admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same censures."

The claim that trade broke down narrow habits of mind served as one of the most important arguments in its favor. Eighteenth-century exponents of the new order did not argue, as liberals tend to argue in our time, that economic incentives are usually strong enough to encourage men and women to set aside their national, ethnic, racial, and religious prejudices during business hours, indulging them only in the harmless privacy of their homes and clubs. Twentieth-century experience has demonstrated the tenacity of national and ethnic solidarity, even when exposed to the solvent of the modern megalopolis. The eighteenth century believed, on the other hand, that commerce broke down particularism and promoted a cosmopolitan outlook. "In the stock-exchanges of Amsterdam, London, Surat, or Basra," wrote Voltaire, "the Gheber, the Barian, the Jew, the Mohametan, the Chinese Deist, the Brahmin, the Greek Christian, the Roman Christian, the Protestant Christian, the Quaker Christian, trade with one another; they don't raise their dagger against each other to gain the souls for their religions." Addison put the point even more forcefully in describing a visit to the Royal Exchange: "Sometimes I am jostled among a body of Americans; sometimes I am lost in a crowd of Jews, and sometimes in a group of Dutch-men. I am a Dane, a Swede, or Frenchman at different times, or rather fancy myself like the old philosopher, who upon being asked what country-man he was, replied that he was a citizen of the world."

Our twentieth-century experience of imperial rivalries, international competition for markets, and global wars makes it hard for us to share the Enlightenment's conviction that capitalism would promote world peace. The cosmopolitan ideal articulated by the Enlightenment, although it remains an essential ingredient in modern liberalism, strikes many of us today as at once arrogant, in its contempt for the unenlightened masses, and naive. "Benevolence," moreover—the universal love for humanity assumed to follow emancipation from local prejudice—presents itself to us as a singularly bloodless form of goodwill, founded more on indifference than on devotion. We can appreciate Rousseau's mockery of "those pretended cosmopolites, who in justifying their love for the human race, boast of loving all the world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one." Paine's self-congratulatory humanitarianism, on the other hand—

-122-