"
Let me get back on your second point first. What was at stake in the article was what I perceive as a growing neo-orientalism that could explode in islamophobia in our "western" societies. My point was to find the means to avoid this situation that is based on ignorance and media manipulations. I denounced it in the first article, by uncovering fake argumentation about human rights to justify islamophobia. In the second article I defined what islamophobia is and how it subsumes from neo-orientalism, which I also defined. Finally, I urged moderate Westerners to learn about Islam, and to engage in conversations with "moderate Muslims", which I also defined.
Your first point is very good indeed. Yes, what exactly is the West? And by calling something the West, and something else Islam, am I not just indeed perpetuating the same ontological divide that I am denouncing?
Let me first make it clear that the term "West" and the term "Islam" were used as simplifications for the sake of journalistic clarity. I should probably write another article that would elaborate on a conception that I have been studying for some years now: cosmopolitanism. One of the key stances of cosmopolitanism is to avoid the ontological commitments such as the ones mentioned. These ontological commitments stem from the communitarian (i.e. nationalist) theory of identity - nationalism being understood as solely the view according to which one state is composed of one nation. Cosmopolitanism consider that identity cannot be conceived of in terms of unity, totality, and is also a matter of choice. This means that one does not have only one identity but several, that there is no reason why only one of them should have prevalence over the others, and that we choose our identities (of course within a constraint frame of choices). Moreover, the social context determines the primacy of our identities: right now my identity as a student of political philosophy is more important than my identity as a guitarist.
What is true for a national identity also holds true for a cultural and a "civilisational" identity. It is an obsession of the West to see something called "Islam" as a unity, and that Islam defines people's identity as the primary identity. It is a methodological bias, and Huntington is therefore wrong in his premisses about a so-called "clash of civilizations", that holds true that there are such ontological units as "West", "Islam" etc. and that their dominant religion is paramount. It is true, though, that some Muslims, particularly the extremists, consider Islam as also being political and refer to the Prophet Muhammad's political career. But many Muslims, particularly those who call themselves moderate, reject the intrusion of politics in religion.
Moreover, it does not make sense to exclude Muslims from the West just because they do not have what is expected to be the right religion for the alleged Western identity - i.e. Christian. Many Muslims live in Europe and only happen to have a Muslim identity as well as others. But it was precisely for that reason that I wrote the first article. What the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten did was to stigmatise these people, Danish Muslims, by systematically pointing at something called "Islam" as an entity remote to the "West". We need to stop doing this and find a cosmopolitan way to accept everyone in our political systems.
However, it is obvious that just as many "Westerners" as "Muslims" have an interest in keeping such ontological separations, and elaborate on a Schmittean friend/enemy discourse along this line. It is easier to govern and control a population that is convinced there is something to fear, and that there is an enemy to fight, so that the community is solidly bound against this exterior threat, thus reinforcing the dichotomic divide in an infernal spiral. So it is up to everyone else to refuse such dichotomies and constitute what Habermas have called "dialogic communities", i.e. communities where one dominant group have constituted a political system, but where dialogue is constantly maintained so as to include all other subgroups, which adhere to this constitution.
