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  • Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe
  • John A Marino
Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe. By Margaret C. Jacob (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) 189 pp. $34.95

Jacob, well-known for her studies on the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, freemasonry, and the politics and culture of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, has pulled all of these themes together in outlining the challenging story of “The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe.” Jacob employs a wide variety of sources and methods to illustrate how the ideas and ideals of being cosmopolitan took shape and were put into practice between 1650 and 1800. Her task is every bit as formidable as investigating the origins of toleration or capitalism.

Diderot defined cosmopolitans in the encyclopedia of 1751 as [End Page 404] “strangers no where in the world,” and Jacob expands the definition of “being cosmopolitan”—“the ability to experience people of different nations, creeds and colors with pleasure, curiosity and interest, and not with suspicion, disdain, or simply a disinterest that could occasionally turn into loathing” (1). As “a citizen of the world,” a cosmopolite practiced “a form of virtue” toward the other, whether hospitality or comfortable socialization with foreigners and people of different religions across “family taboos and regional parochialism” (2, 3, 5). Jacob aims at writing “a different kind of history” in “presenting practices, behavior, social habits, [and] mores from the quotidian long past” that illuminate the origins of today’s diversity, multiculturalism, and clash of cultures in its possibilities and limits (3–4).

The book’s five chapters chart cosmopolitanism not in relation to the more common sites of sociability—court society or civil society—but to religion, science, markets, freemasons, and revolutionary citizens in order to portray a world of cross-pollinating, interconnected spheres of thought, action, and passion. In Chapter 1, Jacob uses a postnationalist perspective to interrogate both Protestant and Catholic censors and inquisitors for insights about the mixing of Christians and Jews, orthodox and heterodox, and aristocrats and commoners to find proto-cosmopolites among the prosecuted.

Chapter 2 follows the need of modern scientific practice for witnesses to experiments, especially among alchemists and mechanists in London and Paris, as the basis for the social setting encouraging cosmopolitan mores. Currency and stock exchanges are the sites of economic as well as cosmopolitan exchange in Chapter 3, as international markets, global commerce, and the luxury trade from records in Antwerp, London, Paris, Lyon, and Marseille reveal a more complex reality of reciprocity than the vaunted ideal of market freedom. In Chapter 4, Jacob studies the new associational brotherhoods practiced by freemasons in depth through the recently returned archives of the Bordeaux lodge, highlighting the paradox of cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism versus secrecy and exclusivity, as exemplified in the restrictions against Jewish membership. But secret societies could become sites of radical republicanism and subversive revolution. Hence, in Chapter 5, Jacob introduces the British radicals and romantics who, in their optimism for crossing boundaries and being free from constraints, invented the “bohemian” as a citizen of the world.

Jacob’s essay into the origins of cosmopolitanism builds its argument on two methodological perspectives: (1) post-nationalism and post-confessionalim, which permit her to think across social, religious, and national boundaries; and (2) evidence from practices or habits, which permits her to view cultural practices and de facto mores, rather than theories or ideals, as the instruments of change in early modernity. Given their practices that bridged the divides between, and challenged the authority of, church, nation, order, and orthodoxy, these cosmoplites [End Page 405] provide an explanation for the widespread fervor for reform and revolution during the late eighteenth century.

John A Marino
University of California, San Diego
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