Abstract
Global theory is diverse; its proponents canvass a variety of ideological, political and explanatory causes. General theories of globalisation, however, tend to imagine the phenomenon of globalisation to be relatively novel and to decisively transform the world. Indeed, transformation constitutes the conceptual dynamism of global theory, of its theoretical claims and its ideological agendas. Transformation sets global theory apart from preceding modern theory and lends globalisation an epochal significance. Global theory, in assuming the guise of a decisive transformative project, tends to underrate the diverse ways in which the world can be conceived, because the theory and practice of a global society are identified as distinctive and epochal rather than varied and mutable. Global theory, like the world itself, is constructed, and yet the very energy of its construction as an innovative project deflects from it seeing its links to preceding conceptions of the world and of transformation.
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Notes
K. Ohmae, The Borderless World (London, Harper Collins, 1992), p. 171.
K. Ohmae, The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York, The Free Press, 1995), p. 4 and for general indictment of the continued partisanship of nation-states, see also K. Ohmae, The Borderless World, p. 182.
A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1990). Notwithstanding his critique of Giddens, Rosenberg emphasises the centrality of Giddens’s work to the discourse of globalisation.
See J. Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory (London and New York, Verso, 2000).
See, for instance, M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, Allen and Unwin, 1930);
E. Durkheim, Suicide (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952);
F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994);
M. Heidegger, Being in Time (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967). See also the writings of Kant, Hegel and Marx referred to in preceding chapters.
A. Giddens, Runaway World (London, Profile Books, 2002), p. 2.
A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991), pp. 10–35.
See A. Giddens, ‘Introduction’ in A. Giddens (ed.) The Global Third Way (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001), pp. 1–23.
U. Beck, Risk Society — Towards a New Modernity (London and New York, Sage, 1992), p. 10.
U. Beck, ‘The reinvention of politics: Towards a theory of reflexive modernization’ in U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash, Reflexive Modernization — Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994), pp. 44–47.
U. Beck, Power in the Global Age — A New Global Political Economy trans. Kathleen Cross (Cambridge and Malden MA, Polity Press, 2005).
M. Albrow, The Global Age (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996), p. 78.
M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden MA, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000).
See A. Negri, ‘The time of common freedom’ in A. Negri, The Porcelain Workshop — For a New Grammar of Politics trans. Noura Waddell (Los Angeles CA, Semiotext(e), 2007).
G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic trans. A.V. Miller (London and New York, George, Allen and Unwin, 1969), pp. 109–157. Hegel takes determinate being as the outcome of the dialectical oscillation between the categories of being and nothing, so that particular determinate things are always positively something and negatively not something else.
See F. Stalder, Manuel Castells (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2006).
S. Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, The New Press, 1998), p. ix.
D. Held, ‘Globalization, corporate practice and cosmopolitan social standards’ Contemporary Political Theory, 1 (1), 2002, p. 61.
D. Held and A. McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Cambridge and Malden MA, Polity Press, 2007), p. 170.
P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalization in Question (Cambridge and Malden MA, Polity Press, 1996).
See D. Held, Global Covenant (Cambridge and Malden MA, Polity Press, 2004)
D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State To Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995).
D. Held and A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, Global Transformations (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999), p. 26.
P. Taylor, ‘Izations of the world: Americanization, modernization and globalization’ in C. Hay and D. Marsh (eds) Demystifying Globalization (Basingstoke and New York, Macmillan), 2000, pp. 50–51.
See J. Scholte, Globalization — A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 4. For a note on the change in tone if not in substance, see the Preface to the Second Edition, pp. xiii–xv) and J. Rosenberg, The Follies of Globalisation Theory, pp. 17–45.
See M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude-War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London and New York, Penguin Press, 2004). In this book and elsewhere Hardt and Negri repudiate expressly their links with dialectical predecessors while operating with arguments that can be termed dialectical.
A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity — Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991).
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© 2011 Gary Browning
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Browning, G. (2011). Global Theory: Transformation. In: Global Theory from Kant to Hardt and Negri. International Political Theory Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308541_5
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