ABSTRACT

One of the services that Jonathan Israel has rendered to the study of the Enlightenment has been to reaffirm the essential unity of the movement. This chapter explores the meanings of cosmopolitanism, particularly in eighteenth-century Germany, and shows how it was able to coexist with a certain conception of patriotism until it was displaced at the end of the century by a much more militant national sentiment which formed one of the components of nineteenth-century nationalism. Cosmopolitanism did not of course originate with the Enlightenment. The Stoic philosopher Seneca advocates involvement in public life, not simply to serve one's own relatives or one's own polity, but to benefit all mankind 'in claiming the world as people's country'. This satire on academic vanity, however, is not directed against the cosmopolitan ideal of the republic of learning, of which Lessing was a distinguished example, as H. B. Nisbet emphasizes in his recent biography.