Becoming a Cosmopolitan

What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium

By (author) Jason D. Hill

Publication date:

29 February 2000

Length of book:

224 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780847697540

As a Jamaican immigrant arriving in the United States at the age of twenty, Jason Hill noticed how often Americans identified themselves in terms of race and ethnicity. He observed, for example, the reluctance of West Indians to joins "black causes" for fear of losing their identity. He began to ask himself what sort of world he wanted to live in, a quest that in time led him to the idea of the cosmopolitan.

In Becoming a Cosmopolitan, Jason D. Hill argues that we need a new understanding of the self. He revives the idea of the cosmopolitan, the person who identifies the world as home. Arguing for the right to forget where we came from, Hill proposes a new moral cosmopolitanism for the new millennium.

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Acknowledgements
Chapter 3 Introduction
Chapter 4 1. Creating the Self: The Self in Moral Becoming
Chapter 5 2. The Existentialist Self: Radically Free and Rebellious
Chapter 6 3. Moral Becoming, Moral Masking, and the Narrativity of the Self: Negotiating the Cosmopolitan Terrain
Chapter 7 4. Forgetting Where We Came From: The Moral Imperative of Every Cosmopolitan
Chapter 8 5. Radical and Moderate Moral Cosmopolitanism
Chapter 9 6. Liberalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Communitarianism: Friends or Adversaries
Chapter 10 Epilogue: Coming Out as a Moral Cosmopolitan
Chapter 11 Appendix: Historical Pictures of Cosmopolitanism
Chapter 12 Biblioraphy
Chapter 13 Index
Chapter 14 About the Author

An ontological rebel —rejecting the categories that limit our freedom—embracing a morality of becoming, arguing for the merit of forgetting, Hill offers us a new moral imagination.