The Cosmopolitan Evolution

Working from the concept of cosmopolitanism and incorporating textual evidence from philosophy, drama of the English Renaissance, seventeenth-century travel narratives, and eighteenth-century literature, The Cosmopolitan Evolution, explores the interactions between the European consciousness and the foreign. The book also chronicles the development of cosmopolitanism from a form of representative universalism, which seeks to enfold all humans under on ideal, towards complex universalism, which seeks to account for alternate and particular views.

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism challenges our most basic assumptions about the history of an ideal at the heart of modernity. Beginning in antiquity and continuing through to today, Leigh T.I. Penman examines how European thinkers have understood words like 'kosmopolites', 'cosmopolite', 'cosmopolitan' and its cognates. The debates over their meanings show that there has never been a single, stable cosmopolitan concept, but rather a range of concepts-sacred and secular, inclusive and exclusive-all described with the cosmopolitan vocabulary. While most scholarly attention in the history of cosmopolitanism has focussed on Greek and Roman antiquity or the Enlightenments of the 18th century, this book shows that the crucial period in the evolution of modern cosmopolitanism was early modernity. Between 1500 and 1800 philosophers, theologians, cartographers, jurists, politicians, alchemists and heretics all used this vocabulary, shedding ancient associations, and adding new ones at will. The chaos of discourses prompted thinkers to reflect on the nature of the cosmopolitan ideal, and to conceive of an abstract 'cosmopolitanism' for the first time. This meticulously researched book provides the first intellectual history of an overlooked period in the evolution of a core ideal. As such, The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism is an essential work for anyone seeking a contextualised understanding of cosmopolitanism today.

"This book provides a denationalized historical contextualization and comparative analysis of the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions. It emphasizes and evidences the importance of international circumstances and transoceanic and transcontinental cosmopolitan communities and connections-whether republican, Communist, Islamic, or otherwise- in enabling and impelling these three instances of revolutionary mobilization in Southeast Asia and in shaping their varying trajectories and outcomes"--

The first conceptual history of the development and evolution of the image of Jews and Jewish participation in modern German-speaking cosmopolitanist thought

What role should national militaries play in an increasingly globalised and interdependent world? This book examines the often difficult transition they have made toward missions aimed at protecting civilians and promoting human security, and asks whether we might expect the emergence of armed forces that exist to serve the wider human community.

"A Walk Through Time" is a landmark book, gorgeously illustrating the remarkable drama of the history of the universe, from the furious blast of the Big Bang to the first pulse of life on Earth and on through the rich pageant of life's evolution from primordial microbes to the rise of "Homo sapiens". 130 color illustrations.