Central European cosmopolitanism demonstrates the limits of the study of political thought in its national context. My argument is not that one cannot write a history of a ‘national tradition’ in political thought. The fascinating narratives produced for this book are proof enough to the contrary. They seem to me most interesting, however, where the national tradition opens to foreign influences. Such openings often have a transformative effect, but national narratives rarely foreground them. I shall use Central European cosmopolitanism to argue for the relativisation of the national viewpoint in the study of political thought and for the complementarity of national and international perspectives. By interrogating the categories of both ‘nationalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, I shall show that there is neither a closed national tradition of political thought that can be historically understood apart from international interaction nor a cosmopolitan tradition that can be understood apart from its national origin. Both nationalism and cosmopolitanism remain useful concepts, a point of departure for understanding and writing the history of political thought, but, standing on their own, they produce impoverished histories. Only their interaction can provide a viable historical account. Accounting for the interaction involves exposing the hypocrisy of nationalist claims to an authentic closed tradition, on the one hand, and disclosing the national origin of cosmopolitanism on the other. This chapter on Central European cosmopolitanism endeavours to do both.