Book review: Reclaiming patriotism in an age of extremes

Extreme far-leftists will naturally invite extreme far-rightists.Hence, it is not strange if radical cosmopolitanism invites ethnic nationalism.This is the phenomenon that we have observed everywhere over the past three decades, from the USA to the UK's modern liberal democracy, to India and Thailand's developing liberal democracy.Such extremism badly impacts the ivory tower, as it is not knowledge, but rather an unexamined ideology, that is generated following such a divide, producing at best jingoistic intellectuals on the one hand and radical liberal cosmopolites on the other.In his response to such issues, Smith explains that patriotism is the most fundamental political virtue.He asserted that "Patriotism, in the most rudimentary sense, is a form of loyalty to one's own, one's people, one's community, but especially to one's constitution or political regime."In the spirit of finding the middle ground, Steven B Smith reclaimed the very tenets of patriotism, in which both radical cosmopolitanism and nationalism miss the point of loyalty and respect among mankind.Smith is surely more than aware of the most commonly read works related to one of the great authors of anti-patriotism, Leo Tolstoy, who saw in patriotism nothing more than a form of collective egoism that leads only to war and death.In his defense of what he calls enlightened patriotism, what worries him are the ongoings at the ivory tower, whereby educated circles seem to view it as morally questionable.However, patriotism is not at all on the verge of disappearing; far from it, the author explains.In Chapter one (on Patriotism and Loyalty), he makes a case for the importance of patriotism, stressing the importance of loyalty and respect (two essential virtues).He claims that the project of cosmopolitanism negates the sentiment of loyalty towards the nationhood (thus, at best dystopia).Additionally, ethnic nationalism negates the importance of respect toward mankind, hence succumbing itself to the hatred of jingoism and xenophobia.There is nothing to be curious about when it comes to the universalistic nature of cosmopolitanism.After all, it is just a secular version of the Christian Commonwealth, and nothing is universalistic about it because it is the religious version of the Roman Empire.In his attempt to unravel the dystopian cosmopolitanism argument in Chapter two (on Patriotism and Its Critics), Smith examines and criticizes some of the thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb, together with a few others.The strength of George Kateb's idea