Lexington Books
Pages: 274
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-8902-4 • Hardback • November 2018 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-4985-8903-1 • eBook • November 2018 • $99.50 • (£77.00)
Nigel Rapport is professor of anthropological and philosophical studies at the University of St. Andrews.
Chapter 1: Love as an answer?
Chapter 2: An anthropology of love
Chapter 3: Voices in a wider debate on love
Chapter 4. The ontology of individuality and the symbology of society
Chapter 5: Taking stock: Love, vision, category, moment
Chapter 6: Empirical investigations: On Stanley Spencer and Phil Ward
Chapter 7: Three possible ways to a universalized love
Chapter 8: The British National Health Service
Chapter 9: Historical overview
Chapter 10: Contemporary treatments: Love today
Chapter 11: Love’s devices
Chapter 12: Loving recognition as a program
This is a thoughtful and deeply passionate book about the civic virtues of mutual recognition. Through a series of nuanced reflections on cosmopolitanism, individuality and society, Rapport proposes to consider love as the principle virtue necessary for establishing a compassionate space for otherness. As such, Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality is classic Rapport but with a twist. With a novel-like prose, the book eloquently captures the conceptual, political and existential components of a cosmopolitanism that is anchored in the distinctive specificity of the Other. Rapport takes this discussion onto a new level, however, by boldly proposing that an integrative society of equals can only be formed through the emotional and compassionate engagement of love.
— Morten Nielsen, Denmark’s National Museum
Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality is the intellectual successor to Rapport’s 2012 Anyone, The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology. In it, he rehearses what might be the motivation for taking up his formerly described politesse as general practice and for recognizing its virtue: the loving look. This book has all the hallmarks of Rapport’s intrepid thinking, chief of which is his dissatisfaction, even anxiety, over the entrapment we anthropologists tend to make of ourselves in classificatory thinking. Having long been one of our bravest thinkers, this book is a quest to loose ourselves from the classifications we all too often take to be realities of ‘culture,’ challenging us to look beyond our borders, and inviting us to visit with the promise of the loving.
— Simone Dennis, Australian National University