Volume 53, Number 11 · June 22, 2006
Cosmopolitans
By Alan Ryan
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Norton, 196 pp., $23.95
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny
by Amartya Sen
Norton, 215 pp., $24.95
Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership
by Martha C. Nussbaum
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 487 pp., $35.00
The three books by leading philosophers under review share one theme: cosmopolitanism. Otherwise, they could hardly be more different. Anthony Appiah and Amartya Sen have written short, brisk, pointed essays on the perils of cultural isolation and narrowness. Martha Nussbaum has written a substantial philosophical treatise on the difficulties that recent fashions in political theory have put in the way of understanding the nature of justice for the mentally and physically disabled, foreigners, and animals. But Appiah and Sen take very different approaches. In Cosmopolitanism, Appiah suggests that if people with vastly different religious, sexual, and political attachments are to live together without violence they must master the arts of conversation. In Identity and Violence, Sen makes a flat-out assault on the use of exclusive attachments and social groupings to define our relations to others. He deplores the ways that people use sexual, racial, religious, and other forms of identity as reasons to fight and persecute one another. Aptly enough, Cosmopolitanism is relaxed and conversational, while Identity and Violence is often irritated and sometimes angry: 'Violence,' Sen writes, referring to conflicts in Rwanda, Congo, Israel, Palestine, and other places, 'is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.'
Review, 5090 words
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