A Cosmopolitan Timeline By Doug McGill The McGill Report       Cosmopolitan, adj, 1. Belonging to all the          world; not limited just one political, social,          commercial, or intellectual world. – n 2. A          person who is free from local, provincial, or          national prejudices, etc.; 3. a citizen of the world.
300 B.C.	DIOGENES, the Greek Cynic philosopher, declares himself "a citizen of the world."
294 B.C.	ZENO of Kitium founded the Stoic school of thought, in which resides the roots of the modern idea of cosmopolitanism. The basic principles of Stoicism as outlined by Zeno are: 1) Logic as an instrument and not as an end in itself; 2) Human happiness as a product of life according to nature; 3) Physical theory as providing the means by which right actions are to be determined; 4) Perception as the basis of certain knowledge; 5) The wise man as the model of human excellence; 6) Platonic Ideas -- the abstract Forms that things of the same genus share -- are unreal; 7) True knowledge is always accompanied by assent; 8) The fundamental substance of all existing things is a divine fire, the universal principles of which are (1) passive (matter) and (2) active (reason inherent in matter); 8) Belief in a world conflagration and renewal; 9) Belief in the corporeality of all things; 10) Belief in the fated causality that necessarily binds all things; 11) Cosmopolitanism, or a cultural outlook that transcends narrower loyalties; 12) Man's obligation, or duty, to choose only those acts that are in accord with nature, all other acts being a matter of indifference. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
240 B.C.	CLEANTHES, a student of Zeno, writes the Hymn to Zeus, which contains these verses: "Nor is aught done on the earth without Thee, O God, Nor in the divine sphere of the heavens, not in the sea, Save the works that evil men do in their folly -- Yea, but Thou knowest even to find a place for the superfluous       things, and to order that which is disorderly,       and things not dear to men are dear to Thee. Thus dost Thou harmonize into One all good and evil things, That there should be one everlasting Reason of them all. And this the evil among mortal men avoid and heed not; Wretched ever desiring to possess the good, Yet they ne’er see nor hear the universal law of God, Which obeying with all their heart, their life would be well."
44 B.C.	CICERO, the Roman statesman and student of the Greek Stoics, writes in On Duties (De Officiis): "The better and more noble, therefore, the character with which a man is endowed, the more does he prefer the life of service to the life of pleasure. Whence it follows that man, if he is obedient to Nature, cannot do harm to his fellow-man. Finally, if a man wrongs his neighbor to gain some advantage for himself he must either imagine that he is not acting in defiance of Nature or he must believe that death, poverty, pain, or even the loss of children, kinsmen, or friends, is more to be shunned than an act of injustice against another. If he thinks he is not violating the laws of Nature, when he wrongs his fellow-men, how is one to argue with the individual who takes away from man all that makes him man? But if he believes that, while such a course should be avoided, the other alternatives are much worse - namely, death, poverty, pain - he is mistaken in thinking that any ills affecting either his person or his property are more serious than those affecting his soul. This, then, ought to be the chief end of all men, to make the interest of each individual and of the whole body politic identical. For, if the individual appropriates to selfish ends what should be devoted to the common good, all human fellowship will be destroyed. And further, if Nature ordains that one man shall desire to promote the interests of a fellow-man, whoever he may be, just because he is a fellow-man, then it follows, in accordance with that same Nature, that there are interests that all men have in common. And, if this is true, we are all subject to one and the same law of Nature; and, if this also is true, we are certainly forbidden by Nature's law to wrong our neighbor. Now the first assumption is true; therefore the conclusion is likewise true. For that is an absurd position which is taken by some people, who say that they will not rob a parent or a brother for their own gain, but that their relation to the rest of their fellow-citizens is quite another thing. Such people contend in essence that they are bound to their fellow-citizens by no mutual obligations, social ties, or common interests. This attitude demolishes the whole structure of civil society. Others again who say that regard should be had for the rights of fellow-citizens, but not of foreigners, would destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind; and, when this is annihilated, kindness, generosity, goodness, and justice must utterly perish; and those who work all this destruction must be considered as wickedly rebelling against the immortal gods. For they uproot the fellowship which the gods have established between human beings, and the closest bond of this fellowship is the conviction that it is more repugnant to Nature for man to rob a fellow-man for his own gain than to endure all possible loss, whether to his property or to his person . . . or even to his very soul-so far as these losses are not concerned with justice; a for this virtue is the sovereign mistress and queen of all the virtues.
20 A.D.	SENECA, the Roman poet, playwright, and essayist, writes Moral Letters, a brilliant Montaigne-like discourse on the quiddities of life including the Stoic principles of Universal Law and the morality of treating strangers with utmost respect.
90 A.D.	EPICTETUS, a former slave turned Roman Stoic philosopher, establishes his school of philosophy at Nicopolis, in Greece, after being banished (along with all philosophers) from Rome by the Emperor Domitian. A Socratic-style teacher, Epictetus  was renowned for his relaxed style, emotional detachment, and intellectual acuity. Like Socrates he left no writings, but students preserved many of his thoughts such as this one: "Consider who you are: to begin with, you are a human being, that is, one who has no quality more sovereign than moral choice, and who holds everything else subordinate to it, and moral choice itself free from slavery and subjection.... In addition to this you are a citizen of the world and a part of it." And this one: "One cannot pursue one’s own highest good without at the same time necessarily promoting the good of others. A life based on narrow self-interest cannot be esteemed by any honorable measurement. Seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings. Our human contract is not with the few people with whom our affairs are most immediately intertwined, nor to the prominent, rich, or well educated, but to all our human brethren. View yourself as a citizen of the worldwide community and act accordingly."
170 A.D.	MARCUS AURELIUS, the Roman emperor, writes one of the great Stoic (and thus cosmopolitan) texts, The Meditations, whose second chapter begins with the immortal instructions: "Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
1580	MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, the skeptical humanist, in his essay On Cannibals counsels the use of reason – not wild imagination – in reports about people and places far away: "When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, after he had surveyed the army that the Romans had sent out against him, drawn up in battle array, ‘I know not," he said ‘what barbarians these are’ (for the Greeks so called all foreign nations), ‘but the disposition of this army that I see is in no wise barbarian.’ The Greeks said the same of the army that Flominius led into their country; and Philip, when he saw from a little hill the order and arrangement of the Roman camp in his kingdom under Publius Sulpicius Galba. Thus we see how we should beware of adhering to common opinions and that we must weigh them by the test of reason, not by common report."
1598	RICHARD HAKLUYT in Voyages writes: "To find himself cosmopolites, a citizen of the one mysticalle citie universal and consequently to meditate on the cosmpoliticall government thereof." (Oxford English Dictionary)
1616	T. ADAMS in Devil’s Language writes: " The vanitie of carnall joyes, the vanitie of vanities, are as bitter to us, as pleasant to the cosmopolite or worldling." (OED)
1645	JAMES HOWELL in The Familiar Letters writes: "Every ground may be ones country – for by birth each man in this is in this world a cosmopolitan. And " I cam tumbling out into the world a pure Cadet, a true cosmopolite not born to land lease, house or office."
1750	VOLTAIRE, the French philosophe, wrote in his essay Fatherland: "It is sad that in order to be a good patriot one often has to be the enemy of the rest of mankind. Whenever old Cato, that excellent citizen, spoke before the Roman senate, he always used to say: "Such is my opinion, and Carthage must be destroyed." To be a good patriot is to wish that one’s city may be enriched by trade, and be powerful by arms. It is clear that one country cannot gain without another’s losing, and that one cannot conquer without bringing misery to another. Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors. He who wished that his fatherland might never be greater, smaller, ricer, or poorer would be a citizen of the world."
1772	DENIS DIDEROT, the philosophe whose L’Encyclopedie became a classic Enlightenment text, publishes "Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’", in which he defends the rational exploration of societies and peoples outside of Europe as a part of the overall Enlightenment project. His description of the explorer Bougainville sets the stage: "He has a taste for the amusements of polity society; he loves women, the theater, fine meals. He takes as easily to the social whirl as to the inconstancy of the elements that have buffeted him about so much. He is gay and genial; he is a real Frenchman, ballasted on the port side with a treatise on integral and differential calculus, and to starboard with a voyage around the world." The benefits to French society of Bougainville’s travels to Tahiti and elsewhere are three says Diderot: "It affords us better knowledge of our old globe and its inhabitants, greater safety on the seas, which he sailed with sounding line in hand, and more correct information for the use of our map makers."
1785	IMMANUEL KANT, the Enlightenment philosopher, reintroduces the idea of cosmopolitanism into respectable intellectual discourse with a handful of essays including What is Enlightenment, Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent, and Perpetual Peace. His basic idea is that exercising the faculty of reason will lead mankind inevitably to embrace a universal law to protect and enforce "cosmopolitical rights" enjoyed by all humans. In Perpetual Peace he wrote: "The connections, more or less near, which have taken place among the nations of the earth, having been carried to that point, that a violation of rights, committed in one place, is felt throughout the whole, the idea of a cosmopolitical right can no longer pass for a fantastic exaggeration of right; but is the last step of perfection necessary to the tacit code of civil and public right; these systems at length conducting towards a public right of men in general, and towards a perpetual peace."
1790	DAVID HUME, the Scottish philosophe, publishes The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he attempts to do for political science what he did for economics with "The Wealth of Nations." That is to describe the workings of an "invisible hand," a principle rooted in human nature that guides all actions towards an overall harmony. In an economy, the market was the invisible hand; in society Hume argues the principle of "sympathy" does the same. The first sentence of the book reads: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he drives noting from it except the pleasure of seeing it." Later in the book, Hume offers this sketch: "Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon reading intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections up the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labors of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasoning concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as is if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitudes seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them?"
1773	JOHANN GOTFRIED HERDER, a German philosopher who called Voltaire "a senile child with a corrosive wit in place of human feeling," publishes "This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity." Herder is one of many counter-Enlightenment and (later) Romantic writers (Hamann, Goethe, Burke, Blake) who opposed how the scientific study of society  dehumanizes cultures, in whose very particularity the very essence of humanity resides. Rousseau wrote on both sides of this question, believing both in a natural universal law which trumped all, yet also arguing for direct vision, natural feeling, and the damaging effects of artificial social definitions, classes, and laws. In 1973, ISAIAH BERLIN in his essay The Counter-Enlightenment summarized the critique of cosmopolitanism this way: "For Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach, Condorcet there is only universal civilization, of which now one nation, now another, represents the richest flowering. For Herder there is a plurality of incommensurable cultures. To belong to a given community, to be connected with its members by indissoluble and impalpable ties of common language, historical memory, habit, tradition and feeling, is a basic human need no less natural than that for food or drink of security or procreation. One nation can understand and sympathies with the institutions of another only because it knows how much its own mean to itself. Cosmopolitanism is the shedding of all that makes one must human, most oneself."
1828	THOMAS CARLYLE in the Letters wrote: "A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism has replaced the old home feeling." (OED)
1844	JOHN STUART MILL in Political Economy writes that "capital is becoming more and more cosmopolitan." (OED)
1848	RALPH WALDO EMERSON in Lectures to a Young America writes that "The legislation of this country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any other." (OED)
1848	THOMAS MACAULAY writes in History of England: "That cosmopolitan indifference to constitutions and religions which is often observable in persons who whose life has passed in vagrant diplomacy." And: "Some had passed a great part of their lives abroad, and were mere cosmopolites." (OED)
1861	WASHINGTON IRVING in Knickerbockers writes: "He was one of those vagabond cosmopolites who shark about the World as if they had no right or business in it." (OED)
1885	ALFRED LORD TENNYSON in Hands All Round: " That man’s the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best." (OED)
1918	OSWALD SPENGLER writes in Decline of the West: "In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In a place of a type-true people, born of an grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city-dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, and fruitful, deeply contemptuous of the country and especially of that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end -- what does it signify? The world city means cosmopolitanism in place of home ... the world city belongs not to a folk but a mob."
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