Sublime

Interestingly, we may see this in his conception of history, particularly in the essay “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” Whereas transcendent religions equate the universal with God, Kant’s starting point of inquiry into the history of humans is not God. Rather, it is, as he says, “this idiotic course of things human

Two master concepts pervade the study: circulation and transcendence. Analytically central to my project, both are highly important but neglected phenomena and categories in the field of historical inquiry.

Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

Redundancy provides insurance against loss. The American chestnut largely disappeared from the forests of the northeastern United States, but other species filled its niche. In 2004, though, when Chiron, one of only two companies providing flu vaccines in the US, announced that its plants in Liverpool were contaminated, our house of cards was at re

Benedict Anderson has popularized Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘empty, homogeneous time’ as the temporality of nations operating in a globally unified time-space (at least for nationalists and nation-makers). As such, it alerted attention to alternative conceptions of temporality.

Thus, in my view, the Chinese conceptions of the new world order will need to respond to this fundamental mismatch and develop a cosmopolitan ideal whether from historical traditions, from new conceptions of universalism, or from some emergent combination thereof. The Chinese ideal of tianxia was perhaps the last archaic universalism to have surviv