“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime,’ so well had he read his Homer.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg paints the portrait of a philologist who has lost touch with the world through reading the classics too closely. The comedy of the aphorism lies not in just the misreading alone, but in the fact that the philologist exchanges the everyday ‘prime’ for the much more exotic name of the Trojan king; as if the textual-critical maxim lectio difficilior had gone over into...

Around the turn of the millennium, academics and politicians predicted that the world would grow together as one and that people would become less bound by national affiliations. Almost twenty years later, there is little left of this vision. This is not such a surprise when we consider that the cosmopolitan ideal (as articulated during the European Enlightenment) wholeheartedly embraced the promises of a globalising economy, yet has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism....