Today, people's cultural identities are increasingly invoked in support of political claims, and these claims commonly lead to acrimony and violence. But what is 'cultural identity', and what is its political significance? This book offers a provocatively sceptical answer to these questions. Tracing the idea back to the now largely discredited notion of national character, it argues that cultural identity is no deep going feature of individual psychology. Nor is it any uniform phenomenon. Rather, various types of so-called cultural identity emerge in response to the different circumstances people face. Such identities are marked by merely surface features of behaviour and these have a principally aesthetic appeal. In consequence, it is argued, cultural identities lack the ethical significance claimed for them and their invocation is in many ways politically pernicious. The book engages not only with thinkers in the analytic tradition like Isaiah Berlin, Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, but with Continental writers like Sartre and Kristeva.

• We started tracking this book on March 29, 2020.
• This book was £21.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 96 times in the past 1,482 days.
• The current price of this book is £21.99 last checked one day ago.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is £21.95.
• The lowest price to date was £11.25 last reached on May 13, 2021.
• This book has been £11.25 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was £65.00 last reached on December 1, 2022.
• This book has been £65.00 2 times since we started tracking it.

• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 209 Pages
• File Size: 730 KB