I have made a video (on my Youtube Channel) on the two famous paintings representing the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, attributed to Jean-Jacques Le Barbier (and his engraving). https://youtu.be/9wESIPLh7JQ Based on my article published in the art history journal POTESTAS, I combine art history and intellectual history to... Continue Reading →
https://jhiblog.org/2023/02/20/cosmopolitanism-in-eighteenth-century-france/ My post for JHI blog has just been published! Credit: An extremely detailed survey of the activities surrounding the building of the tower of Babel. Engraving, c. 1680. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark
https://youtu.be/NxpMxccfrQ0 The Cosmopolitanism of Joseph Honoré Rémy On 29 May 2022, I was invited to give a lecture on my article in Early Modern French Studies, 'Transcending the Public and the Private: The Cosmopolitanism of Freemason Joseph Honoré Rémy'. I am very thankful to the organisers at the Open Lectures on Freemasonry. Check their other... Continue Reading →
The Universal Claims of Cosmopolitanism NYUAD Institute March 24, 2010
Global Intellectual History. Published online 30 May 2018, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23801883.2018.1479976 https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2018.1479976. ABSTRACT This article analyses what Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794) meant when he chose the name Anacharsis and called himself ‘Orator of the human race’. It argues that it was an act of self-fashioning by a foreigner in the French Revolution trying to find his place by representing... Continue Reading →
History of European Ideas. Published online 12 June 2018, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2018.1477615 https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2018.1477615. ABSTRACT This article examines the education that Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794) received during his stay at the Berlin Académie des nobles (1770–1773). Cloots wrote at several occasions about his education there, notably naming Sulzer as a philosophical influence 10 years later. Examining the pupils’ life at the... Continue Reading →
My PhD thesis from the European University Institute is available on the Open Access Repository Cadmus: A Cosmopolitan Republican in the French Revolution: The Political Thought of Anacharsis Cloots
I wrote a seminar paper at the European University Institute for the seminar "Nationalism in Theory and Practice" with Profs. Rainer Bauböck and Michael Keating. Since it received an excellent review I publish it here. You can find it on my academia.edu webpage: http://eui.academia.edu/FrankEjbyPoulsen/Papers/138682/Cosmopolitanism-and-Nationalism.
Petite note de lecture en passant. Rabelais évoque à propos des couleurs de Gargantua, la distinction entre jus gentium et droit naturel (jus naturae) dans Gargantua aux éditions de la Pléiade (pp. 30-31): Et n'est cette signifiance par imposition humaine institué, mais receue par consentement de tout le monde, que les philosophes nomment ius gentium,... Continue Reading →
My master's thesis "Element of an Archaeology of Cosmopolitanism in Western Political Thought: A Return to the French Enlightenment" is now available for download on the Danish website of the Department of Political Science, Centre for European Politics, University of Copenhagen. Using Foucault's archaeology and problematisation, coupled with the Cambridge school's contextualism, I investigate the... Continue Reading →
Work Cited Rosenfeld, Sophia. “Citizens of Noweher in Particular: Cosmopolitanism, Writing and Political Engagement in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” National Identities 4, no. 1 (2002): 25-43. Contention of the essay: the development of the conceptual space of political engagement among private subjects cannot be reduced to the creation of national loyalties. A body of literature existed, produced... Continue Reading →
Mortier, R. (2000). Le rêve universaliste de l'"Orateur du Genre humain". In R. Mortier, Les Combats des Lumières (pp. 385-394). Paris: Aux amateurs de livres international. The Universalist idea was not something new or invented in the eighteenth century. However, the transformation of the feeling of being human into concrete political and social systems is... Continue Reading →
Work Cited Fink, Gonthier Louis (1997) “Cosmopolitisme.” In Dictionnaire européen des lumières, edited by Michel Delon, 277-279. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. « Le XVIIIe siècle est le siècle du cosmopolitisme » (L. Réau). (277) « En 1690, le Dictionnaire universel de Furetière, qui ne connaît pas encore le terme « cosmopolite », le définit indirectement à l’article... Continue Reading →
Introduction: cosmopolitanism, narrative, history Cosmopolitan history: “‘Cosmopolitanism’ is no longer a term much favoured by intellectual historians: as an idea, it seems to lack intellectual content; as a category of political thought, it has no referent. [footnote: “the last investigation of this idea was Thomas J. Schlereth]. The term is occasionally invoked by literary and... Continue Reading →
Historiographie du mot “cosmopolite.” Hazard, Pierre (1930) "Cosmopolite." In Mélanges d'histoire littéraire générale et comparée offerts à Fernand Baldensperger, 354-364. Paris: Libraire ancienne Honoré Champion. Résumé: Apparition au XVIe siècle : 1560 Guillaume Postel De la République des Turcs et, là où l’occasion s’offrera, des mœurs et des lois de tous muhamedistes, par Guillaume Postel, cosmopolite.... Continue Reading →
Avenel, Georges (1865), Anacharsis Cloots: L’orateur du genre humain, Paris : Librairie internationale. This is one of the very first biography existing on this not so well-known history character of the French Revolution, Anacharsis Cloots. The merit of this book is its weakness: the tone in which it is written. The author is writing in a... Continue Reading →
Bélissa analyses the conquests made by the new French Republic in Italy (an IV-V), Switzerland (an VI-VII), Holland (an III), and Belgium (an III-IV). These countries are called “sister-Republics.” Patriots in these “sister-Republics” are European militants and support the French Republic, at first, in its fight against monarchical Europe (91). These patriots have conscious to... Continue Reading →
Dédéyan, Charles (1976) Le cosmopolitisme européen sous la Révolution et l’Empire. 2 vols. Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur. One of the rare books of intellectual history about cosmopolitanism in Europe. Written in French, it is focusing on the periods immediately after the Enlightenment: the French Revolution and the first Empire under Napoléon Bonaparte. It is... Continue Reading →
Schlereth, Thomas (1977) The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694-1790. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Thomas J. Schlereth studied how the cosmopolitan ideal had a “noticeable impact on Enlightenment intellectual life throughout the trans-Atlantic community”.[1] But Schlereth does not advance that... Continue Reading →
Que faut-il comprendre aujourd'hui des mots cosmopolite, cosmopolitisme ? D'abord si l'on reprend 'histoire de l'apparition de ces mots, il faut bien se rendre à l'évidence que notre conception actuelle est liée au paradigme dominant du nationalisme qui nous pousse à y voir une opposition entre cosmopolitisme et nationalisme. J'avance la thèse, en fait, que... Continue Reading →
Frank Ejby Poulsen 