Cosmopolitanism as Nihilism: Rousseau's Study of Paris

Today's cosmopolitanism and its ideal of the global citizen is an attempt to bring together the universality of philosophy with the dedication of politics, and more precisely the freedom of the mind with political freedom. This attempted synthesis was also attempted in the eighteenth century by the French philosophes and was examined most carefully and comprehensively by Rousseau. His First Discourse outlines the deficiencies of cosmopolitanism and attempts to reestablish the conflict between philosophy and politics, but it is in his romantic novel Julie that he treats cosmopolitanism most exhaustively as a way of life and as a social order. There he argues that cosmopolitanism is really just a prejudice of metropolises and that its ideal is only a reflection of the ruling element—the gynaecocracy. Ultimately, cosmopolitans are neither philosophers nor citizens and their attempt to be both means that they are nothing at all.