Introduction: Parts and Wholes — Kant, Communications, Communities and Cosmopolitics

Abstract

In his 1770 Considerations on the Government of Poland, Rousseau exclaimed:

Whatever one says to the contrary, today there are no more Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards or even Englishmen; there are only Europeans. Everyone has the same tastes and the same habits. (Rousseau 1990, 171)

The prospect evoked by Rousseau of a European identity superseding national differences probably seems remote to us today in the wake of the repeated rejection of the European Constitution (2005). Of course, to place the quotation in its context, Rousseau is himself not speaking in favour of an eventual European project: indeed, according to the sentiments expressed in this text, it seems he also would have voted ‘no’ in the referendum. The motivation for his essay is the wish to affirm the importance of specific national and cultural identities against what he sees as a dangerously formless abstraction. Rousseau regards ‘Europe’ as leading to a generalised state of decadent mediocrity. Uncannily echoing contemporary debates, he presents ‘Europe’ as smothering its inhabitants’ individuality with its all-encompassing uniformity; for him it lacks the animation which properly pertains to a particular, robust and resonating ‘national form’.