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The New York Review of Books
June 22, 2006
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19103?email

Cosmopolitans
By Alan Ryan

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.'

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