Michael Murphy

Written with flair and imagination, Michael Murphy’s exciting and thoughtful book rethinks the relationship of self and other in critical conversation with Gerard Delanty’s cosmopolitanism and Walter Mignolo’s decolonial theory. By pollinating this engaging dialogue with Watsuji Tetsuro’ original

 concepts and perspectives, the book aspires to shed a new, valuable light on theorizations of temporal and spatial modalities of modernity.

Marianna Papastephanou, University of Cyprus, Department of Education

In our interdependent world, my interdisciplinary research brings into unconventional dialogue the methodologies of three fields: critical theory, decolonial theory, and the work of the Japanese philosopher and historian, Watsuji Tetsurō. At the beginning of my academic journey I was told that such a dialogue was impossible as criticality resided only in European thought. However, cutting across traditional disciplinary and epistemic boundaries reveals an undiscovered space for the creation of a conceptually post-Western centric and critically oriented theory of cosmopolitanism. This is motivated by the consideration that the story that we have told ourselves about who we are is causally part of the problems that we face personally, societally, and as a species, and are unlikely to provide any realistic solutions.

Rather than a grand projection of ideals onto the world, we will explore how if cosmopolitanism is to remain critical, relevant and familiar, then it must engage with other global relational sociologies on matters of common concern through the process I describe as critique and cooperation. At the level of inter-cultural exchange, through an engagement of mutual humility, in celebrating the global resources of cosmopolitanisms as reciprocal phases of development, holds out the potential to rejuvenate world philosophies and to break through internal boundaries and limitations. This represents a challenge to the supposed necessities of conventional political, economic, cultural and social dogma.

The second stage of the book takes the methodology of critique and cooperation to provide a radical account of being and acting in the world. It does so through an exploration of the relationship between the ruled and ruler-givers in democracies. The recent shocks to the neo-liberal view of the world, the financial crisis of 2008, the United Kingdom’s referendum decision to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States of America, have revealed a battleground for the rationality the political between ‘populist’ and ‘established’ political identities. This clash for the image of being and acting in a democratic world, has overlapped with the belief among many citizens within Western democracies of the development of a gap between themselves, as embodied citizens living contextualised lives, and centres of power. Established political figures do recognise that globalisation, the cosmopolitanisation of the everyday, and democracy is perceptively not working for the majority. And yet, all they have to offer is to argue for change in order for things to remain the same. However, the most recent shock, the emergence into the world of SARS-CoV-2, has revealed a belief in the importance of social relationships. If there is to be any benefit to this recent event, it is that this can provide the ground for reconsidering and renovating how we think about the relationship between institutions and the individual, to provide a pluralistic, relational, creative, embodied agency and an independent source of legitimate rationality for a more democratic way of being and acting in the world.