Home Search Every Field Editorial Search Authors' ROMANTIC COSMOPOLITANISM Responses By Esther Wohlgemut (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), viii + 203 pp. Guidelines Reviewed by Nigel Leask on 2010-09-27. For Click here for a PDF version. Reviewers Click here to buy the book on Amazon. About Us Masthead Criticism invariably views the writing of the past through the lens of the present, and the contemporary wave of interest in cosmopolitanism is no exception. The "modernist" theory of nationalism promoted by Benedict Anderson's Feedback Imagined Communities in 1993 was undermined by the return of bloody ethnic nationalism in the 1990's, especially in the states of the former Soviet empire. Responding to economic migrancy and border crossing' from the South on a hitherto unknown scale, postcolonial theory grappled with the new transnationalism' in attempting to define the ethics of new multicultural societies. In the same decade the metropolitan ascendancy of London in post-imperial Britain (already weakened by twenty five years of civil war in Ulster) was decisively challenged by devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, part of the phenomenon memorably described by Tom Nairn as "the break up of Britain." Old configurations of region and nation were transformed in an era of rapid globalisation. Philosophers and critics like Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Kwame Appiah, Homi Bhaba, and Bruce Robbins interrogated the politics of identity in the new world order under the sign of Cosmopolitanism, or Cosmopolitics. Romanticists were rather slow to catch up, despite the fact that the 2004 NASSR conference (held in Boulder, Colorado) was dedicated to the topic of Romantic Cosmopolitanism. Perhaps the topic seemed to belong to the Enlightenment rather than Romanticism, whose literature seemed more preoccupied with questions of nation, race, and empire. Esther Wohlgemut's new book takes up the challenge by reconsidering Romantic cosmopolitanism in relation to its supposed other, nationalism. Building on the theories of enlightenment philosophers like Hume, Smith, and Kant, she contends that Romantic cosmopolitanism was not so much a rejection of patriotism as (usually, but not always) its politically progressive supplement, combining both its national and transnational affiliations. In so doing she makes common cause with many contemporary scholars who seek to downplay any notion of radical discontinuity between Enlightenment theory and Romanticism. Her view is crystallized in Coleridge's formulation in The Friend of 1809, quoted in her introduction: "this is indeed Cosmopolitanism, at once the Nursling and the Nurse of patriotic affections! This, and this alone, is genuine Philanthropy, which like the Olive Tree, sacred to concord and to wisdom, fattens not exhausts the soil, from which it sprang, and in which it remains rooted, it is rooted in the soil of the nation: nourished and nourishing the national soil." As Wohlgemut notes, rather than standing in essential opposition, "together cosmopolitanism and patriotism make up an ecosystem" (3). Of course the post-radical Coleridge sought here to disaffiliate himself from the kind of cosmopolitanism that loyalist writers linked with French Jacobinism, especially in Edmund Burke's attack on Richard Price in Reflection on the Revolution in France (1791), which Wolhgemut treats in her first chapter. In his "Letters on a Regicide Peace" (1795), Burke went on to warn that British Jacobins are "worse than lost to their country" because their "hearts are abroad," namely across the channel. To British conservatives in 1795 "cosmopolitanism" was a name for the expansionist ideology of French nationalism, just as their equivalents in 1925 and beyond regarded internationalism as a front for Soviet Russia. British eyes, perhaps, always saw somthing foreign in cosmopolitanism because it utterly opposed the ideology of a "British Empire" which rallied subjugated nations and ethnicities under the Union flag. Kant's philosophy held out a promise to post-revolutionary intellectuals like Coleridge, whose political hopes had been shattered on the battlefields of Napoleonic Europe. In his 1784 "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose," Kant had argued that "the problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law- governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved." The goal of a perpetual peace (sketched in a later essay) can be achieved, he wrote, only by a "federation of free states," although he took pains to stress that such a federation would preserve the national identity of its constituent members rather than subsuming them into some new transnational configuration. Going beyond Coleridge (whose thinking in this area was always compromised by notions of racial hierarchy and Anglo-Saxon expansionism), Wohlgemut demonstrates that Kant's theories inspired Julia Kristeva's influential definition of cosmopolitanism (in Nations without Nationalism [1993]) as a "transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries" (qtd. 21). In thus contraposing Kant's cosmopolitanism with Burke's nationalism, Wohlgemut's first chapter lays solid theoretical foundations, although the book as a whole risks oversimplistically equating Romantic nationalism with Burke, ignoring the role of other important figures like Rousseau, Herder, or Hegel, not to mention their myriad disciples in Europe and the Americas. In the second and third chapters, she turns to The Edinburgh Review, the most influential organ of cosmopolitanism in Romantic Britain. If Coleridge's cosmopolitanism sprang from the philosophy of Kant, she argues, the Edinburgh's applied the economic and cultural theories of Adam Smith. Yet chapter two prompts a question: important as the Smithian critique of mercantilism was to Jeffrey, Brougham, Mackintosh, and Horner, does an argument about Free Trade in a book on literature really need a protracted account of Horner's essay on corn bounties? Furthermore, though Wohlgemut aptly considers Jeffrey's angry response to the partition of Poland in 1816, she regrettably ignores the Edinburgh's complex attitude to Scottish nationhood within the terms of the 1707 Union, which has lately received a lot of scholarly attention. Fiona Stafford, for example, points out that The Edinburgh Review emerges as the "centre of British intellectual consciousness, just at a time (1801) when the Union with Ireland might have knocked Scotland into the margins" (Demata and Wu, ed. British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review 39). Wohlegemut is more effective when she turns in the next chapter to literary free-trade and Francis Jeffrey's salute to Madame De Stael as "the most eminent literary female of the age." As Wohlgemut goes on to show, the Edinburgh's progressive cosmopolitanism made common cause with De Stael's 1800 study Literature in Relation to Social Institutions. Influenced by Scottish Enlightenment stadial theory as well as De Stael's argument, Jeffrey proposed that the growing international commerce of literature (which his review ceaselessly struggled to promote, even through the difficult war years) gradually minimized differences between national tastes and cultures. If the first half of Romantic Cosmopolitanism focuses on philosophy and non-fictional writings, the three chapters and conclusion -- comprising the second half of the book -- turn to imaginative literature: the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Germaine De Stael, Charles Maturin, and Mary Shelley, and the poetry of Byron. Examining national identity in the novels of Edgeworth, chapter 4 contraposes her hyphenated Anglo-Irish identity to an Englishness or should it be "Britishness"? - premised on "Burkean" principles. Wohlgemut here misses an opportunity to reflect on the problem of Burke's own Irish identity, magisterially addressed by Luke Gibbons in Edmund Burke and Ireland (2003). In Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth's treatment of the 1801 Union is notoriously ambivalent, but is it enough to call it "an international cross-over of customs" drawing on a cosmopolitan European model (75)? Given the role played by the Union in constructing an imperial British state, wasn't Edgeworth's hyphenated Anglo-Irish identity (even in its most enlightened form) itself the sign of hegemonic ascendancy, premised on the suppression of the rights of the Catholic majority? More attention to questions such as this would have strengthened a chapter that usefully examines several topics: Edgeworth's "positive cosmopolitanism" in promoting an enlightened Irish patriotism in Ennui; her attack on absenteeism in her novel of the same name; the dangers of cultural deracination in Ormond; and representations of "the Jew" (that archetypical cosmopolitan) in Harrington. Yet even though Wohlgemut writes intelligently about the novel's philo-semiticism, her focus on progressive attitudes to Jewish characters as "quintessentially other" tends to underplay the role of the Irish Catholic nation. For Edgeworth, Wolhgemut writes, "The larger polity of Britain can accommodate both English Protestant and Jew" (91). Maybe so: but could it also accommodate the Catholic Irish? This was certainly the burning question for Irish and British politics over the century that followed. In chaper 5, Wohlgemut's study of the cosmopolitan heroine takes off with a spirited meditation on Zizek's concept of the "social symptom" (qtd. 119), a kind of symbolic spanner in the works that