The modern cosmopolitan ideal is often associated to the Enlightenment, but it is important to understand it early modern genealogy, because it defines many of its intellectual possibilities and contradictions, and there was no simple intellectual thread from the Stoic ideal of world citizenship to Kant. The Renaissance cosmopolitan tradition was historically conditioned by the consolidation of political and religious divisions within Europe and by growing colonial rivalries, notwithstanding the existence of a common cultural horizon – humanist and Christian - that supported the pursuit of peace. This cultural horizon compensated for those divisions and rivalries in two ways: with a transnational ideal of travel and learning within Europe, and through an ideal of global commerce that assumed the moral unity of mankind. The chapter emphasizes the impact of travel writing in shaping perceptions of cultural diversity and argues that the definition of human nature through empirical diversity is distinctive of European cosmopolitanism, despite some scepticism about the capacity of human reason to reach a universal moral understanding in all circumstances. However, this focus on describing and explaining empirical diversity opened a paradox never fully resolved: whether the "universal spirit" of the cosmopolitan ethos was not inevitably tied to a particular notion of civilization, or even, at a deeper level, to some particular language and cultural system at the expense of others. In this respect, early modern cosmopolitanism was inevitably hierarchical: internally biased towards urban elites with the kind of education and experience that allowed them to participate in the Republic of Letters, and externally associated with a new idea of polite civilization whose values and institutions were often culturally specific. In this process, the role of non-European cultures as partakers of universal values was increasingly (and perhaps unnecessarily) marginalized.

If one considers the Kantian cosmopolitan to be the result of political and cultural forces specific to Western European societies, then it is no more than a situated form of local knowledge. There were other forms of local globalism that were as situated as the Kantian cosmopolitan. The difference is that the forms of Catholic local globalism that I discuss here never became normative and universal. Moreover, the forms of local globalism explored in this essay never acquired the geopolitical epistemological authority to cast Kant as a parochial Prussian whose ideas were no more than one version of local globalism. In an unexpected turn, the Enlightenment notion of the cosmopolitan acquires the epistemological authority to cast the Black, nuns, and Indigenous intellectuals explored in this piece as parochial and local. This essay offers an alternative to early-modern forms of the local “cosmopolitan,” namely, individuals who often did travel physically more than Kant, with the exception of a few nuns who, like our Prussian, imagined the globe as a whole by firmly staying in one place.

Sometime early in the seventeenth century, a native Andean named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1530s –c. 1616) decided to write his own account of the Inca past, together with a fierce denunciation of Spanish colonialism.1 An indigenous interpreter fluent in Quechua and erstwhile collaborator of the Spanish religious authorities, Guaman Poma had participated in the campaigns to “extirpate idolatries” in the Andean highlands.

Writing his contributions to Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des Deux Indes, Diderot developed a peculiar perspective on how to rethink human society according to the ideals of the Enlightenment. The histories of the European conquest of the world unveiled a cultural energy that displayed the contradictory impulses of cruel desire for domination and benevolence. Ferocity and humanity sprang from the same physical constitution of mankind. However human history, like natural history, was not uniform. Monstrous anomalies could not, and were not, ignored, but had to be interpreted through the philosophical language of reason and historical experience. The European colonial conquests in fact showed four types of social monstrosity in action. The first tree, familiar from the example of the Spanish empire, were cruelty, greed and religion. Despotism was the fourth and most insidious category of monstrosity, because both the despots and their subjects lost their humanity. Philosophical history, nonetheless, also offered a glimpse of what a rational society could be like, by revealing the true roots of the natural, civil and religious codes. The cosmopolitan ideal corresponded to a natural code that offered the principles of pity and natural right through which a free society might be founded, one where the mutual relationship between morals and politics could be re-established on more rational grounds.

Most contemporary students and proponents of cosmopolitanism would identify it as a philosophy of peace, based on mutual tolerance, recognition, dialogue and commitment to global justice. This chapter argues that, though true, this account of cosmopolitanism is historically incomplete and conceptually truncated. It shows how such a pacific conception of cosmopolitanism had to be positively argued for in the Enlightenment against currents of cosmopolitanism reaching back to the Stoics that presented it as conflictual and conflicted. In particular, it argues that there has been a long and complex relationship between conceptions of cosmopolitanism and ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to our own age of “Global Civil War.” It presents the darker side of cosmopolitanism as a philosophy of conflict as well as compromise, of war as well as peace and of civil war as well as of civilisation and civility.

The interconnections within the natural world as observed by European explorers and armchair cosmographers connected meaningfully in the eighteenth century with the longer history of early modern cosmopolitanism, relying on an evolving understanding of the globe and its peoples in all their particularities and diversity. This chapter examines the tenets of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism through the natural sciences by examining how individual actors, largely based in Europe, explored their world and described its geographies. Working across the disciplines of cartography, natural history, and ethnography, these individuals aspired to be inclusive within a cosmopolitan frame but often struggled to articulate a universal principle about whose knowledge should be included and whose voices should be excluded. These practices became critical sites of cosmopolitan contestation as they underlined a highly ambivalent attitude toward local sources of knowledge while proclaiming Europe’s unequivocal ability to describe and depict nature and space with a particularly vehement denigration of the tropical regions of the globe and their inhabitants.

Is gender a useful category for querying cosmopolitanism? Do women take part in the unfolding of Enlightenment cosmopolitan civilization? Do they change its understanding and conceptualization? If so, in what sense? The aim of this chapter is to stress the symbolic and material role that women played within a universal and cosmopolitan history, which, in the Enlightenment, coincided with the history of civilization. Focusing on the emerging of a new historical genre in 1770s Scotland, the history of women, the chapter first examines the civilising role assigned to women as agents of culture in the process driving to commercial and cosmopolitan societies. Then, it explores why and how the ‘progress of the female sex’, potentially universal, was in fact instrumental to distinguish the history of European civilization from all the others. Within this framework, the focus on sexuality offers a space for looking at the crystallization of the differences between peoples, where the reproductive powers of women’s bodies are central. The final section deals with the other side of this same discourse: the ambiguity of civilization in modern and commercial societies of Europe, which were expressed in the fear that progress could be reversed into its contrary, turning the ‘civilizing femininity’ into ‘decadent effeminacy’. The question, then, is to what extent does cosmopolitanism lead to effeminacy and decadence, and how is this related to women’s agency?

As all the essays in this volume demonstrate, cosmopolitanism can take many forms and has been understood in many different ways. Diogenes’ famous riposte to the citizens of Athens who asked him to what city he belonged – that he belonged to none, that he was a “citizen of the world”, cosmopolites – was intended as a rebuke. To be without a city meant in effect to be no one, possibly even, as Diogenes’ own outrageous behavior seemed to bear out, not to be really human at all. Diogenes was rejecting a view of the world that identified the person with a community.

This chapter focuses on the life and writings of Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731–1815) and provides one way through which to map out the shifts and transformation of the cosmopolitan ideal in an age of growing patriotism. Napoli Signorelli wrote and lived between the intellectual and political worlds of two connected peripheries of Europe, Italy and Spain, and one of its intellectual centres, France. The Bourbon courts in Madrid and Naples provided the political thread for these debates and the Neoclassical tradition the background for them. The querelle between the ancients and moderns remained central, as writers searched within and outside of the Neoclassical tradition to stake their claims. Knowledge of the shared ground of the Neoclassical canon bound enlightenment writers together but also provided the fodder to drive them apart. Napoli Signorelli’s work and life illuminates a crisis or reconfiguration of cosmopolitanism, specifically at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Neoclassical underpinnings of cosmopolitanism were unsettled by emerging patriotic identities within Europe.

Recent theorizing about cosmopolitanism has emphasized the need to embrace diversity as a constituent element informing the shared value of cosmopolitanism. This development suggests the need for an alternative genealogy from received accounts which typically trace cosmopolitanism from the Stoics through Kant, on the premise of moral continuities and consensus. My chapter explores the work of John Locke and his engagement with scepticism as a different way of encountering diversity with implications for a reimagined cosmopolitanism. But Locke’s inheritance is not straightforward and presents as many dilemmas as solutions to the challenge of reconciling difference with universal commitments. His acceptance, at some level, of diversity is not the prelude to an expression of human solidarity, framed around a nascent cosmopolitan ideal. Locke’s ultimate pessimism on these matters is a reminder of the difficulties involved in the contemporary project of accommodating divergent philosophical forces.

Global domination – including imperial oppression and commercial exploitation across borders and, especially, across continents – was a key concern for many modern thinkers, and among its roots and its remedies were often thought to be the various forms of antagonism and resistance that fundamentally characterize humans’ social practices and interactions. Unsocially sociable individuals, in this view, are characterized by a seemingly contradictory array of impulses that both draw them together in a spirit of humane association and yet pull them apart, as they seek to resist others either to forestall being dominated themselves or to indulge their prideful and hierarchical sense of superiority. Among the many treatments of what one could call "cosmopolitan unsocial sociability" are the incisive – and complementary – theoretical writings of the 1780s and 1790s respectively by the Afro-British political thinker Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant and Cugoano together exemplify an intriguing and complex strand of Enlightenment thought that viewed global connections as both corrosive to our shared humanity and yet essential for resisting the domination that afflicted both European and non-European peoples.