HST7316 – Nationalism, Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism in Political Thought, Nineteenth-Twentieth Centuries

This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of what some of the most important political thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (before the emergence of what is called 'contemporary political theory' since the 1970s) thought and wrote about the phenomena and concepts referred to as ‘nationalism', ‘patriotism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Thinkers focused upon include J. G. Fichte, Giuseppe Mazzini, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, John [Lord] Acton, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ernest Renan, Francis Lieber, Alexander Crummel, Karl Marx, Otto Bauer, Jessie Fausset, Alain Locke, Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rabindranath Tagore, José Vasconcelos, Simone Weil, Richard Wright, Hannah Arendt, John Plamenatz, Isaiah Berlin. The emphasis of the module is not on ‘nationalist’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ thinkers as such, but on what political thinkers thought and wrote about the nation, patriotism, nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism from the Napoleonic wars to the Cold War.