BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

and enduring than the Persian, Egyptian or other civilizations of kings and priests. 10 These early
ethnic and cultural identities, formed in opposition to externalized others Kohn noted with some
irony, bred cosmopolitan and universalist ideas via the Greek Sophists and Stoics and the
Judeo-Christian Old and New Testaments. 11 Kohn further distinguished Greek visual/spatial
cultural and racial unity from Jewish audio/temporal conceptions of a calling or historical
mission. From these two ancient spatial and temporal models, certain elements of modern
national identity can be traced: the “us” versus “them” mentality reflecting Greek denigration of
barbarians, as well as the citizen’s duty to state or polis, and the Hebrew trope of the “chosen
people” with a national history and covenant with God for a providential future. 12 Kohn cited, as
an example of the latter, the early modern revolutionary Puritan self-identification with Hebraic
ideals, which became a metaphoric expression of English political and religious liberties. Poet
and polemicist John Milton considered his “sacred task” the writing of political treatises
advocating the liberty of unlicensed printing and the fundamental equality of men, including the
right to depose tyrants. 13
10 The Idea of Nationalism (Collier Books edition, 1967), 27-29.
11 Ibid., 47-49, 56, 59. Kohn specifies the books of Isaiah and Matthew.
12 Ibid., 30-37, 50-53.
National Cultures and Citizenship
In 1882 French philosopher Ernest Renan delivered a famous lecture entitled “What is a
Nation?” in which he warned against the dangers of confounding nation and race and the
13 Ibid., 168-170. Kohn refers to Milton’s works respectively entitled Areopagitica (1644)
and Defense of the People of England, concerning their right to call to account kings and
magistrates and after due conviction to depose and put them to death (1650).
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