Description:
This book seeks to address the kinds of challenges that cosmopolitan perspectives and practices face in a world organized increasingly in relation to a proliferating series of global absolutisms - religious, political, social, and economic.
Review Quotes:
In Giles Gunn you have a distinguished senior scholar at the height of his powers, building upon his last several books to create a far-reaching articulation and vindication of what he calls "pragmatic cosmopolitanism." Any readers of his earlier works on "solidarity" and "pragmatism" will be prepared for the humane, learned, and forthright style of this new book, but readers who have never read a word of Gunn's before will find this an accessible, self-contained work. Ideas to Die For: The Cosmopolitan Challenge is an earnest, sober, and deeply appealing essay on some of the most vexing issues of our time.
David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of History, University of California Berkeley, USA.
The brilliance of this book lies in its author's uncanny ability to subject the long tradition of academic reflections on cosmopolitanism to cutting-edge insights drawn from the emerging transdisciplinary field of global studies. Insisting that various forms of cosmopolitanisms are best understood when associated with the concrete social problems they are grappling with, Giles Gunn relies on a good dose of Deweyan pragmatism to sketch the social, literary, historical, and religious dimensions of a sensible cosmopolitanism opposed to globalized absolutisms of any kind.
Manfred B. Steger, Professor of Global Politics, University of Hawai'i-Manoa, USA and author of The Rise of the Global Imaginary.