Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment

Joan-Pau Rubiés · Neil Safier

03/2023 · Cambridge University Press

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As we face new global challenges – from climate change to the international political order – the need to re-examine the historical roots of cosmopolitanism and liberal principles on a global scale has become increasingly central to the political conversation. Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment brings together leading scholars in cultural history, the history of ideas and global politics in order to reassess the complexity of cosmopolitanism during the Enlightenment and its various interpretations over time. Through a fresh and revisionist perspective, the volume explores issues of universalism and cultural diversity, the idea of civilization, race, gender, empire, colonialism, global inequality, national patriotism, international and civil conflict, and other forms of political discourse, challenging the simple negative stereotype that the Enlightenment was inevitably hierarchical and Eurocentric. This timely intervention into the debate about the legacy of the Enlightenment highlights both the plurality and the continuing relevance of Enlightened cosmopolitanism to contemporary global concerns.

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Joan-Pau Rubiés is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and was previously Reader at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He directs a research project on the history of Ethnographies, Cultural Encounters and Religious Missions in the Early Modern world and has published extensively on these topics. He is currently writing a monograph on travel writing and the origins of the Enlightenment, and a book on missionary ethnographies in the early modern world.

Neil Safier is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, where he served from 2013–21 as Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (2008) and a range of articles on the history of natural history, environmental studies, and the trans-imperial history of the tropical world, especially South America. He is currently working on a book that connects Brazilian natural history with the plantation cultures of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, including sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton.