In a recent discussion of “Victorian Internationalisms,” the term cosmopolitanism is often used to designate the domain of individual feeling or ethics of toleration in contrast to the more geopolitical terminology of “inter-” or “trans-nationalism” (Goodlad and Wright 5–16). For Goodlad and Wright, the tendency of cosmopolitanism to evoke individual ethos rather than cultural, social, or political process suggests the merits of exploring complementary terms (15). They then go on to discuss authors with “more complicated subject positions than ‘European or American first’” serving other ends than conventional European hegemony (Goodlad and Wright).

This essay focuses on late Victorian cosmopolitanism as generative of just such subject positions. It argues that what is at stake in maintaining the ethical-political continuum is a conception of individualism that is not just the “unimpeded personal sovereignty” that Goodlad and Wright associate with cosmopolitanism and contrast with politics (10), but a conception of individual development that takes the social as the fundamental unit of analysis. It explores two key notions of late Victorian cosmopolitanism – the Good European and the Education of the Emotions, or passional enlightenment – at a moment when there was less perceived conflict between individualism and the social state (see Gagnier, Individualism) and when the cosmopolitan critic of the modern nation could be a “citizen of the world” without falling into the depoliticized idealism that that phrase often evokes today. In particular it demonstrates that cosmopolitanism's engagement with Europe was part of its progressive potential rather than merely its failing. The essay moves between past and present, both in the co-development of Europe and cosmopolitanism and in the exemplary case of William Morris. It contrasts Morris's substantive cosmopolitanism with current liberal neo-cosmopolitanism and sees his work in light of current models to move beyond western exceptionalism.

I. Rejecting Identity: The Good European

In Europe: A Nietzschean Perspective (Reference Elbe2003) the political theorist Stefan Elbe raises concerns about the European Union, currently constituted as a market. Policy makers want an “identity”; “Europeans aren't falling in love with a common market”:

While diversity is greatly valued, policy makers think that “Europe” needs underlying unity. Elbe thinks that this underlying unity might begin with Nietzsche's nineteenth-century idea of Good Europeans.

In Nietzsche's fin-de-siècle analysis, Europe had emerged as the Christian continent, the Occident defined in relation to the Orient. When God “died,” or Europe began to secularise, intellectuals began to question not God's existence but rather the disillusionment evoked by that secularisation. Sacred truth was replaced by scientific truth and then the truth of the nation. As each of these was delegitimated through the catastrophes of the twentieth century, they were replaced by what Nietzsche called The Last Man. The Last Man was rational economic Man – blinking, shallow, selfish, egotistical, abandoning the Idealisms and Machtpolitik of the Victorians and bringing an end to their progressive history in his pursuit of individual self-interest. The “free spirits” or “Good Europeans” whom Nietzsche wanted to replace him with are marked by a “dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world [which] flames up and flickers in all the senses” (Human 1: 4, Preface).

In The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image (Reference Krell and Bates1997), David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates concede the depths of Nietzsche's personal resentment: he was the child of a Lutheran country pastor who owed his pastorate to the king, hankered after the nobility, despised the rabble, was physically weak and literally could only breathe in the mountains. He was nonetheless one of the principal critics of European and especially of German nationalism, imperialism, and militarism.

For Nietzsche, the Good European was the cosmopolitan writer. Under the heading Learning to Write Well, Nietzsche composed a vision of international cooperation through communication. The European, especially the German, must learn to think and write better, “inventing something worth communicating, and actually knowing how to communicate it, something translatable into the languages of our neighbors; making oneself accessible to the understanding of those foreigners who are learning our language; working toward the end by which everything good is common good, and by which everything stands free for the free” (Nietzsche, Human 2: 242–43; Part II The Wanderer and His Shadow).Footnote ¹ While, for reasons that we shall explain, Nietzsche thought that it would fall to Europeans to “guide and oversee civilisation as a whole,” he was nonetheless adamantly anti-nationalist: “Whoever preaches the opposite, whoever does not trouble himself about writing well and reading well . . . in effect will show the nationals a path along which they will become ever more national: such a one aggravates the sickness of the century – is an enemy of good Europeans, an enemy of free spirits” (Human 2: 242–43).

Defining “modern human beings” as without homeland and mixed in race and descent, Nietzsche concludes that “we are not very tempted to participate in that mendacious racial self-aggrandizement and ill-breeding that proclaims itself a sign of the German way of life, something that is doubly false and indecent for a nation that has a ‘sense of history.’ In a word . . . we are good Europeans” (Nietzsche, Gay Science 340). It is noteworthy that the good European does not express herself in speech, which is tied to nationalism and the Volk, but in writing, which extends, as Nietzsche says, beyond the nation.

Nietzsche uses the term “European” to critique nation because Europe had confronted nihilism, rendering it modern or disenchanted. The ethos of modern Europeans is the freedom or openness to question both Christian and scientific – religious and secular – wills to truth, to reject nationalism, and to experience nihilism as the freedom to build new worlds (Elbe 107). These are the attributes of the persons he called alternately Good Europeans and free spirits. Nietzsche was suspicious of politicians and marketeers (“the Last Man”) who used the vision of Europe for their own ends. He was interested in the making of a certain kind of critical and creative person, in possession of both rational and emotional capacities.

In Edward Carpenter's The Healing of Nations (Reference Carpenter1915), he cites this work of Nietzsche in a discussion of “These fatuous empires with their parade of power and their absolute lack of any real policy – this British Lion, the Russian Bear, these German, French and American Eagles – these birds and beasts of prey – with their barbaric notions of greed and war” (151). Carpenter cites the troops “in the trenches and the firing-lines, who have given their lives – equally beautiful, equally justified, on both sides” (Healing 183). He gives examples of sociability between Germans, Japanese, and Chinese, and dramatizes the famous cease-fires and spontaneous fraternizations of Christmas 1914 between opposing lines in northern France (Carpenter, Healing 200). Carpenter quotes from Human All Too Human (1911), where Nietzsche had urged the strongest nations to disarm: “Better to perish than to hate and fear; and twice better to perish than to make oneself hated and feared” (Healing 239). I shall return to Carpenter as an exemplum of the anti-nationalist, creative, and critical Good European.

Nietzsche's idea of a unified Europe mediating between its neighbours because of its particular history of disenchantment persists in the present. In We, the People of Europe? (Reference Balibar2004), Etienne Balibar considers three ways that Europe might mediate between our contemporary US American version of Machtpolitik and the rest of the world. Immanuel Wallerstein calls on Europe to oppose US foreign policy on the principle that multipolarity is better than a superpower. Timothy Garton Ash, on the other hand, argues that Europe should check American power not because it is American but because it is unchecked, on the principle that in the US itself systems of checks and balances work best in the balance of power. And Edward Said points out that US religious fundamentalism prolongs the ideological association of elect nation with manifest destiny; when this mission is added to US networks of money and power that control national elections and national policy, US domination is so dangerous that Americans themselves, Said argues, should call on Europe as the only available economic counterforce (see Balibar 203–36).

Balibar rejects Wallerstein's, Garton Ash's, and Said's formulations of Europe as mediator by rejecting Europe as an identity. He would rather see Europe as a borderland, an agent or actor whose actions ground its power rather than its “sovereign” power legitimating its action. He concludes, like Carpenter, with spontaneous collective agency, new solidarities, and the cessation of hostilities:

Using Fredric Jameson's figure of the Vanishing Mediator, Balibar explores the possibilities for Europe to use its own fragilities and indeterminacies, its own “transitory” character, as an effective mediation in a process that might bring about a new political culture (234). He compares the vanishing mediator with a “translator,” “intermediary,” or “intellectual.” Europe's exceptional historical character of disenchantment and decline, in particular its global expansion, the competition between its imperialist powers that ensued, followed by the “striking back” of its empires, make it uniquely suited to this function (Balibar 234).

A similar position of Mediator was claimed for Britain by the late nineteenth-century historian John Seeley, author of The Expansion of England (1883), who described Britain's position as that of mediator between the Old and New Worlds. The description is racist, but it is also conscious of Britain as a function rather than an identity:

The history of European changes marked by Balibar and the self-reflection on that history studied by Nietzsche may qualify Europe as mediator in a world where power is contingent and mobile. The late Victorian idea of Europe as function rather than identity is attractive when the polar structures that historically identified it continue to change. The definition of “Europe” still in the dictionaries is of a “continent in the West part of Eurasia, separated from Asia by the Ural mountains on the East and the Caucasus Mountains and the Black and Caspian Seas on the South East. Excluding the former Soviet Union and Turkey” (Random House College Dictionary). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the idea of modern Europe was taking shape, it was specifically a reaction to Ottoman power. Winston Churchill, always a proponent of a European Union, traced its aspiration to when King Henry Navarre of France “laboured to set up a permanent committee representing the 15 . . . leading Christian states of Europe. This body was to act as an arbitrator on all questions concerning religious conflict, national frontiers, internal disturbance, and common action against any danger from the East, which in those days meant the Turks” (Churchill).Footnote ² Described as a continent, and defined by waters to the west, north, and south, no obvious geographical feature divides “Europe” from the “continent” of Asia to the east. Russia is similar on either side of the Urals. Turkey, like Russia, is part-Europe, part-Asia. Whatever Europe is geographically, it is not a continent and Turkey is no longer its Other.

As things stand, identified as a common market, the European Union has twenty-seven diverse states with three more – including Turkey – waiting in the wings, and at least another fourteen neighbour states who, as borders with more neighbours multiply, are likely to seek inclusion. Nations whose citizens have the right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights include Turkey and Russia. The European Court's remit to uphold human rights extends to the Bering Straits, opposite Alaska. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe extends well beyond the European members of NATO to virtually the whole northern hemisphere. Furthermore, in popular culture, phenomena like European football and the Eurovision song contest extend the idea of Europe in popular consciousness, which may ultimately be the most significant boundary of all. Yet as late as 1983 Europe was not included in the last revised edition of Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. This is simply one more reminder of how Britain's borders have extended that Williams did not consider Europe or European a significant cultural category. Of course Islam, Muslim, and Turks were not there either, though “western” was.

What does it mean to say that Europe emerged as the Christian continent? The main creeds of institutional Christianity were the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Reconciliation, Atonement or Forgiveness of Sins. The main motive was the possession of the one Truth, a motive that Christianity shared with Islam. The comparatist of world religions S. A. Nigosian says that the net effect of three hundred years of the Crusades

Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Reference Matar1998) by Nabil Matar would suggest that this antipathy is an overstatement, perhaps written in light of Victorian ideology and corresponding ijtihad themselves. Matar chronicles an “alluring” mutual interest between Muslim and Christian law in Britain from the mid-sixteenth century until the death of Cromwell in 1658.Footnote ³ But in Europe, on the Christian side, the violence, barbarism, and atrociousness continued from the Crusades through the Inquisition, the Persecution of the Jews, the Conquest of the Americas, the Reformation, the spread of Protestantism, and Missionary Evangelism. The disenchantment of which Nietzsche writes is the disenchantment with religion and distaste for Church dogma after a millenium of religious wars. Robert Pogue Harrison captured Nietzsche's tone with his Conradian description of the western metropolis (in this case, London) as dark, then Enlightened, and now in decline; it had progressed from the barbarism of sense under the Roman conquest to the barbarism of “reflection” (Vico's term) under Christian hypocrisy (133).Footnote ⁴

Europe or the West including Europe and the Americas was historically distinguished from Asia and the Orient. In the nineteenth century, to this geography was added a temporal element known, at least for Europeans, as Progress. For the Victorians were obsessed with time, particularly world-historical time, as in evolution or Progress with a capital P, or, alternatively, degeneration or decadence. If European was a dubious geographical designation that the Victorians moralized with ideas of Progress, the “Victorians” as a designation was also temporal, pertaining to the reign of Victoria (1837–1901) from its earliest usage in 1875. After Victoria's death, it was itself de-moralised when Victorian, meaning particularly mid-Victorian, came to be seen as prudish, priggish, strait-laced, or just old, antiquated, or fossilised (as in the OED and Roget's Thesaurus). The fin de siècle, because of its doubts, skepticism, and rejections of identity and one Truth, was more often annexed to modernity than Victorianism.

It is arguable that the economic, political, legal, and cultural functions of Europe – especially as a mediator always on the move – today are better than a European identity that in the past has proven fatal. Identities are usually accompanied by an emphasis on shared values, which are often constructed in opposition to others’ values. Rhetorical reifications of identity values can harden hatreds, whereas what is needed is not to start with identities or values at all but rather to begin with problems to be solved or wants to be negotiated. This is what Nietzsche meant when he said that if they were to be Good Europeans the Germans should “invent something worth communicating, and actually know how to communicate it, something translatable into the languages of our neighbors; making oneself accessible to the understanding of those foreigners who are learning our language; working toward the end by which everything good is common good, and by which everything stands free for the free.” German power should derive from its activities or functions as they could be translated to the self-perceived good of others, not from its identity or essence.

It was prescient of Nietzsche to comprehend the changing or modern functions of Europe. To counteract a “spiritless,” “institutional” or “bureaucratic” perception of the European Union, Elbe returns to Nietzsche's idea of “free spirits,” who express western or Christian individuality without being individualists, selfish, or egotistic. They do not need the authority of one truth; they can live outside one home and without private property; and they can experience each of these as freedom to solve problems and build new worlds. Elbe concludes that Nietzsche's Good Europeans would want to see a Europe that would avoid nationalism and racism; would remain open to those who currently remain outside the borders of the European Union; would not seek to impose its freedom on others, but would equally not shy away from exemplifying a commitment to a deep experience of freedom. They would address economic individualism through the cultivation of reflective depth (120–21). The Good European was both ethical and political, concerned with the right relationship of self to other and critical of power inequalities between them.

II. Neo-liberal Neo-cosmopolitans

The years of Nietzsche's productivity coincided precisely with the revival of socialist internationalism in Britain, Europe, the Americas, and Australasia, which culminated in the Second International. Late Victorian individualism was articulated in this global context of possibility about the social state. For Nietzsche, as for many late Victorians, socialism's redistributions of wealth were merely the precondition of increased and enhanced individualism (see Gagnier Individualism). Our contemporary notions of neo-cosmopolitanism, often based in political or property rights, may rely on thinner notions of individualism or “unimpeded personal sovereignty.”

In a final section of World Citizenship and Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Western Political Thought (Reference Heater1996), Derek Heater concludes that “the role of the individual qua world citizen is [now] central” (209). With the advance of global civil society – that is, societies increasingly given to individual property and individual political rights – the possibility arises of global governance. World citizenship, or identity as a member of the human race, is a stance of responsibility for the condition of the planet; a recognition that the individual is subject to a moral law above one's own municipal law; and a responsibility to promote world-government. In the same year, 1996, Martha Nussbaum argued for making world citizenship the focus for civic pedagogy (“Patriotism” 2–20). Her work traces a lineage from the Stoic Marcus Aurelius to his Victorian followers Emerson and Thoreau. Whatever else we are bound by and pursue, she argues, we should recognise that each human being counts as the moral equal of every other: “Human Personhood, by which I mean the possession of practical reason and other basic moral capacities, is the source of our moral worth, and this worth is equal” (133). According to her account, Stoic norms have subsequently been invoked to justify domestic and international political conduct, including renunciation of wars of aggression, constraints on the use of lies in wartime, an absolute ban on wars of extermination, and the humane treatment of prisoners and of the vanquished and, in peacetime, duties of hospitality to aliens working on national soil and denunciation of all projects of colonial conquest.

Nussbaum sustained intense criticism from interlocutors ranging from Judith Butler and Charles Taylor to Gertrude Himmelfarb and Hilary Putnam, generally because her approach to rationality seemed disembodied and insufficiently situated (Cohen 96–97).Footnote ⁵ In the following year, Nussbaum published a revised call for cosmopolitanism in a collection of essays on Kant's “Perpetual Peace” (Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism” 25–58). There she traced a thicker history of the kosmou-polites, or world-citizen, beginning with Diogenes the Cynic's famous reply when asked where he came from, “I am a citizen of the world” (Diogenes Laertius VI: 63). He refused to be defined by his local origins but was part of rational humanity. Nussbaum now conceded that we all have at least two communities: a local community of practical reason that guides the day to day and a global community of argument and aspiration. Far from the passions or emotions being opposed to Reason, the central goals of the world citizen would be the overcoming of prejudice and the complete extirpation of anger, both in oneself and in the surrounding society. She linked world citizenship to this goal of passional enlightenment or enlightenment of the emotions. In connecting Kant to this tradition of passional enlightenment, she quotes his famous conclusion, one of the great descriptions of how Progressives think:

Nussbaum concludes, “This hope is, of course, a hope in and for Reason” (“Kant and Cosmopolitanism” 50). Reason, we may remind ourselves, is essentially the mind's ability to plan and pursue a course of action. In Kant, and Nussbaum here, it is also an action for the Good and not opposed to the emotions: a passional enlightenment.

If one key aspect of the new cosmopolitanism is the education of the emotions, a second is the situatedness of the global citizen, even in times of unprecedented mobility.Footnote ⁷ In the wide-ranging collection Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Reference Cheah and Robbins1998), editors Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins called for a cosmopolitics to match capitalist globalization. They also called for a new personnel: not the Stoics, Kant, or first-world intellectuals, but the servants, helpers, companions, guides, bearers, and migrant workers who are particular rather than universal world-citizens, postcolonial diasporic or migratory cosmopolitans. We should note here the diversity we would anticipate among these neocosmopolitans, with the diasporic subject potentially bringing a sense of loss or nostalgia, while the migratory may bring more positive feelings of new or better lives to come. The editors of Cosmopolitics rejected Kantian and Stoic theory for “actually existing cosmopolitans,” who may, in the present, be united through religious activity, be political activists who seek models outside their own cultures, or be entertainers who are global icons such as Bob Marley (whom Mayhew and Mill would have called cultural “enrichers” [see Gagnier, Subjectivities 83–93]). Like Robbins, Scott Malcolmson (in the same volume) includes in the category of cosmopolitans “everyone on the market with goods, both merchants and sellers of labour”: “All of these existing cosmopolitans involve individuals with limited choices deciding to enter into something larger than their immediate cultures” (238, 242). I shall return to the degree to which choice and decision are involved.

In one of the most cited papers in the Cosmopolitics collection, Kwame Anthony Appiah quotes Gertrude Stein's “America is my country and Paris is my hometown” (An American and France [1936]) as an example of the cosmopolitan patriot, or the rooted cosmopolitan, who takes her roots with her as she moves about the world (Appiah 91–95). Appiah de-couples the cultural nation from the political state, in which the nation is “dependent upon will or pleasure,” while the state is formal or procedural, regulating our lives through forms of coercion (96). For Appiah, cosmopolitanism flows from the same sources as political liberalism, “for it is the variety of human forms of life that provides the language of individual choice,” and patriotism flows from liberalism for “the state carves out the space within which we [can] explore the possibilities of freedom” (106). “The cosmopolitan ideal – take your roots with you – is one in which people are free to elect the local forms of human life within which they will live” (Appiah 95). Appiah argues that the best state – the state he would choose to live in – is the state that provides the most choice for the greatest number. We must note, however – and this distinguishes liberal cosmopolites like Appiah from the late Victorians – that Appiah's emphasis is on political freedoms of speech, religion, lifestyle, while the economic status quo is assumed. The emphasis is on the freedom to move about in the world and to participate freely in world governance, from situated, or “discrepant,” localities that are defined by markets in labour, goods, and services (Clifford 369). The neocosmopolitanisms from North America tend to be economically neoliberal, emphasizing choice but assuming capitalist market conditions rather than the substantive freedoms and equalities the late Victorians demanded.

The new cosmopolitanisms, or the cosmopolitanisms from below, are meant to distinguish themselves from the old cosmopolitanism, typically associated with a unitary appeal to universal Reason, the Enlightenment, or at least the West, as well as from “aesthetic” or consumer cosmopolitanisms of limited access.Footnote ⁸ The new cosmopolitanisms are situated, vernacular, rooted, and discrepant, and might include forced or diasporic migrants – like the Communists, Jews, and dependents of 70,000 dead Communards, deprived of their means of livelihood, who fled Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – as well as the elite cosmopolitan intellectuals of the coteries, such as the Anglo-American artistic or same-sex communities in Italy. Current political theorists believe that the new cosmopolitanisms have a renewed urgency due to international migrations, multiculturalism, global social movements, and war. Revived are the ancient questions: can the world ever live in peace (and not necessarily a Kantian perpetual peace, but even a momentary and fleeting cease-fire)? And what do we share, if anything, as human beings distinctly embedded in thick but always interdependent environments?

Some cultural critics have rejected cosmopolitanism as a global politics in favor of affective, elective affinities. Thus Lauren Goodlad prefers the term “queer internationalism” for E. M. Forster's attraction to the Other's difference. “Queer” because Forster is attracted specifically to the Other's difference, and “internationalism” because for Forster difference begins with national difference (Goodlad; and see Goodlad and Wright). In Affective Communities (Reference Gandhi2006), Leela Gandhi also uses the late Victorian period's homosexual, animal welfare, spiritualist, aesthetic, and utopian socialist communities to illustrate affective affinities outside a formal politics: ones that resisted state governmentality. Leela Gandhi also uses the term “queer” to illustrate how Mahatma Gandhi countered Indian hypermasculinity in emergent Indian nationalism, which had itself countered Britain's effeminization of India. Against state-supported forms of non-relation, Leela Gandhi opposes the communities that felt affinities across “vastly different phenomenologies and ontologies” (86): other religions, other races, other species, and so forth.

While I agree with Goodlad and Gandhi on the progressive value of the elective, affective affinities of what might retrospectively be called the “new social movements” of the fin de siècle, where I differ is probably in their emphasis on affect as opposed to “governmentality” or State-directed self-regulation. Here I would join Bruce Robbins in reasserting that from a progressive perspective the State can be good as well as evil, distributing orange juice as well as agent orange.Footnote ⁹ Carpenter, Wilde, et al, were not averse to self-discipline, or what Pater called “ascesis”; rather, their “affect” was, with varying degrees of success, disciplined and self-conscious. While postcolonial critics rightly emphasize governmentality in the colonial context as coercive, for western critics of market societies and globalization like Carpenter and Robbins, the problem may not be too much governmentality or self-discipline but too much perceived choice, or too little restraint. The “hybridities” that Goodlad, Gandhi, and I value in the late Victorian period have been vitiated by consumerism's easy choices and emotive gratifications. Forster's attraction to Indian men partakes, at least in part, of what Vertovec and Cohen call the “aesthetic cosmopolitanism” (consumption as taste) of the global economic elite.

In building a new cosmopolitanism, I would prefer to combine more classic conceptions of self-governance with contemporary appreciation of embodied affect through the ancient idea of oikeiosis. With a history of unsettled translation, oikeiosis has meant conciliation (Cicero), a desire for society (Grotius), the domestic instinct (Whewell), as well as appropriation, love, familiarization, affinity, well-disposedness, affection, and endearment (in the usages of contemporary classicists) (Martin). Oikeiosis is a rational natural order that ensures that animals are immediately drawn toward what serves and preserves them. Associated with an image of concentric circles, it is not an individual's psychological state or disposition, but a process informing behaviour toward others. As a pebble dropped in water creates a spreading set of circles, so in psychological materialist terms the self-concern at work in oikeiosis tends systematically to broaden its scope to encompass not just the individual but a progressively larger domain of those around her – the immediate family, household, city, and then the whole of rational humanity. In the outer circles, cosmopolitan concern does not equal flat moral universalism (or deontology, in which commitment to the world is as obligatory as that towards family), but is a final stage, for the self-concern already at work in the infant systematically expands to wider circles of inclusion, providing normative guidance in action. If we understand oikeiosis as an impulse to preserve oneself and to feel affection for one's own constitution, self-consciousness becomes not a Cogito (“I think”) but a comprehending sentiment, not a knowledge of one's own psychological state but of one's own bodily constitution. It follows that its main role is not to prop up the knowledge that I exist in a particular identity (I am) but rather to guide or motivate what I do or how I act. This kind of evolutionary development of social consciousness, or what is called elsewhere the evolution of morality, seems more promising than both deontological and identity-based cosmopolitanisms (see also Richards; Joyce; and Broom).

III. William Morris and the Education of the Emotions

I wrote above that many of the neo-cosmopolitans were also neo-liberal, emphasizing choice but assuming market conditions rather than the substantive freedoms and equalities demanded by the late Victorians. If we are to understand late Victorian cosmopolitanism, we need to give up vulgar notions of socialism that see it as incompatible with individualism or with the freedoms and choice that have become attractive to modern citizens. But we also need to give up modern market notions of individualism that see it as unimpeded personal sovereignty.

In his quest to reconcile freedom and equality, William Morris did not sacrifice the Fine to the Good. The Fine, also called Taste, implies the capacity to make distinctions on the basis of individual choice and preference, the domain of the aesthetic. The Good is the realm of our conduct toward others, the domain of ethics and politics. Morris and those associated with him were exemplary in bringing the Fine and the Good together. As he said in a review of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (Reference Bellamy1888) in Commonweal, “variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and nothing but an union of these two will bring about real freedom” (Morris, Political Writings 425; see also Faulkner and Preston 17). Socialism expert Ruth Kinna has argued that Morris distinguished his creed from anarchism in that he was for an individuality that also required a conception of public or social good (Kinna 219). With this harmony of individual and social, Morris also included, among the conditions of individuality, freedom from authority and satisfaction of material needs. He was for the expression of creative individuality without being methodologically individualist. He knew that the unit of analysis had to be society rather than individual monads, that only when society provided for all equally could individuals then develop fully according to different needs and capacities. He was also antiauthoritarian and antibureaucratic because both led to passivity: in the case of authority, passivity of thought, and in the case of bureaucracy, passivity of responsibility. As both socialist and activist, Morris shared in classic western conceptions of the Good as inconceivable without action, the Good not as contemplative but as active. It has often been pointed out that unlike the Fabians, who were socially bureaucratic and conventional in their personal lives, and unlike the SDF (Social-Democratic Federation) under Hyndman, which was directed to working-class people who were multiply constrained, Morris's Socialist League was the party of educators, idealists, anarchists, and disciples of the unconventional Engels. In an 1896 issue of Freedom, Kropotkin said that while Morris could have gone all the way with the masses, he could not go with parties, with all their “wire-pulling and petty ambitions” (Faulkner, Critical Heritage 399–401). Kropotkin also thanked Morris for preventing socialism in England from taking the authoritarian and functionalist character that it had in Germany.

The sensuous freedom or creative development that made Morris impatient with parties and bureaucracy extended to his unconventional tastes. It will always be one of the more charming refinements of history that a political agitator of such virility should spend his last years printing beautiful romances. In William Morris at Home (Reference Rodgers1996), David Rodgers calls Morris “the first champagne socialist.” Rodgers explains, “Until the radical changes in society came about, it would hardly be fair to sacrifice his family and employees to save his own conscience” (117). Others have less apologetically put it that Morris was not given to sentimental personal gestures. What is important about Morris's taste is not the actual products of his or his firm's artisan- and craftsmanship, or even his poetry or romances. These were just byproducts of what he valued, the sensuous and intellectual labour of making them. A socialised infrastructure on which individuals could freely develop was the essence of fin-de-siècle socialism, which was distinctive for its freedom, toleration, and aesthetic choice.

In the course of the twentieth century, socialism's dual emphases on freedom and equality bifurcated. The West committed to markets and procedural freedoms of speech, dissent, lifestyles, while socialist states committed to substantive freedom from want in housing, education, and health. Today, where wealth has increased and markets have prevailed over planning, people do seem to want to possess the good things of the earth, they do want to choose these things for themselves, and they do want to possess the pleasures of both activity and leisure. For the foreseeable future, we need to recognise that tastes and choices matter for people living above necessity, and that whether we like it or not markets are the present way of distributing them. While there is fear, terror, hatred, and incomprehension of The (globalized) Market, most people like souks, bazaars, shopping, and farmers’ markets. So Morris's insistence that individuality not be sacrificed to equality but that equality be the enabler of individuality makes his socialism more acceptable to contemporary liberals. The tragedy that no socialist at the fin de siècle would have believed is that over a hundred years later most people in the world are no nearer taking “pleasure in their labour” than they were in the nineteenth century. Ceaseless competition ensures a division between work and leisure for most of us. Since Morris's individualism is premised on creative development in work, it still remains a romantic ideal for most.

So the question is: what is the relation of individuals like Morris, those with the opportunity to live comparatively free, creative lives, to everyone else? Elsewhere I have discussed the great famines in India and China of the 1870s through the 1890s, exacerbated by laissez-faire economics that saved the West while letting the rest of the world starve (Gagnier and Delveaux). This was also the period of refined environmentalism at home. The Edinburgh Environment Society (1884), the Selborne League (1885), the Selborne Society for the Preservation of Birds, Plants, and Pleasant Places (1886), the Society for the Protection of Birds (1889) and the Coal Smoke Abatement Society (1898) joined the Rational Dress Society (1881), the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877), the Anti-Vivisection Society (1875), and other protectors of large and small environments, in a fin-de-siècle flourishing of ecology. The Manchester Vegetarian Society founded in 1847 had 5000 members by 1900. In order to comprehend this juxtaposition, we need something like the “Systems” approach favoured by eco-critics (Kerridge and Sammels 7).Footnote ¹⁰ While systems analysis or dependency theory in politics has been eclipsed by neo-liberalism's methodological individualism in the last couple of decades, it is currently making a comeback in the physical sciences, in biology, molecular biology, microbiology, climatology, and in genomics. The late Victorian “Back to the Land – Back to Nature” movements, and the eco-criticism that has studied them, have heretofore focussed on the climatic conditions, food chains, soils, animals, solar, wind, and water powers at home. Yet in their collective interaction with the environment they were beginning a critique of individualism and independence. And Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts (Reference Davis2001) has begun to show the global disasters besetting the world in the same period, for which British and European economic policies were in part to blame.

We know from Florence Boos, Martin Delveaux, Peter Gould, and Jan Marsh's work, as well as from eco-criticism more widely, that the period of 1870–1900 was the most fecund period of environmentalism in western history before 1970.Footnote ¹¹ It was also a period of a widespread cultural cosmopolitanism, as shown by the proliferation of late Victorian cosmopolitan periodicals: Cosmopolis, Cosmopolitan Critic, British and Foreign Review, and The Cosmopolitan (Agathocleous). These were different from earlier engagements with culture outside Britain in their linguistic competence as well as in their stance that other cultures might have something to offer. At mid-century, the established view had been that Britain had been spared a European-style revolution by its political and economic freedoms, which were best embodied in its own language. Sabine Clemm, who has studied in detail the meanings of “Europe” and “Continental” in Dickens's very popular mid-century journal Household Words (1850–1859), concludes that Household Words's general attitude toward other countries changed in the context of Britain's colonial expansion, becoming decreasingly tolerant. Only at the end of the century did the cosmopolitan journals open up the attractiveness of cultural interaction, and it is in light of this cosmopolitan development that we should begin to see the japonismes, chinoiséries, arabesques, and other exoticisms of the fin de siècle as part of an idealistic experimentation as well as a development of commodification and economic globalization.

I now return to Morris as the educator of the emotions in his literature and the great writer of pilgrims, travellers and refugees. I think that his wanderers are asking just this: what do we share, if anything, as human beings distinctly embedded in thick but always interdependent environments? Very early in Morris literary criticism (1937), Dorothy M. Hoare pointed out how deeply Morris's translations from the Icelandic sagas and Edda poems misunderstood the originals. Morris perceived correctly that the Sagas were individualistic, “not overburdened by religion,” illuminating of personality and character without the intrusion of self-consciousness, possessing a clear sense of value, and about general common life, all of which he admired (Hoare 2–10, 27–53). What his translations failed to capture was their violence and tragedy. Hoare thought that Morris was too leisurely, pleasant, and discursive, whereas the ancient Sagas were constrained, hot, and tragic. I would put it that Morris was less interested in tragedy – “man” alone in the world – than in ethics, in our proper conduct toward each other, through an education of the emotions nourished by the discipline of everyday life and work.

Yet Nussbaum remarked on the loneliness of world-citizens, from Marcus Aurelius to Thoreau, and one might use this to reflect on May Morris's description of her beloved father as “an intensely lonely man” (Morris, Collected Works 24: x–xi) in which she cites The Pilgrims of Hope (1885–86): “that wall of distance, that round each one doth grow,/ And maketh it hard and bitter each other's thought to know.” The poem is a passional enlightenment, in Nussbaum's sense, or a refusal to bifurcate reason and emotion, in which the love of humanity as such triumphs over personal betrayal, political failure, and every incitement to hate. In the poem, a man with a small inheritance, Richard, and his country lover go to London. He is cheated out of his inheritance by a lawyer but is content to live by his labour. Influenced by communists, he takes to agitating and is imprisoned. His wife stays with their son, and sings to him the most beautiful lullaby in the language, in praise of the mother's voice, and the mother-tongue:

When Richard is released, they take up with another communist, Arthur, and, despairing of solidarity in London, they join the communards in France, leaving the boy at home. Richard is aware of Arthur's affair with his wife, as Morris was aware of Jane's affairs over 25 years with his friends, but he is not bitter. At least he is not consciously bitter: in the narrative the wife and Arthur are killed in the rising. Richard returns to England to look after his son:

Morris was equally committed to a nativist love of the land and socialist internationalism: his is what we would call a situated cosmopolitanism. He is also as interested in interdependence in personal relationships as in politics. Florence Boos has pointed out that Pilgrims of Hope is unique among both communist and epic literature in that it is equally feminist and socialist (see Boos “Narrative Design” and Boos “Gender Division”).

In discussing the importance of affect in countering governmentality, I used the term affective or elective affinity. When Goethe first applied the scientific term for the chemical process “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandtschaft) to amorous relationships, he intended something very like what Morris's protagonists learn. In all the phenomena of nature, the first thing we observe is that things adhere to themselves. Just as each thing has an adherence to itself (oikeiosis), it must also have a relationship to other things. Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. (Antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.) The affinities become especially interesting when they bring about divorces. When there has occurred a separation and a new combination, we have an elective affinity, because it looks as if one relationship were preferred to another (Goethe 51–54). This process of self-preservation, attraction to another, separation from the past, and new combination is repeatedly what Morris's fictional encounters show: a willingness to endure the pain of detachment and the compensation of new attachments.Footnote ¹²

All Morris's biographers concur that his deepest commitments are in A Dream of John Ball (1886–87), on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. As in News from Nowhere (1890), the Poet-Guest is always outside, lonely: “I walked along with the others musing as if I did not belong to them” (Morris, Collected Works 16: 257). John Ball says of him, “Thy speech is like ours and yet unlike, and thy face hath something in it which is not after the fashion of our day” (Morris, Collected Works 16: 268). After the first battle, his friend Will Green describes the fallen enemies, and the Poet is moved by his struggle to overcome his anger: “I looked at him and our eyes met to see how wrath and grief within him were contending with the kindness of man, and how clear the tokens of it were in his face” (Morris, Collected Works 16: 253). The self-overcoming of anger was of course one of the classic signs of the cosmopolitan since the time of the Stoics. Another was religious tolerance. The Priest John Ball tries to draw the Guest into religious dispute. Urged to express his views on religion and the afterlife, the Guest replies, “Friend, I never saw a soul, save in the body; I cannot tell” (Morris, Collected Works 16: 263).

On the eve of the battle after which Ball will be hanged, drawn, and quartered, and the Guest will awake, the two complete their exchange of tales of hope to come and despair at the immediate future (which turns out to be the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries), the past dreaming the present and the present dreaming the past. My point is that time-travellers are also cosmopolitans, or world-citizens, and Morris used the languages of world-historical literature – medieval chivalric, Icelandic and Marxist – to inform his writing, architecture, and design. In what is arguably the first modern cosmopolitan poem in English, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70; Collected Works 3–6), he retells cycles of pagan, medieval, and Norse myth and legend. In composing this poem, he learned to control his natural irascibility, extirpate anger, forgive enemies, and cultivate fellowship under inhospitable conditions. His first work, The Defence of Guenevere (1858; Collected Works 1), traced the psychology of the unfaithful wife; The Earthly Paradise made peace with rivals.

In a collection acknowledging Eleanor Marx's contribution to feminism – for Eleanor Marx was, like Morris, equally committed to feminism, socialism, and art, and was a linguist and translator of world literatures – John Stokes unconsciously or not describes her like Morris's Guest, ejected from the feast he helped prepare in News from Nowhere, “a world that Eleanor Marx helps to make possible but which she never completely inhabits, never witnesses” (Stokes 12). The category of World Literature (Goethe's Weltliteratur of 1827) is rising, not has traditionally been called Comparative Literature, based in national identities and distinctions, but in a circulating economy of literatures as political and economic forces in their own right. This is the import of Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (Reference Casanova and DeBevoise2004), and we can expect much more emphasis on this global economy of literatures in the future. Morris's cosmopolitan romances fit the classic definition of romance – the quest for the objects of personal and social desire – in as many languages as he could read. In this definition, the national differences of the knights, pilgrims, or questors are less prominent than the elaboration of their needs and desires.

In addition to the importance of world literatures to the creation of cosmopolis, we should also note Morris's recurrent figure of the Guest: Morris is always the Guest as narrator; his works are typically centred on the reception of Guests and Others of foreign lands. One of the great pleasures of reading the Icelandic Journals (composed 1871 and 1873; Collected Works 8) and diaries is Morris's enthusiasm as a guest, consuming great fishes and chocolate, attempting to converse in Icelandic with his hosts, describing the minutiae of domestic architecture of the bonders, thanking them always for their hospitality. In Derrida's late writings on cosmopolitanism, reflecting on the establishment of European cities of refuge, Derrida, like Morris, defines ethics as hospitality: “Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic among others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one's home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is . . . the manner in which we relate . . . to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality” (Derrida 16).

In her essay “Dystopian Violence: William Morris and the Nineteenth-Century Peace Movement,” Florence Boos traces Morris's pacifism from the unpublished 1880 essay “Our Country Right or Wrong” to his last recorded statement on the subject in an unpublished lecture on communism “Changed Times” (1893). She puts great weight on the following statement as representative of Morris's mature view on war and terror:

While Boos acknowledges that Morris's literary writing is nonetheless filled with war and battle, she attributes this to his admiration of personal courage and self-sacrifice, and describes such armed conflict as mostly ritualistic and allegorical. Even the butchery and conflagration of Sigurd the Volsung (Morris, Collected Works 12) she calls “elegiac cartoons of muscular paganism” emulating loyalty, persistence, and courage (29). This underscores the individuality and ethical centrality that I have attributed to Morris and is characteristic of epic, the heroism of which is antithetical to current strategical and game-theoretic approaches to conflict. She points out that in any case Morris gave up this bellicose romance from 1878, just as he was turning to antiwar politics, and she finds consistent pacificism in Morris's essays and political actions. In linking Morris to the history of anti-war movements, Boos cites Joseph-Pierre Proudhon, who “anticipated Morris's view that a true revolution would be economic and social rather than political” and military, and she concludes that Morris recognised that most wars of his time were commercial, imperialist, and unjust (Boos “Dystopian Violence” 17; see also Salmon, ed., 509).

IV. Alternatives to Religious and European Exceptionalism

Nietzsche's term “Good Europeans” includes both forced and voluntary Victorian cosmopolitans who conceived of themselves and were perceived by others as international comrades, international feminists, translators, and even world-citizens. In thinking how these radicals preserved autonomy while recognizing interdependence, how they preserved their individuality while maintaining responsibility toward others, we must adopt a skepticism toward the Victorian myths that Nietzsche could only just begin to understand. Such myths include religious and European exceptionalism.

I suggested before that Europe was not a continent in any geographic sense. What sense other than historical ethnocentrism can it make for the dictionary to say that Europe is a continent in the west part of another continent called Eurasia, while the much more numerous Indians have but a subcontinent, and while China is but a country? Europe became distinctive when it opposed itself to Islam. But in the course of European history, European religion came to develop another source of distinctiveness, also allied to its individualism, its optative quality. The sociologist of religion Robert Bellah, following Merlin Donald, distinguishes between theoretic, or critical and scientific, dimensions of human culture and mythic (which he defines as narrative) and mimetic (which he defines as bodily enactive) dimensions. Freedom of religion as something that we can choose, as if from an interdenominational menu, is a very modern idea. It is theoretic religion, whereas most religions in the world are mythic and mimetic. People inhabit them like fish in water. “Religion,” writes Bellah, “is historically constituted. It is worth remembering that in its modern usage, the term religion is only about two hundred years old. In [traditional] societies religion is a dimension of the whole of life, the conscious expression of a way of life. . . . That religion is basically a private belief system and that churches are voluntary associations of like-minded believers is a modern and Protestant idea” (Bellah and Tipton 6).

What this means is that for most people in the world religion is not primarily a matter of beliefs or ideas at all, but a way of living in the world. It was the theoretic or conceptual nature of religion in the West that, for Nietzsche, made it slip so easily into competition with science. In Adam's Peak to Elephanta (Reference Carpenter1910), Carpenter frequently marvelled that his interlocutors were so casual in their admission that none of them “believed” in the Hindu deities and myths, but they nonetheless participated fully in the daily, even hourly, rituals of the faith. Comprehending that religion in India was in Bellah's terms more narratively and bodily enactive than theoretic, Carpenter looked critically at the Western obsession with critical thought:

As Bellah argues, theoretic culture rarely inspires ethics or politics; hence the ethical and political crises Nietzsche predicted for the West in the twentieth century. What strikes one about the atheisms, agnosticisms, and transcendentalisms of the late Victorian radicals is that while institutional religions were just one idea among many for them, ethics and politics were both mythic and mimetic. Morris's and Carpenter's epic romances are mythic, in Bellah's sense of “ethically and religiously charged narrative” (12), and their total commitment to the value of work, or pleasure in labour, and to sensuous activity generally, is mimetic, in Bellah's sense of bodily enactive. That is, they were indifferent to religion as ideas in favour of stories and labour as ethics and politics. The fin-de-siècle socialists were essentially ethical and political, where others are essentially religious, and where today we may be essentially economic.

Morris's ideas about Christianity qua social institution were much like his ideas about bureaucracy generally and are clearly expressed in the Commonweal. Christianity was not an identity for him but a social institution consistent with external conditions. When Socialism was realized, its theory of life would be all-embracing and Christian ethics would be absorbed within it. Until then, Christianity had taken the various forms that social, political, and economic circumstances have forced on it, most recently the sordid commercialism of modern capitalism (Commonweal 6: 217 [8 March 1890]; in Salmon 467). By the eighteenth century, Morris said, religion in England was “recognized as a State formality, but having no influence whatever on the corporate life of the country, its sole reality a mere personal sentiment, not at all burdensome to the practical business of life” (Salmon 29). For Morris, the main Christian ethic – the essential ethic – was hospitality: the treatment of the Guest or the Other.

In comprehending that modern religion had been relegated to the status of either corrupt bureaucracy or ineffectual personal sentiment, and in turning his capacity for reverence toward the creative process, Morris was typical of fin-de-siècle artists. The only contemporary I can think of whose hatred of the age and reverence for beautiful things could match Morris's in intensity was J. K. Huysmans in France (Gagnier Individualism, “Appendix”). Such a shocking juxtaposition as Morris and Huysmans is instructive. Although their passions against civilisation and for art were equally intense, their temperaments were opposite. Morris was all sensuous action and energy, mythic and mimetic. Huysmans is static and theoretic, unable in his own terms to give up sceptical, critical thought for the unselfconscious love he sought to emulate. While Morris did not, like Huysmans, characterize the vulgarity specifically as “Americanization” (he rather followed Engels and the Marx-Avelings in a more generous attitude toward America), he did share Huysmans's disgust with the materialism of modern life, including contempt for the “big business” (Huysmans) of institutional religion. They both turned to medievalism: Morris to Icelandic sagas and Huysmans to medieval alchemy, the Occult, and ultimately to an oblation that in no way compromised his contempt for the clergy. Equally frustrated with modernity, Morris chose collective action and Huysmans the apolitical miracle of individual grace. They both predicted cataclysmic twentieth centuries.

I shall conclude with the myth of European exceptionalism in the nineteenth century. The European Forum Alpbach is Austria's and one of Europe's foremost think-tanks for political, economic, and scientific policy, established to provide politicians with fundamental information for making decisions. As recently as 2005, its program was Europe – Strength and Weakness. Its seminar “Why the West?” was on the rise of modernity as a uniquely European development comprised of the rise of modern science, modern constitutional government, and modern industrial capitalism. In addition to the expected seminars on economic growth, risk, competition, finance, globalization, etc., there was a session of particular interest to humanities scholars. “Images of Europe” was on the stereotyping of national characters in literature, and encounters in “international novels” between representatives of Europe and other cultures.

As a thought experiment we might try to name an author whose identity is European. George Eliot is English, James is American, Flaubert is French. Nietzsche (despite his wish to be a Good European) is German. But there are “international novels” precisely because in relation to nonwestern cultures novels and novelists were historically aggregated as European. There can be the comparative category of the European novel without there being an identifiably European author. Europe, again, is a function rather than an identity. In the nineteenth century, development rather than nationality was the primary term in the encounter between East and West.

The interdependence of East and West was common knowledge as far back as Herodotus and was only forgotten in the nineteenth century. “History is marked by alternating movements across the imaginary line that separates East from West in Eurasia,” wrote the so-called Father of History (qtd. in Frank, Preface).Footnote ¹³ Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the founder of the Historical School, historicist par excellence, reiterated “There is no history but universal history – as it really was” (qtd. in Frank, Preface). And contra Nietzsche, more recently Marc Bloc alluded to the earlier views with “Il n'y pas d'histoire de l'Europe, il y a une histoire du monde!” (qtd. in Frank, Preface).

We have said that the Victorians were obsessed with time, particularly world-historical time, which they rewrote in their social theory to such effect that we are only now uncovering the error. If we are to listen to the systems analysts in biology, ecology, economics and politics, we must question the nineteenth-century question, “Why the West?” We must question the Victorian understanding of Europe as the Rise of the West, as the bearer of Progress, in short, as exceptional in nineteenth-century terms. While always a lover of the land called England – which he wrote in News from Nowhere could be loved like the fair flesh of the beloved – Morris was not only not jingoistic, but he actively rejected the whole theme of western progress and European exceptionalism that we are only now beginning to dismantle. Put simply, and now following not only Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts but also the systems analyst André Gunder Frank in ReOrient (Reference Frank1998), far from being the autonomous miracle of industrial capitalism progressively leading barbarous Others to the end of history in free market exchange, Europe and North America only came to dominate the globe by building on divisions of labour, markets and finances already established by China, India, and Turkey. As Frank succinctly formulates it, far from being an unprecedented miracle of industrialisation and progress, Europe and North America used silver extracted from the Americas to buy a ticket on a long-running Asian train. On this train, the division of labour was already flourishing with commercial and financial linkages through world-wide money markets and capitalist finance (see also Gagnier and Delveaux). At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Europe could be an agent or mediator of cosmopolitanism due to its disenchantment and decline. A further stage of its self-consciousness deconstructs its exceptionalism, and this is also a further step toward cosmopolitan openness and toleration.

Morris began his first literary works hating the Age into which he was born and under no illusions that it was the end of history. He looked for alternatives in whatever climates and languages he could find them. His disenchantment and then critical engagement with his own age, combined with his hospitality toward guests and others, may be his most precious legacy in our current crises. Most people remember from “How I Became a Socialist” (1894) that the leading passion of his life apart from the desire to produce beautiful things had been a hatred of modern civilisation. What is often forgotten is that the passion to produce beautiful things was coupled with the study of history:

Far from being escapist nostalgia, I take Morris's medievalism, such as it was, as a resistance to turning history into pure ideology or inconsequent nonsense: a keeping before our minds images of freedom that are not relegated to leisure-time and of choice that is collective as well as individual. There was no conflict between the ethical and political, autonomy and interdependence, local and global, civil rights and justice for pilgrims, guests, and refugees.