Editor's Introduction

the last several years have been plague years, not only because of the appearance and persistence of COVID-19, but also because of the alarming political turn, worse in some places than others, toward authoritarianism. Here in the United States we had Donald Trump, fortunately no longer president but still a threatening political force. In Europe, most notably in Hungary and Poland, we have Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, to whom we must add Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia for their increasingly authoritarian rule. Worst of all is the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia which is ravaging the country and causing enormous suffering and death. Then there is the tightening of control and the growing loss of human and civil rights in China—where they were not robust to begin with—as well as the disasters in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, to name only three countries where we are witnessing the nightmare scenarios of civil wars. Last, but certainly not least, there is the tidal wave of refugees and migrants forced from their countries because of war, famine, or political threats against their lives, and the concurrent global rise of xenophobia, which was the subject of the previous issue of Social Research.

The current issue on hospitality, a subject that is intimately connected to that of xenophobia, was inspired by the compelling and fruitful suggestions of my friend and colleague, Polish philosopher Tomasz Kitlinski. It is a subject that lies at the heart of many of the problems besetting our world and that is gratifyingly illustrated by the warm welcome so many of those escaping the war in Ukraine have received in Poland and in the other countries to which they have fled.

As Kitlinski wrote when we conceived this issue of the journal, "At a planetary level, our present moment of rising xenophobia, racism, and sexism is in dire need of philosophies and practices of hospitality toward the other. What matters is inviting, welcoming, celebrating refugees and other migrants, minorities, and the marginalized. Hospitality constitutes an ancient and postmodern value. In the religious texts and epics of antiquity—from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Koran to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana—hospitality is the epicenter of ethics. Immanuel Kant recommends hospitality; a revival of hospitality emerges in the work of Rosenzweig, Levinas, Derrida, Kristeva, Arendt, Ignatieff, and others. … Hospitality is at the heart of humanity and democracy." We need it now more than ever.

We might also note, as our editorial board has pointed out, that "the matter is complicated by the question of whether implicitly existing social contracts in a given society and polity should be thought of as needing renegotiation for newly arrived refugees or migrants. Would such renegotiation revitalize multiculturalism, or is it rather an unwieldy and unrealistic expectation that any such renegotiation take place? If the latter, does it then follow that migrants and refugees must be accepted on the condition that they have acquiesced to the social contract of the society or polity where they have landed? If the former, we must then ask, what exactly does renegotiation mean when the very idea of a social contract is so implicit and theoretical?"

These thoughts are the launching point from which our special issue takes off. There are, of course, many questions about hospitality that might be asked, including how interpersonal hospitality manifests on the political or societal level in different cultures and societies; what the demands of hospitality in different cultures are; how the ideal of hospitality faces off against nationalist and populist rhetoric; in what ways economics factors into the realizing of hospitality; and how social or political change might be driven by ideals of hospitality, to name just a few general ideas.

This issue of Social Research touches on many of these questions. But there are many more to be asked and thought about, and we hope this issue of the journal increases the likelihood that they will be.