Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes by Steven B. Smith

Author:Steven B. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300254044
Publisher: Yale University Press

THE COSMOPOLITAN IDEAL

At the other end of the continuum, the deficiency of patriotism involves a kind of transpolitical cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan idea runs deep in the Western tradition. It was very much present in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, where the first political philosopher was accused of treason for not believing in the city’s gods and for corrupting the young. The philosophical tradition as a whole stands counter to the spirit of particularism. It claims that the principles of justice must be conceived as impartial, atemporal, and universal, standing at a remove from the local conditions of which they are a part. Plato may have doubted whether the ideal city (kallipolis) described in the Republic could ever be realized in practice, but this did not dampen his belief that without universal standards or criteria of justice, philosophy could only rationalize existing institutions and practices.

Ancient cosmopolitanism, as we have seen, was given its canonical expression by the Stoics in the first and second centuries of the Common Era. Their doctrine of “world citizenship” came of age at a time when Rome exerted world hegemony and its universal empire was seen as having replaced smaller, more parochial political units like the free city-state. According to the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis, human societies are structured in concentric circles, beginning with the family, extending to one’s community and country, and finally including the whole of humanity. Among the Stoics, a debate arose about the locus of one’s moral obligations, whether to those closest to us or to humanity as a whole. Cicero, a primary source of this debate, argued that “the fellowship among mankind . . . was established by the gods” and when this is denied, “kindness, liberality, goodness, and justice are utterly destroyed.”27 The Stoics were a small philosophical sect who never dreamed that their austere teachings about moral autonomy and independence could become a recipe for humanity as a whole, much less that they could create a new kind of political identity. For this to take place, Stoicism needed to be augmented by another, far more powerful force for cosmopolitanism.

Stoic universalism received a massive boost from Christianity, which sought to replace duty to family, tribe, and city with a message of universal brotherhood. Christianity marked the end of the res publica that had previously been supported by the gods of the communal hearth. The early Christians were not Rome’s most patriotic citizens, precisely because they put faith in the heavenly City of God above loyalty to the earthly city of Rome. Saint Augustine, the most effective propagandist for early Christianity, wrote the City of God precisely to absolve Christianity from the charge of complicity with the sack of Rome in 410. No one has ever described this transformation better than the French classicist and anthropologist Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in his seminal study The Ancient City, from 1864. “Christianity introduced other new ideas,” Fustel wrote. “It was not the domestic religion of any family, the national religion of any city or of any race.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.