The article focuses on the specific characteristics of contemporary globalization and hegemonies which constitutes a very new development in human history. Among the most important such specific characteristics are the changes in the structure of international relations and of hegemonies; the continuous impingements of the different peripheries on multiple hegemonic centers and entailing the growing power of small numbers, as well as the transformation of some basic characteristics of nation and revolutionary states and the close relations of these processes to new civilizational perspectives and inter-civilizational relations.

Interest in postmodernity has stagnated over the past decade and has come to be partially replaced by a concern with globalization. While the two terms are often considered to be divergent there is continuity as theoretical discourse transfers from one to the other. In what follows, we first distill the heuristic models employed by various knowledge-geographical traditions of social thought in conceptualizing postmodernism. We then transpose these models into recent debates on globalization. Globalization theory has become the provenance of British and American theorists because of a contiguity that extends back to a propitious model employed to understand postmodernism. Globalization theory in France and Germany are largely non-existent or tangential for similar reasons that find opposite tendencies. The spatial and temporal aspect inherent to both the modern and postmodern indicates that both already present a stance on globalization. Among the key factors predicting the fortunes of heuristic models is the continuation of classical theoretical concerns in the present situation of globalization. Post-classical tendencies in heuristic models indicate that more cloistered postmodern concerns do not transfer well to globalization. Those heuristic models that conceive of a postmodernist break are those whose application to present instantiations of globalization is subsequently limited.

Modernities are a theme of our times. Recognizing that modernities are multiple and diverse and transcending ideal-type modernity and its Eurocentric legacy, acknowledges the multi­polar realities of twenty-first century globalization and the ‘rise of the rest’. Real-existing modernities are mixed social formations in that they straddle past and present and import and translate styles and customs from other cultures. In addition, modernities are layered—some components are shared among all modern societies and make up transnational modernity while other components differ according to historical and cultural circumstances. The third section reflects on East Asia as an alternative modernity and sketches its main features. Leaving modernity as utopia behind, for a grounded modernity opens the possibility of coming to terms with the dilemmas that real modernities face.

The analysis of modernity in Latin America has led to recurrent controversy and debate. In spite of its tension-ridden and even contradictory implications, it has been the relatively open-ended character of modernity and its élan of material and cultural progress and the promise of expanding autonomy and equality that has been a major asset for its endorsement in Latin America, a region that some have called the ‚farthest West,‘ a name that hints at the ambiguous and sometimes conflict-ridden relationship of these societies with the poles and agents of Western expansion and hegemony. This article claims that the confrontation with Western modernity is in Latin America a confrontation with roots, discourses and institutions that turned out to be their own. Accordingly, the dynamics of expansion of modernity has been linked from very early on to global and transnational arenas, turning modernity into multiple yet truncated, leading to recurring attempts to reconstitute and attain the unfulfilled promises of modernity in the region.

Nations, as the hitherto highest level of human groupings, have their varied internal organizational structures featuring functionally differentiated yet interactive arrangements among three leading human institutions: economy, polity, and social life. An internal organizational structure affects the different members of a human grouping in different ways due to institutional exclusion that is inevitably the prerequisite for any human organization. With that in mind, this paper moves beyond ethnocentric confines to suggest an institutionalist understanding of the concepts of modernity and modernization, and discusses the issue of institutional exclusion and its four leading patterns in the era of globalization.

According to the basic needs principle, a state in favorable circumstances must enable its members to meet their basic needs throughout a normal life-span. Applied to the international situation, I argue, this principle implies that a global state would have a duty (ceteris paribus) to enable subordinate states to meet their members‘ needs. In the absence of a global state, existing states have a duty (ceteris paribus) to work to create a system of institutions that would enable each state to meet its members‘ needs. Near the conclusion, I respond to skeptical objections about global justice.

A legal system consists of a complex body of practices—primary and secondary—, particularly practices of reasoning and justification. The intellectual, theorized aspect of legal order is embodied in legal doctrine: the corpus of norm-sentences, norms and rules, principles, doctrines and concepts used as basis for legal reasoning and justification. It includes elaborate conceptual structures of principles and doctrines, explicit and sophisticated forms of reflection and criticism. It is only when we have understood the nature of legal doctrine that we can comprehend the workings of courts, lawyers and even legislatures. Concerning the need for a new conception of legal theory one question arises, above all, especially when external and internal observation as well as the critical reflection of the premises and presuppositions of all dealings with the law permit a degree of distance, the question, namely, whether it is not an increasing application of scientific methods that is needed, in the sense that the development of a legal theory from the beginning involves the integration of a norm-descriptive point of view and intellectual stand-point with the norm-prescriptive theory of law, by way of complementing each other, as it were (multi-level-approach to law). This, at least, appears to be the only way of clarifying also the relationship between le­gal theory and philosophy and the theory and sociology of law. The inevitable consequences of the development of a theory of norms and action also have to be drawn from this.

This article examines the struggles over space in rural southeastern coastal China, where the market economy has brought newfound prosperity to local communities. Instead of reinvesting all of their wealth into furthering industrial growth, local residents wish to also plow their money into building tombs for their deceased, ancestor halls, deity temples, Daoist and Buddhist temples, Christian churches, and holding extravagant rituals and festivals. These investments into the divine and celestial realms are not met with approval by the local government, who regards them as “wasteful” and “backwards”. However, the local residents have some of their own ruses and strategies in this spatial struggle.

Foreign managers in China talked about the need to “re-engineer the Chinese soul” in order to make employees conform to global corporate norms. My approach examines how Western business knowledge and practices are transferred to Shanghai in two major ways. First, I discuss attempts by American managers to focus on corporate norms aimed at disciplining Chinese employees to be team players, not entrepreneurial figures. Frustrations encountered in attempts to “re-engineer” workers are expressed in terms of the opposition between We­stern business “rationality” and Chinese cultural “irrationality.” Chinese employees appear to be driven less by company rules and goals than by individualist careerist moves in a turbulent job market. Western management knowledge is also entering not through American companies but through returning Chinese expatriates who exercise a sophisticated blind of business enterpreneurialism and cultural knowledge in their business dealings. The article concludes by identifying the contradiction in foreign firms wishing to remake Chinese workers as neoliberal subjects but then these same workers are faulted for being too self-enterprising and China critiqued as a site where neoliberal opportunism has run wild.

Global cycles of rising and declining hegemonies within the world-system have been associated with periods of war and peace, free trade and protectionism, and economic expansion and contraction. Periods of hegemonic decline are also associated with the cultural production of a certain strain of self deprecating, or even self-hating, literary output. And, because we are dealing with the world-system, the popularity of such icons of national self-deprecation should be gappreciated within other countries. We see this in the fact that Don Quixote, poking fun at Spanish chivalry was an immensely popular book outside as well as inside Spain. Similarly, the James Bond books, and particularly the movies had a huge audience world wide, and, the same could be said for the Rambo movies which poked fun at the chivalric Green Beret American military figure. We see, then, three instances of hegemonic decline—Spain, Britain, United States—and three instances of self-deprecating literary figures—Don Quixote, James Bond, and Rambo.

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are produced by the ongoing fragmentation of wage labor relation­ship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighborhoods from the national and global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison of the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of “advanced marginality”—territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of “place,” and the loss of a hinterland—and draws out their implications for the formation of the “precariat” in postindustrial societies.

In a number of papers, Keith DeRose articulates his reasons for thinking that we cannot plausibly explain the mechanics of knowledge attribution in terms of varying conditions of warranted assertability (1998, 2002). His reasoning is largely comparative: “know,” he argues, proves a poor candidate for such a diagnosis when compared to other terms to which such warranted assertabilility maneuvers (i.e., WAMs) clearly apply. More specifically, DeRose aims, through to use of such comparative case studies, to identify several general principles through which we might determine when WAMs are called for. In what follows, I take issue with one of these principles and argue that DeRose’s efforts to deploy the others to pro-contextualist (i.e., anti-invariantist) ends are misguided. I conclude by examining DeRose’s specific objection to Unger’s skeptical invariantism, and identify a problematic feature of his recurrent appeals to linguistic intuition. The payoff of this is an enhanced appreciation of the factors on which the contextualist/invariantist dispute should be seen to turn.

Recently there has been an upsurge in interest concerning the relationship between religion and international relations. Much of this has been expressed as if the relationship between these was entirely new. In contrast, this paper involves the argument that it is not so much a question of religion returning but rather why it is that students of international relations have neglected the connection since the Peace of Westphalia. This neglect has largely occurred because of the primacy given to changes and events in the West, particularly since the formal separation of church and state and its imposition on or emulation by Eastern societies. The recent concern with globalization has provided the opportunity to undertake historical dis­cussion in new perspectives which overcome the Western “normality” of the absence of religion in the Realpolitik perspective. Moreover, it is argued that much of the neglect of religion in work on world affairs has largely been the product of the inaccurate and ideologically motivated perception of ongoing secularization. The overall discussion is framed by some objections to the limiting consequences of disciplinarity, particularly the way in which both IR and sociology were rhetorically constituted.

Is moral evolution a mere illusion, as postmodern thinkers state or a more or less permanent feature of history though it can be thwarted by unfavorable conjunctures, as Weber or Durkheim thought? The question is tentatively answered by a reanalysis of data drawn from the World Values Survey conducted under the lead of the University of Michigan. The data on seven Western countries show, when comparing the answers of younger to older respondents and of more to less educated respondents, that definite trends characterize the frequencies. On the questions regarding issues related notably to work, authority, morals, religion, politics and attitudes towards other people, the younger and the more educated appear as giving answers less inspired by tradition. On the whole, the data illustrate Weber’s notion of ratio­nalization. The same trends can be observed in countries outside the Western world as India, Russia and Turkey. Such trends may plausibly be reinforced by globalization.

Arguing that today’s burgeoning globalization literature still neglects the investigation of powerful subjective dynamics of growing social interconnectivity, this article explores how various ideological articulations of globalization have shaped its material designs and in­stantiations. The thickening of global consciousness can be conceptualized along the three interrelated dimensions or layers of ideology, imaginary, and ontology. Each of these three layers of subjective globalization is constituted in practice at an ever-greater generality, durability, and depth. Normative contestations continue, but they tend to have a common global point of reference—albeit not to the exclusion of the national.

The term “modernity” is used to refer to the cultural component of modernization, which encompasses also the political component (state formation) and economic component (capitalism). Historical analysis shows that in the phases of merchant and Dutch capitalism the dominant culture provided a religious justification and stimulus to capitalism, the Scottish philosophers provided an ethical framework based on human sentiments, especially empathy. With the secularization and turbulence of the 19th century a series of cultural critiques of the capitalist system emerged in the form of “modernism”, “postmodernism” and finally “global civil society”. Presently, we experience a hiatus between certain counter-cultural movements and the capitalist system as well as an ideological divide and a political impasse between social policy concerns and capitalist priorities. A human-centered cultural framework is proposed to serve as a tool for “civil society” to formulate societally agreed guidelines of political economy.

The numberless unprecedented situations attached today to the concept of transnational diaspora arise the debate of whether or not this phenomenon signals a new era. Our own contention is that it does represent a factor of new kinds of heterogenization of both the societal reality and of the diasporas themselves, as worldwide entities. It is in this dialectic perspective that we describe transnational diasporas as causes of discontinuity in our world and point out to the qualitative change in the social fabrics that they represent. Among other aspects, dual or threefold homeness that is bound to the transnational condition signifies for diasporans a slipping away from the totalistic character of the commitment and view of the nation that the nation-state requires of its citizens. When viewed in its multiplicity, the cohabitation under the same societal roof of a priori alien socio-cultural entities yields a configuration that is not uniform in every setting, but which still responds in its essentials to the new reality experienced by many a contemporary society.To illustrate this approach, this paper compares four well-known contemporary transnational diasporas—namely, the Muslim, African, Hispanic and Chinese.

Modernization represents a political project of power and domination, marginalization and exclusion. The concepts that make up modernization-theory are deeply complicit with this and are implicated in legitimation strategies for the regimes and peoples who benefit. As with other power/knowledge projects, tropes of literality that reference materiality generate the discourses of certainty through which political persuasion takes place. These discourses are bounded by a constitutive “outside” of metaphor, and thus devalue other subjects of knowledge and knowing subjects. Said’s Orientalism presents a remarkable catachresis through which an alternative understanding of knowledge-production becomes visible. This work challenges Euro-Americano-centric social science and intellectual life, because it undermines the binaries through which ideas themselves are understood as certain or not. Butler’s theory of materialization in turn conceptualizes materiality and certainty in a complementary way.