The Cosmopolitan Evolution: Travel, Travel Narratives, and the Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century European Consciousness

by Matthew W. Binney

Critical works such as Srinivas Aravamudan's Tropicopolitans (1999) and Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) study the influence of Europe upon the colonized and also how the colonized resist its over-generalizing and oppressive drive; but, these and other works have failed to examine the impact of the 'foreign' on the European consciousness. The Cosmopolitan Evolution argues that reciprocity exists between the cultures and that this relationship has not yet been sufficiently explored. 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, this book explores the interactions between the European consciousness and the foreign. Binney also chronicles the development of cosmopolitanism from a form of representative universalism, which seeks to enfold all humans under one ideal, towards complex universalism, which seeks to account for alternate and particular views.

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is OK. It delivers what it says on the tin. The book moves from the 'medieval imagination' of representative universalism through the the 18th century configuration of individualism. The pendulum swing from the universal to the particular is well captured.

Very specific slices of literature in the history of ideas were selected to make this case. There is a dismissal of contemporary theorizing. Even Derrida is inappropriate for this conversation. Therefore, the nesting of this book into new theorizing of cosmopolitanism is neither neat nor comfortable.

A singular argument. Well delivered.