Cosmopolitan Culture 2: reused post

     As there is often a fair amount of confusion concerning the term -- the past really is a foreign country -- here's another post from last year.

      "Cosmopolitan culture" is an important concept for understanding pre-modern empires. The term refers to a high culture in which literature and polite conversation were expressed in one or more refined languages, at home everywhere but natural or "organic" nowhere. Although empires created or engendered the most successful ones, there wasn't a one-to-one correspondence of empires to cosmopolitan cultures. Only the most successful empires brought a high culture into being, the rest contenting themselves with the high culture they inherited. And some cosmopolitan high cultures, for example the Babylonian, the Greco-Roman, and the Islamic (in the cultural sense), long outlasted the empires that engendered them.  Whoever ruled, what wouldn't change was the expectation that elites would possess a cultivated personality thoroughly steeped in one. 

      In the 3rd century cultivated personalities were expected to be at home in Latin, Greek, or (ideally) both, no matter where they came from; in the 17th century Middle East it would have been some combination of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Think of it in these terms: within any civilization elites could move easily from one city to another, confident that everywhere they would find people much like themselves. They would share many of the same tastes, would have been exposed to the same literary classics, and would appreciate similar styles in everything from food and dress to music and architecture. And styles would change, one had to keep up. Religion could play a role too, but among the elite refinement had a way of trumping belief, much to the disgust of the pious.

      Outside the walls of the major cities, perhaps even their home cities, our travellers may well have been stupefied by the rustic language and rude ways of life of their neighbors. To be part of the elite in a premodern empire you would have had to possess this universal high culture, to exemplify it, to think of it as a good part of the point of life. Convincing mastery of it was a prerequisite for elite status and it was very hard to fake."Nothing is harder to acquire than the surface polish that is called good manners", as a French writer once put it.  

      We moderns are probably not as distant from this outlook as we like to think. We—or some of us--can devote ourselves to cultivating a universal high culture just as happily as our ancestors  did (well, somebody's ancestors anyway). However, we tend to see ourselves as citizens of nations in which everyone shares a broad cultural patrimony, including, broadly speaking, language. We recognize that other equally legitimate nations have other languages and cultures, including high cultures, so much so that we tend to take it for granted. We are also curious about other cultures, a trait that was generally (but not absolutely) absent in pre-modern times. A pre-modern cosmopolitan culture, in contrast, would have been untethered to a particular place, unless that place was the imperial center, and even there elites would be alert to the degree of refinement in everyone they met. 

      Such cultures were convinced of their own superiority and baffled by the existence of literate and leisured persons elsewhere. At the height of the Roman Empire an educated Roman could travel anywhere she might wish and find people who spoke Latin or Greek or (ideally) both. She would feel at home in the major cities, confident that she would find others of like sensibilities, tastes, and manners. But outside the walls she would have understood little or nothing, perhaps not even in her native province . The same thing happened under the `Abbasid Caliphate and the civilization it brought into being. A traveller could spend years going from Spain to India and feel at home everywhere, as long he was dealing with his fellow elites; the country folk, neither tutored in the culture of the elite nor speaking their language, would have been foreign to him no matter where he went. 

     There is another use of the term "cosmopolitan" that has little to do with pre-modern empires and their high cultures. Both the Third Reich and the USSR deemed "cosmopolitanism" a threat to the body politic and a crime against the state. In practice this usually meant Jews, especially in the officially anti-anti-semitic USSR (the Nazis in the end of course didn't need to resort to euphemisms to oppress Jews). But the label and even the indictment was applied to others: being referred to as a "bourgeois cosmopolitan" would have been terrifying to anyone. I'm a little scared of it myself. Again, this has as little to do with the course as the magazine or cocktail of the same name. 

Claire said...

When we talked about Sargon the Akkadian, we said they defined the ideal, "only legitimate state." Such a state would have a completely natural political structure. It was called the Universal Cosmopolitan Agrarian Empire. Such a label really gives us insight about the ideals of the culture and the time period of the Akkadians. It also explains the context and expectations people might have had of Islam.
Here's a question: do you think Islam ever came close to fulfilling such a role, or was it missing one of those 4 parts? Do you think the solidarity of the people made them more difficult to unify, or would they have a stronger bond because they had more in common (i.e. ideals, agrarian lifestyle)?

March 19, 2009 3:35 PM

Michael Chamberlain said...

Excellent questions, here's a quick answer, quick because the course is largely an exploration of these questions.The early Islamic empire shared the following characteristics with previous universal empires:

1. Its economy was agrarian, that is to say most people were engaged in the production of agricultural goods. Though the term agrarian does not mean "agricultural" as it did not exclude all the economic specializations we have seen: traders, crafts-people, bureaucrats, city-dwellers of all types, and even pastoralists.

2. Like other empires before it considered itself the only legitimate polity on earth, a universal empire. Anything not under its dominion was by nature illegitimate. As we'll see in a couple of weeks, even when the early Islamic empire was fractured politically, the ideal survived even when the reality behind it had changed.

3. With the advent of the `Abbasid Caliphate (though to be sure elements of it had appeared earlier) the empire had become cosmopolitan: it both fostered and was sustained by adherence to a common high culture among its elites. The most successful empires were held together not so much by coercion as as coalitions of elites of various kinds. Giving them a stake in a common high culture was politically very useful.

4. And finally, the "empire" part: what distinguishes an empire from the nation-states that so recently supplanted them?

My view, shared by most historians, is that the Islamic Empire was perhaps the most successful universal cosmopolitan empire of them all, even though its political unity lasted a fairly short time. We are going to see that its fragmentation at the end of the ninth-century did not prevent it from transforming itself into a civilization.

Thanks for the question, which again was excellent. Keep them coming.

March 19, 2009 6:07 PM