Unity or Diversity?

Abstract

Amongst the values dearest to Enlightenment thinkers was cosmopolitanism. Claiming that reason shed the same light all over the world, the philosophes commonly insisted that there was a single universal standard of justice, governed by one normative natural law — and indeed that there was a single uniform human nature, all people being endowed with fundamentally the same attributes and desires, ‘from China to Peru’. Thus one of the favourite literary genres of writers such as Montesquieu was to assume the persona of a foreign ‘anthropologist’ (such as a Persian sage) visiting Europe — as a way of satirising the vices and follies not just of Europe but of mankind as a whole [88].