Reichert, Roey
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA
Stipendium für Aufklärungsforschung
Aufenthalt: 30.04.2019 - 29.07.2019
Forschungsprojekt
Nationalismus und Weltbürgertum in der deutschen Aufklärung
My dissertation is set to explore the concepts of Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the political thought of four prominent philosophers of the German Enlightenment, namely Kant, Herder, Hegel, and Marx. Rather than focusing on these different concepts in isolation, the object of this study is to examine how each philosopher viewed the inherent dialectical tension residing between the two, and how they sought to resolve it. Special attention will be given to the tracing of the development of their ideas vis-à-vis their engagements with lesser-known contemporaries. The dissertation argues that the Nationalism/Cosmopolitanism dialectic must be understood in relation to the respective philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology in each philosophical system, as well as a response to Enlightenment values, particularly those of universalism and progress. The dissertation aims to accomplish three goals: the first is to provide a genealogy of how the present antithesis between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism arose. The second is to uncover the different conceptualizations of the relations between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the past. The final goal is to broaden the horizons of contemporary political imagination by exploring alternative theories of Cosmopolitanism.