Writing Cosmopolitan Lives: Joseph and Kwame Anthony Appiah

The idea of cosmopolitanism continues to attract many scholars concerned with the mutual responsibilities of an increasingly global world. But there is no agreed definition of cosmopolitanism, and indeed some difference of opinion about the relative importance of ideas about world citizenship, on the one hand, and of questions about culture and identity, on the other. One of the theorists who attaches most importance to the ethical and aesthetic issues involved in cosmopolitanism is Kwame Anthony Appiah. This essay explores some of his ideas about cosmopolitanism, looking particularly at the importance of stories and of his own family in the way he defines and explains it. In drawing on his family, and particularly on the autobiography of his Ghanaian father, Joe Appiah, he immediately moves beyond the Eurocentrism that continues to cling to the idea of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, the social privilege of the Appiah family raises questions about how widely applicable their experiences are, while the gender blindness evident in the writing of both father and son make some of Appiah's arguments extremely problematic.