From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

We know why the American Revolution was fought. We have a document called the Declaration of Independence

in which Thomas Jefferson laid out many grievances against the crown. The threat of abolition wasn't one of them.

This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's Peter Wood, author of 1620,

a critical response to the 1619 project.

We'll talk with him a bit later on today's program.

Our first guest is Dr. Khalil Habib,

Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College.

We talk about nationalism versus cosmopolitanism.

And we start with a definition of sorts.

What would you say makes a country nationalistic?

It's a difficult concept to really define because different nations define their nationalism differently.

But if you want to contrast it to cosmopolitanism, I think we can get closer to the mark.

Cosmopolitanism essentially means a universal city, cosmopolus.

And a cosmopolitan would be somebody who referred to him or herself as a universal citizen, as opposed to

somebody who was defined by the particularity of their tradition or their race or their location.

And so quite often nationalism refers to a people who coalesce around a shared path, in some cases, a shared race, language, religion,

location, nationalism tends to be rooted in history, as opposed to cosmopolitanism,

which is in philosophic in origin, actually, whereas nationalism and nationalists who have supported such

positions tend to look to history and the people's unique past and its unique identity

as the defining feature of their politics. What are different possible foundations of unity

in a nationalistic society?

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