of their origin in late 1730s France. Furthermore it shows a tendency of the editors of Freemason’ s Magazine, who were apparently of the opinion that Ramsay’ s thoughts mirrored the influence of freemasonry on society. Given that one of the most prominent representatives of German radical Enlightenment, Wieland, in his essay on the Order of Cosmopolitans fifty years after Ramsay’ s oration( and six years before the first reprint of Ramsay in London) repeats some of its central ideas, it cannot be underestimated. Again it must be emphasised that Ramsay was not original in the sense that he invented the concepts in his oration( although I would like to see the idea of crusaders as the“ new people” and the petition for an encyclopaedia to which all people contribute, in print or even manuscript, before 1737), but he surely was one of the earlier representatives, crystallising these ideas. Wieland’ s essay on the Cosmopolitans is not printed for a masonic audience but reflects the discourse of a time that was disappointed with the turn that the first masonic, truly European, endeavour had taken. The rise and fall of the Strict Observance was one of the most traumatic events for those who had hoped that a new time for a trans- national community – at least among European intellectuals – would arrive. This disappointment explains to a large extent the emergence of the Illuminati – to which Wieland disappointment explains to a large extent the emergence of the Illuminati – to which Wieland most certainly and leading Vienna freemasons most definitely belonged. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars there grew a resistance against an entirely rational definition of world citizenship. Napoleon’ s dominion over Europe was perceived as a threat of a universalising force able to erase some of the continent’ s core values. Faced with the destruction of a political order that had given sense to the German-speaking states since its foundation by Charles Magne in the 9 th century, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation – finally dissolved by Napoleon in 1806 and thus erasing the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 as the framework of European statehood – Novalis attempted to secure at least the concept of“ Holiness” for a new cosmopolitan vision of Europe. Opposing the“ sacred” with the“ secular” he invented a basic dialectic pattern of world explanation( as later developed in Hegelianism and Marxism) and saw in their synthesis a dream of the future unity of humankind: the secular is reconciled with the sacred in the lodge, receiving there the kiss of brotherhood. Ramsay’ s oration contains the nucleus for two forms of world citizenship, one based upon rational principles and the other founded upon spiritual values. Both readings of cosmopolitanism, in a rational and an ideal sense, are possible within fundamental texts of freemasonry.
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