Citizens or cosmopolitans? Nationalism, internationalism, and academic identity in the early American republic

Abstract

Historically, the changing roles of academics have often been associated with changing relations between scholarship and the state. What functions did the state expect scholars to fulfill? Using a historical–biographical approach, this essay considers the example of early nineteenth-century astronomer Ferdinand Rudolf Hassler, who immigrated to the United States from Switzerland in 1805 and whose contributions to various scientific projects during the next decade (i.e., the final decade of the Napoleonic Wars) revealed a key shift in modern academic identity—a shift from cosmopolitanism to nationalism shaped by the political anxieties and geopolitical uncertainties of his time. Hassler’s involvement with a US coastal survey and the construction of a US national observatory raised doubts about the extent to which a scholar (particularly an immigrant scholar) could be a “cosmopolitan” and a “servant of the state” simultaneously. Hassler, like others of his generation, failed to balance these competing and perhaps fundamentally incompatible roles. His case, together with his own commentary on his experiences, sheds light on similar dilemmas facing so-called global scholars today.