Historians see themselves in some topics more than others. Take cosmopolitanism, which historians usually find on the side of the angels: we hope it embodies worldly self-restraint and universal openness, to be contrasted with nationalist passions of attachment to place and people. Politics has changed recently, though, and when elites assert cosmopolitan openness, those who feel attached to some corner of the world can sense a steely hand in the velvet glove. Influential studies of cosmopolitanism such as those by Martha Nussbaum (The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal [2019]) or Anthony Pagden (The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters [2013]) evoke a wonderful ideal that, after this past decade, may seem somewhat airy as a description of reality, an echo fit for a smallish chamber.
Leigh Penman's new conceptual and cultural history, The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism: The Early Modern Origins of the Intellectual Ideal, is a valuable corrective to the usual story, which tends to focus on a refined set of heroes: Erasmus, of course, but also Justus Lipsius, whose Neostoicism recovered something of the claim of Diogenes the Cynic (or was it Socrates?) that he was kosmopolitēs, a citizen of the world, to mark his simple detachment from worldly affairs. The usual narrative center is the Enlightenment, especially France, where the cosmopolitanisms of Diderot or Kant seem inclusive and secular.
To recover an alternative history, Penman centers his account on the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the opening chapter, Penman points out that figures as diverse as Erasmus, Guillaume Postel, and John Dee recovered a more exclusive version of cosmopolitanism, for the purpose of asserting difference: Diogenes, like the Apostle Paul, had used the claim to be a citizen of the world to disavow claims of the present regime, for his allegiance lay elsewhere—Paul claimed citizenship in the spiritual city of God. For Postel and Dee, this posture legitimated their prophetic voices: they were pilgrims aiming to bring about an eschatology of universal Christian empire. In a remarkable second chapter, Penman shows how this apocalyptic understanding pervaded some of the most characteristic travel literature of the time, from Hakluyt's Navigations and several iconic maps to the late Renaissance utopian projects of Comenius and Bacon.
In the early seventeenth century, Penman argues, Christian thinkers began to link cosmopolitan language with more negative associations of “worldliness,” especially among reform-oriented writers of the more spiritually intense sort, such as English Puritans and more radical Reformers in German-speaking lands. (Penman has previously written an exemplary book on apocalyptic thought in the latter context.) Penman relates that as the influential English encyclopedist of travel writing Samuel Purchas put it, the “Cosmopoliticall” was “in regard of the world,” which he thought should be low on a Christian's list of priorities (80). Still, this negative use of the cosmopolitan vocabulary was, as for Erasmus, a way to assert difference. Penman detects a shift over the course of the seventeenth century toward the more familiar Stoic meanings explored by Lipsius and others, where cosmopolitan terminology gestured toward a universal kinship of learned elite beyond insular small-mindedness. Even so, Penman shows over and again that throughout the period such expressions of worldliness retained a sacral frame. For example, Rosicrucians and even Giordano Bruno—now so often made a saint of secularism—could not eliminate Christian concepts of pilgrimage and disdain for worldliness from their language of universal citizenship. That sacral frame sets up Penman's conclusion, for against that backdrop we can see the eighteenth-century philosophes and their formulation of what we might call Enlightened cosmopolitanism as a careful selection out of the possible modes of cosmopolitanism, pruning back Christian assumptions in favor of their own. The fertility of Penman's approach, it should be said, can be seen in his comments on Kant's vaunted cosmopolitanism, which depended upon a racial hierarchy of rationality and now looks much less egalitarian than the apocalyptic imperialism of Postel (124).
Penman has given us an ambitious, learned essay, written with a generous ambit and a light touch; it is a good antidote to starry-eyed accounts of the Enlightenment, and an invitation to historians to dig our genealogies deeper, understanding their tensions instead of burying inconvenient truths. The fact that history is always a matter of interpretation does not mean it is not also an effort to see clearly. One reason Penman can see clearly is his commitment to excavating and then interpreting the language of cosmopolitanism, using evidence of all kinds, including period lexicons, textbooks, dissertations, and other handbooks. Early on, he claims that this is a conceptual history, and he dismisses “antiquarian” studies of words (3). I take some friendly exception; in fact, conceptual studies that avoid word history tend to run unbridled by evidence, which limits their value as histories. Although he does not mention Raymond Williams, Neil Kenny, or Richard Scholar, Penman in fact offers a word history: this is a textured, dynamic account of what he calls the “cosmopolitan vocabulary” throughout this period (3, and passim). I hope the theorists of cosmopolitanism take note.
