Beyond Solidarity ― Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World

Beyond Solidarity is an impassioned argument for a sharable morality in a world increasingly fractured along lines of difference. Giles Gunn asks how human solidarity can be reconceived when its expressions have become increasingly exceptionalist and outmoded, and when the pressures of globalization divide as much as they unify.
He finds the terms for answering these questions in a more inclusive, cosmopolitan pragmatism—one willing to explore fundamental values without recourse to absolutist arguments. Drawing on the work of William and Henry James, John Dewey, Primo Levi, Richard Rorty, and many others, as well as postcolonial writing, Jewish literature of the Holocaust, and the cultural and religious experience of African Americans in slavery, Gunn points pragmatism in a transnational direction and shows how it can better account for the consequences of diversity. Beyond Solidarity, then, is a study of the difference that difference makes in a globalized world.

Giles Gunn is a professor of English and Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism and The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture.