Volume 52, Number 7 · April 28, 2005
The Magic of 'I'
By Alan Ryan
The Ethics of Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Princeton University Press, 358 pp., $29.95
'Rootless cosmopolitans' was the belittling label that Stalinists applied to Jewish intellectuals during the Soviet purges; and although the American academy is neither Stalinist nor anti-Semitic, there has for the past twenty years been a good deal of argument between the enthusiasts for roots and the defenders of cosmopolitanism. Writers such as Harvard's Michael Sandel and the London School of Economics' John Gray have contrasted the rootless condition of cosmopolitan liberalism with the rootedness of traditional societies elsewhere in the world and of our own society at various times in the past, invariably to the disadvantage of liberalism.
Review, 4620 words
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