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Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Kwame Anthony Appiah·2006·English

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Appiah's defense of the old Stoic idea that we have obligations to strangers as well as to our own communities. Against both the nationalist and the universal monoculturist, he argues for a cosmopolitanism that values human commonality while cherishing difference: the conversation between cultures, not the merging of them.

Cosmopolitanism is an adventure and an aspiration at the same time. But not, in the end, an impossibility. The world does not have to choose between the universal and the particular. Contamination — the mixing of cultures, the exchange of ideas across difference — is nothing new. It has been going on for millennia, and it has made us what we are.

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