How to Theorize the "World": An Early Modern Manifesto

This essay examines contemporary theorizations of intellectual scale, by asking how we can move, with integrity, from particular experiences to universal claims. To do so, I return to the "Fool's Cap Map," an allegorical print from the early modern period and show how the image goes beyond traditional tropes of macrocosm and microcosm by invoking and inventing a cosmopolitan critical subjectivity. This, I argue, can be a model for rethinking the relations between the global and the local, the universal and the particular. The essay offers an alternate genealogy for cosmopolitanism rooted in the figurative power of aesthetic objects and their local, transnational networks of production and dissemination, and demonstrates how we might reconstruct intellectual and cultural histories of key terms such as "world" in ways that go beyond binary oppositions, drawing together, instead, the singular and the abstract whole in dialectical relation.