Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: cosmopolitanism and empireIf global identity may be seen to represent the cosmopolitanism of large aggregates or of empire, it also represents the class from which particularity is drawn.For empire lurked in the wings of the nation state from its very inception.As those small spaces carved out of the great garment of Christendom, the early modern European nation states not only emulated empires rather than city-states (hence Rome and not Greece), but they quickly went on to found empires.Cosmopolitan localism was a strategy for nationalism but the cosmopolitan element was by no means trivial.Nationalism, whether we like it or not, seems to reach for empire readily.It is noteworthy that the quintessential theorists of the early modern state, Hobbes and Locke, made no systematic reference to empire or to the colonies of the New World in their canonical works, which may explain why imperialism was regarded as antithetical to nationalism in the beginning of the modern era.Hobbes's failure to discuss empire as the horizon of the absolute state, or to discuss technological developments in transportation, communications and warfare that made colonization feasible, is all the more remarkable due to the fact that he was himself a regular participant at meetings of the Virginia Company. 1 In the some thirty-seven meetings of the Company, Hobbes is recorded as having attended with his patron, William Cavendish, earl of Devonshire, justifications for settlement were actually discussed.Rationales canvassed included: the natural-rights arguments of Sir Edwin Sandys, playwright brother of the great translator of Ovid, George Sandys; rights of conquest, oGcially endorsed by James I; and the conversion of Indians, as preached by John Donne at a meeting attended by Hobbes and Cavendish in November 1622. 2 Very probably Leviathan, intended as the bible
Author: Patricia Springborg
Institution: The University of Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2312528939