COSMOPOLITAN LOCALISM: AUGUSTINE ON PLACE AND CONTINGENCY Elly Long 1,2 Abstract: Augustine is not included among the many ancient thinkers that Martha Nussbaum draws upon for her cosmopolitan project. This is surprising both because Augustine is often read as a cosmopolitan and because Nussbaum engages with and critiques him on other related matters, particularly the purported ‘otherworldliness’ of this thought. This article remedies this lack, putting Augustine into conversation with Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism. By investigating Augustine’s view of contingency generally and the contingency of place specifically, I show that Augustine’s thought supports both universal ethical concern of the sort Nussbaum praises and particular attachments to place which Nussbaum has been criticized for lacking. In addition, Augustine’s view of contingency avoids the ironism of Richard Rorty’s patriotism, which Nussbaum also criticizes. Augustine sees more clearly than both Nussbaum and Rorty how particular and universal commitments need not be competitive. Therefore, Augustine is not quite the cosmopolitan thinker that he is often recognized to be, but neither is he the severely otherworldly thinker that Nussbaum reads him as. Keywords: Augustine, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, place, cosmopolitan- ism, localism, patriotism, amor Dei, contingency, gift, creation. Introduction In contemporary debates over patriotism, cosmopolitanism and the ethics of attachment to place, political theorists and philosophers have often made recourse to pre-modern thinkers to shed light on our own context. 3 The moti- vation for this mode of inquiry is, in part, the idea that by looking to ancient and medieval sources, we can see both that our own debates are not so new, but also that our contemporary positions in and framings of these debates may overlook the still-relevant resources of the past. Arguably, no thinker has more consistently drawn upon pre-modern thought in this way than Martha HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XLIV. No. 3. Autumn 2023 DOI: 10.53765/20512988.44.3.484 1 Department of Politics, Princeton University, 001 Fisher Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. Email: eabrown@princeton.edu. 2 For helpful conversations about the themes of this article, I wish to thank Leora Batnitzky, Evelyn Behling, Eric Gregory, Michael Lamb, Melissa Lane, Haidun Liu and Darren Yau, as well as a terrific audience at the University of Notre Dame. 3 E.g. T. MacArt, ‘Pietas: A Case for Ethical Patriotism in Aquinas’, Journal of Poli- tics, 84 (2022), pp. 541–53; S.B. Smith, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (New Haven, 2021); M. Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford, 1997). Copyright (c) Imprint Academic For personal use only -- not for reproduction