8 - Citizens of the World

Summary

Chapter Eight revisits several of the same authors and texts as in the previous chapter, but focusses on the complex relation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, looking at how the modern concept of citizenship emerged in this period as a bridge between Enlightenment and Romantic values. The first par discusses the origins and theoretical foundations of cosmopolitanism, including the notions of Humanität, republicanism, and national culture in works by Kant, Schlegel, and Herder. It then turns to two texts on education written in response to the Revolution by Schiller and Fichte. The latter combines Romantic nationalism with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in an effort to first liberate the individual nation, then, through moral education, humanity as a whole. In the last part, the author presents three case studies of lived Romantic cosmopolitanism, in which the above ideals are enacted. These include an abolitionist slave narrative by Olaudah Equiano; the Franco-British poet and writer Helen Maria Williams’s radical repo+L22rting from Revolutionary Paris; and German poet and patriot Karl Follen’s early nationalist and later internationalist writing in exile.