
Cosmopolitanism and Antisemitism
Bloomsbury Academic (Publisher)
Book
Paperback/Softback
192 pages
978-1-4725-8888-3 (ISBN)
Description
Cosmopolitanism advances a universalistic conception of humanity and ties it to the particular freedom and well-being of individuals. However, this book argues that universalism has shown two faces to Jews - an inclusive face that sees them as fellow human beings and reveals itself in magnificent discourses on Jewish emancipation, and a cruel judgmental face that abstracts and identifes 'the Jews' as the 'other' of the universal, which has long manifested itself in discriminatory discourse on 'the Jewish question'.Robert Fine and Philip Spencer track the shifting theoretical discourse of cosmopolitanism in and through its relationship to this question- from the French Enlightenment to contemporary scholarship, including recent work by Judith Butler. Their aim is to shed light on the dangers of 'unreflective cosmopolitanism' and to develop a more reflective mode of cosmopolitanism - a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges its own 'othering' tendencies and attempts to overcome these.The engaging and thought-provoking short book will appeal to a broad audience with interests in the relation of racism to antisemitism, European debates on Israel and cosmopolitan thinking in the social sciences and humanities.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-4725-8888-3 (9781472588883)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Robert Fine is Professor Emeritus at Warwick University, UK Philip Spencer is Professor and Director of the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Conflict and Mass Violence at Kingston University, UK
Content
1. Introduction: From Formations to Interrogation 2. The Cold War and After: Contexts of Civilizational Analysis 3. Watersheds in Contemporary Civilizational Analysis 4. Counterpoints, Critiques and Overlaps: Civilizational Analysis in a Competitive Field 5. South, East and West of the West: Many Civilizations, Many Thinkers 6. At the Interstices and in the Borderlands: Unexplored Paths for Civilizations Analysis Bibliography Index