Globalization is a process—of intensifying relations and interactions on our planet—which has economic, political, and cultural dimensions. It is perhaps most popularly connected today with the rise and power of global markets. And for many it has as its presumed end state a homogenized world in which similar sociocultural and political forms have been adopted throughout the world—the “convergence hypothesis,” which informs so much writing about globalization. The other major preoccupation of this literature, of course, is the damage globalization is doing to the old forms and institutions many value. Contributors to this literature thus all hit on one or several of the following effects: “deterritorialization,” the end of a “politics of space,” a general decline of the state, a specific decline of state policy autonomy, state decline as death of the welfare state (Teeple), the end of “national” economies, the decline of national diversity, the growing homogenization of cultures, the advent of “McWorld,” convergence along numerous parameters, etc. To make matters more complex, many point out the dialectic aspects of globalization—it generates both convergence and multi-cultural diversity, integration, and fragmentation (Clark).

To the unlimited supply of books on various dimensions of this conjuncture, we can now add the two under review here. These books by Daniel Cohen and Peter Taylor, while on different pieces of a larger puzzle, actually complement each other nicely, and provide important insights into the conjuncture we are witnessing. Cohen’s addresses rising income inequality, a highly controversial dimension of global economic processes, and Taylor’s gives a sweeping and profound account of the historical construction of the rapaciously globalizing world society we have arrived at today. In this essay I use these two books to discuss what is happening in the globalizing 1990s, and the literature on how we have come to this point in history.

First to Daniel Cohen’s slim but worthy volume. Cohen tackles and illuminates a very specific but important element of our conjuncture—the problem of rising inequality within national populations and, more interestingly, that of changes in the relative status of countries, the rise of wealthy developing countries and the appearance of a new poor in developed ones. For Cohen, this is typically a misunderstood phenomenon, but an extremely important one. Indeed, in our age of “new ages” Cohen informs us that we are also in the “new age of inequality,” and the possibility that this inequality is somehow the result of globalization-induced de-industrialization is described as “the Great Fear of the Western World.”

What is the magnitude of the problem? The disparities between some countries have exploded in the last century. In 1870 the per capita income of the wealthiest countries was 11 times that of the poorest; by 1995 the wealth of the richest countries was 50 times that of the poorest (17). Yet Asian countries that have had high growth (around 7.5%) are now in a position to close the gap with the rich countries in the space of a decade. Inside rich countries, inequality has grown and shape-shifted: the unskilled in France suffered 3 percent unemployment in 1970 and 20 percent in 1990. In the U.S., inequality is manifested more in wages than in employment status, but the changes are still profound. Skilled American workers as of 1990 had seen their purchasing power drop to the level of the 1960s. In the same period, the compensation of corporate CEOs has gone from 30 to 150 times that of their skilled workers.

Even if one disagrees with his data on growing inequality (and I do not), what is always interesting about books such as these are the factors discussed as explanations of the problem. Many of Cohen’s explanations are not particularly novel or earth-shaking, but his opinions are of special interest given that he is a prominent French economist at the Sorbonne and was named economist of the year for 1997 by Le Nouvel Economiste magazine. His target audience is the disenchanted critics of globalization in developed countries generally, but most certainly in France, a country in an enduring “bad mood” where globalization is now the New Terror (Moisi 1998). He is trying to debunk the claims of those who blame the appearance of the new working and/or unemployed poor in the West on globalization, increased trade, and advances in developing countries. Thus, Cohen first wants to be clear about where not to point the finger of blame. He goes to some lengths to demonstrate that increased trade with developing countries is not the culprit (Chapter 3). Furthermore, usual suspects such as a transition to a service economy or immigration are not the problem. Instead, Cohen, like Robert Reich and others before him, hits upon education level as the single greatest predictor of income. And higher education levels among workers in the 1990s are a response to demand, from the rising complexity of industrial processes and in the service sector. Therefore, he concludes, we must look at the advances in capitalism which are placing such a high premium on skills and education (and not rewarding those without them).

Cohen discusses several intriguing elements contributing to the inequality accompanying globalization, around the core argument that the West and Western capitalism is going through a transformation of which globalization is just a small part. The big picture is the Third Industrial Revolution—the transition from Fordist blue collar assembly lines to information manipulation and knowledge workers. This part of the story is hardly new, and has been explored in the post-Fordist literature that began to appear in the early 1980s.

But other interesting factors are raised by Cohen, many of which were unfamiliar to this author and so I mention them here. First, Cohen mentions “the O-Ring Theory,” named for the small, failing component that produced the Challenger space shuttle disaster. The larger lesson, apparently, is that products and production processes have become so complicated that they are only as good as their weakest part, a notion that encourages the hiring of highly skilled experts for everything. A similar idea is that of “Assortative Matching,” which refers to the tendency for the new workplace to be homogeneous in terms of skill level and has the effect of driving out the unskilled. It might more parochially be termed the “problem of galloping credentialism.” For example, under Fordism the workplace brought together people of all skill levels under the management of a relatively few skilled managers and engineers. Today, as the number of the highly skilled and the level of their training has increased, the workplace has become more homogeneous and team-oriented. To be unable to participate in these teams is disastrous.

Historical Accounts of Globalization

Before discussing Cohen’s conclusions and recommendations, I want to take a more expansive look at the era in question. How are we to understand this conjuncture of conjunctures and how we got here? What can history tell us about where we are and what might be around the corner? Most of the globalization literature takes some kind of longer-term perspective, if only by accident, as it attempts to make the case for recent watersheds and epochal changes. A much smaller subset of books actually tries to explain the 1990s in deep historical terms—and by this I mean, to use Braudel again, in the longue durée; not going back merely to the 1970s but, for example, to the 1470s. Enter Peter Taylor’s wonderful book, with the modest title of The Way the Modern World Works. Taylor, a British geographer, uses a specific lens for viewing world history, that of leading or hegemonic world powers, a device also used effectively by world-systems scholars (e.g., Immanuel Wallerstein) and long-cycle theorists (George Modelski). Taylor describes three periods of particular kinds of global hegemony, beginning with the seventeenth century Dutch, then the British and the Americans. He argues that what is particularly important about these is their dominance as cultures, and the impression that each left on the world economy, international society, and “modernity.”

We can best appreciate Taylor’s contribution to a crowded field by quickly reviewing what his colleagues and predecessors have found when delving into deep history on this issue. While much of the globalization literature is a kind of journalistic “pulp nonfiction,” the subject has also of course been addressed by the scholarly community. In many ways, the sociologists were way out ahead of the rest of the social sciences on this, and I focus on that literature primarily here. Globalization has definite and (somewhat) distinct economic, political, and cultural dimensions to it, and one in turn finds different analytic perspectives which focus on each. For example, in sociology’s most purely economic account of globalization, it is the evolution of capitalism and the geography of trade that is found to be paramount. The Annales school and world-systems theory were far ahead on this in positing and researching the dynamics of one world economy (though this work is typically ignored or pushed aside in much of the globalization literature). The world-systems perspective views the modern world since about 1450 as one economic system, a system of capitalism, with an evolving global division of labor. The fate or path of national societies is to a considerable extent determined by position within this division of labor. World-systems theory is most commonly criticized for excessive economic determinism; it certainly incorporates states and the political, but these are ultimately servants of capitalism and its developmental logic. World-systems theory is also a pioneer in investigating the phenomenon of hegemony, as periods of domination by the predominant capitalist country.

The world-systems literature has become so expansive and diverse that it is impossible to characterize it with much accuracy, but it would be fair to say that it has not been attuned to the convergence debate or the new developments in globalization. Fundamentally, capitalist competition and international exchange produces ranks of countries—a core and periphery with more important differences than similarities. Since culture is substantially derivative of capitalism and therefore less central, looking at the convergence/homogenization trend along these lines has not been of interest. Current excitement about the globalization of the world economy is very old news to world-systems scholars as well, and they do not seem to see the 1980s and 1990s as an important turning point or discontinuity.

Turning to work more clearly cast as globalist, this literature shares some common themes, with broad agreement on the basics. All are more concerned with the convergence thesis and mapping out its genesis and path. While most embrace a multidimensional approach to globalization-as-process (rejecting economic reductionism), there is a predilection toward culture as the main arena for and vehicle of globalization, as the trappings and forms of modernity are adopted by actors/societies/states as cultural scripts. In retrospect, several authors have found modernity itself to be inherently about globalization and an Enlightenment “project” infused with rational purposiveness (Albrow; Giddens). There is disagreement over whether we are in late modernity or the fuller discombobulation of postmodernity. Some (though not Giddens) conclude that the accelerated globalization of the 1990s is therefore ending modernity, and we move into postmodernity, though what that can mean is unclear since in postmodernity such grand narratives about history are disallowed.

Some specific examples are worth exploring. Sociologist Roland Robertson is considered a pioneering formulator and popularizer of the term “globalization,” in work from the 1980s and before. For Robertson the use of “global”-ization is important because it specifies the endpoint of the process, in which the world is one place, and suggests that one is thereby adopting a “world-as-a-whole” perspective or the “globalization paradigm.” The key vector of the transformation of diversity is the diffusion of modernity as a cultural package. For Robertson (1990), globalization is a relentless, accelerating, autonomous process that extends before and after the “nation-state” era that is emblematic of modernity and preoccupies the social sciences, but is in fact the product of the globalization processes themselves (26). He outlines a history of globalization with a “germinal phase” stretching from 1400 to 1725, followed by an “incipient phase” (1725–1880) and a “takeoff phase” (1880–1920). Globalization thus predates modernity, but modernity, particularly since the 1880s, has accelerated the processes of globalization. While important cleavages in world society—especially religious and cultural ones—have hampered global convergence in the past, very recently because of technology’s “compression of the world” and late modernity’s new “global consciousness,” these rifts are closing rapidly and globalization is accelerating.

The eminent British sociologist Anthony Giddens, whose work covers a myriad of topics, is also recognized as another early popularizer of globalization. Giddens, however, places a bit more emphasis on the political and the nation-state in, for example, his The Consequences of Modernity (1990). For Giddens, globalization is not especially Western but modern. The globalization “juggernaut” of the 1990s is therefore the logical result of the expansion of the forms of modernity, including capitalism and industrialism, but also nationalism, the nation-state, and the rationalization-bureaucratization of both state and society. Giddens believes more strongly in the possibility of discontinuities in history, which leads him to emphasize the uniqueness of modernity as a substantial departure from all that came before. Subsequently, some lucky breaks in the nineteenth century (peace in Europe and a turn to colonization) and the twentieth century (lots of international organizations) allowed the modern West to spread these forms around the world. All culminate in a late modernity that is “radicalized” by reflexivity and the reorganization of activities to embrace much larger time-space distances. Giddens also devotes considerable effort to conceptualizing globalization as the profound yet obtuse “annihilation of space through time,” a process that has progressed because of technological developments in transportation and communication.

Finally, we turn to sociological institutionalism (SI) which, like the world-systems approach, has become its own school-like perspective, indeed it is some-times known as the “Stanford School” because many of its leading proponents are in the sociology department at Stanford University or were trained there (e.g., John Boli, John Meyer, Francisco Ramirez, George Thomas). SI began as the work of sociologists of organizational theory, and it is focused primarily on the political-organizational aspects of modernity’s spread, with considerable work on the global spread of particular educational policies, environmental policies, bureaucratization, specific state organizational models, etc. SI’s historical depth is more limited to the very modern, going back not much further than the last 100 years or so. And within this period, the social fact it finds preoccupying is “isomorphism,” the striking similarities in institutions across diverse national environments. The mechanism for explaining isomorphism is a specific Weberian-rational world culture at work in a world society:

Many features of the contemporary nation-state derive from worldwide models constructed and propagated through global cultural and associational processes. These models and the purposes they reflect (e.g., equality, socioeconomic progress, human development) are highly rationalized, articulated, and often surprisingly consensual. Worldwide models define and legitimate agendas for local action, shaping the structures and policies of nation-states and other national and local actors in virtually all of the domains of rationalized social life—business, politics, education, medicine, science, even the family and religion. The institutionalization of world models helps explain many puzzling features of contemporary national societies, such as structural isomorphism in the face of enormous differences in resources and traditions. (Meyer et al., 144–145)

SI thus shares an emphasis on the cultural/ideational, and in particular uses the vehicle of norms and accepted “rituals” to explain the world, including rationalization as ritual; that is, while the first bureaucratizers and state builders were perhaps doing something functional, thereafter many of these things were just copied because they became the accepted practices. Finally, SI also features perhaps the most elaborate accounts and empirical testings of these dimensions of globalization. SI’s other strength is its effort to work out the mechanisms of propagation of its “worldwide models,” mainly since the 1870s, and by way of international organizations, to which they devote considerable attention: the ILO and the spread of the welfare state, UNESCO and the spread of science policy bureaucracies, etc.

Taylor’s Global History

Each of these approaches brings a piece to the table. Some have a deep historical perspective but little explanation of the detailed workings of globalization processes. The sociological institutionalists lack the historical depth of other perspectives, but make up for this with a more sophisticated theorization of the socialization processes and resultant isomorphism in the world of the last 100 years. What is still in short supply is work that combines both historical depth and an actual explanation of the details of globalization. We need the deeper picture of why these particular Western states and their sets of social-bureaucratic institutions are present in 1880, to be enforced upon the world. For this, Peter Taylor provides one of the best answers one can find today.

Taylor says that he is working from a “world-systems interpretation of the modern world” (25), but Taylor goes well beyond this, incorporating the best of other perspectives and further. A review of the substance of the book reveals three principal advances that Taylor makes. First, hegemons are incorporated as real, individualized actors rather than automatons fulfilling a role dictated by the structures of history. Taylor eschews what can be highly structural and/or rigidly cyclical histories of unfolding modernity and globalization in favor of a much more nuanced and sophisticated account of the agency of hegemons, spending considerable time on their specific actions and impacts on others in world society. Many have used hegemony as an analytic lens, but Taylor gives hegemons complex lives and deaths. Second, the mechanisms by which hegemons construct the world and their modernities brick by brick, three times over, are clearly elaborated. Modernity—its content and propagation—did not just happen by accident. While others have dealt with factors in the rise and decline of hegemons, Taylor deals quite exhaustively with the specific economic and political practices that each devised and propagated and tells how these end up as key constitutive elements of world society. Taylor is aware of and incorporates the new analytic trends in interpretivism and ideological power much more than his world-systems and long-cycle predecessors. He walks us through the world views and variations on modernity in question under the Dutch, British, and Americans and how, à la Gramscian ideological hegemony, their visions became the subconscious cultural templates for all.

Third, and most importantly, Taylor’s account of the last 500 years in no way neglects the political. While hegemonic projects as “culture” are front and center, each project is prominently political, with the role of liberalism as the guiding ideology explored in detail. Each hegemon is liberal for its time and a “liberal champion,” foisting its liberal ideology on the rest of the world. More fundamentally, the introduction of the vagaries of political change helps to unleash Taylor’s history from structural determinism.

Hegemons and their specific policies—national and international, political and economic—are the main focus for Taylor. Like world-systems and long-cycle theorists, Taylor identifies and discusses the special qualities that gave hegemons their edge. Many have debated and described the important economic advantages—in new products and technologies, better manufacturing techniques, improved business practices—which allowed hegemons to rely more on economic prowess than the less profitable and more destructive military power, and Taylor mentions these as well. But Taylor devotes more attention to the creation by hegemons of “modern politics” at both the domestic and systemic levels. One of the most important achievements of each hegemon, for example, has been to stand in the way of what otherwise has historically been the most common and obvious form of world system—world empire. In acting as balancers in Europe from 1580 to 1914 or so, the Dutch and then British prevented any one country from controlling the entire Continent; America made similar contributions in WWI and II. By this means, hegemons preserved and nurtured the modern world of the sovereignty principle and independent states and helped to construct an order that, according to Taylor, has allowed for greatness and “golden ages” without the stifling quality of world empire.

Beyond preserving the state-system, Taylor finds that hegemons have made three crucial contributions to the accepted practices of modern politics within and between states (46–47): (1) a hegemon (the Dutch) first domesticated the state and made it subservient to society and a promoter of public prosperity; (2) hegemons introduced and perfected the practice of promoting peace within the international system; and (3) hegemons became the “chief purveyors of the idea of freedom” and of the liberal discourse about rights and freedoms. (Indeed, Taylor brings in interpretivist concerns about identity formation to highlight how hegemons construct an identity as champion of freedom and engage in “othering” to create anti-freedom demons against which they must fight.)

Each hegemon has taken on the role of a liberal champion, at least at crucial points on crucial issues, as they tried to promote their ethos of commerce over conquest. And each hegemon, as the “can-do” society (Taylor’s term) of its time, constructed hegemony in its own liberal image and served as a model for others to emulate, such that “broad liberalism comes to be seen as essentially right and proper, the only way for a truly modern society to organize its affairs” (116). This liberalism is part-and-parcel of the “universalism” (another key element) of hegemons and of their high culture, which must provide the “social glue” to bind countries in an international society.

In the end, Taylor has an excellent and more comprehensive account of modernity in its political and economic shape, as capitalist, rational, with a state and interstate system. For Taylor, modernity isn’t just a given quantity, described in post hoc fashion. Taylor demonstrates how the content and meaning of modernity for a world culture came to be defined and redefined (though with considerable continuity) under each new hegemon. Thus Taylor, like SI, but with broader historical scope and more culture and romance, explains much of what happens under hegemony as mimetism, the copying of the hegemon’s bright and shining model. (Chapter four’s subtitle is “emulation as the highest form of flattery.”)

Taylor’s is a rich, vibrant account of the agency and structural changes in the international system that have produced the globalized economic, social, and political system Cohen and others write about today. In brief, the Dutch laid the commercial foundation, the British brought industrial-scale production, and to America goes credit for the final deepening of the cultural homogenization of globalization, through production unbounded and mass consumerism (175–176). Fundamentally, we catch a new mental disease from these hegemons as well, the disease of faith in progress which leads to myopia and over-consumption (131–140). This culminates in the sociocultural dimension of modernity American-style—suburbia, Hollywood, the unbridled consumerism of the affluent society—which receives a sound hiding from Taylor. After WWI discredits progress, America comes up with the requisite new term, “development,” and the promise of material development for all. The American gift of mass consumerism is ingenious in rendering its cultural forms attractive and attainable for the global masses; as Taylor notes, “everyone can eat the burger” (176). And not only can we, but we want to. In the 1980s, America and American-designed international institutions promote liberal economies, promising growth. Finally, in the 1990s, we arrive at the world Daniel Cohen and so many globalizationist writers describe, of liberal economic principles more expansive than ever, of capitalist innovation out of control, and finance capital unchained.

Before I explore the conclusions and the “What next?” questions posed by both these books, some comments on Taylor, because at least two noteworthy and important weaknesses detract, though not seriously, from his book. Most prominent of these is Taylor’s underlying historical materialism and economism (e.g., p. 39), a paradox in a book that does such an excellent (and all too rare) job of bringing politics in to broad historical accounts of the world system. For all the detail and nuance, the basic portrait of hegemonic states as master Machiavellian manipulators and champion capitalist exploiters of all others is unnecessary and oversimplifying. This leaves him open to all the traditional political counter-arguments to economistic explanations of action, including the problem of war. Also crucial at each hegemonic transition and order-building episode, for example, was simple disgust with the carnage of world war and the desire to prevent it in the future.

A second, related point has to do with the roots and extent of hegemonic power. That is, another (reverse) causal chain can be read between the lines of Taylor’s rich analysis, but cannot go fully developed by him in this book. This is the notion that constraining norms and the pattern of acceptable practices in an integrating, globalizing international community would not allow any other kind of country to be a hegemon. (After all, for 400 years now every would-be illiberal hegemon has been defeated.) One thread of current scholarship in international relations theory attributes to the international system, as with any social system, a governing “constitution” to a specifiable international order. In such an eventuality, it would be the accepted norms and expectations of a multitude of actors in international society that would actually allow a very specific kind of state to become a hegemon.

This leads us to ask how much a given hegemon sets the tone in its age or merely reflects it or epitomizes it. Take, for example, the British and nineteenth-century democracy. While there is no question that the British model helped the spread of liberal constitutionality in Europe and elsewhere between the 1820s and the 1870s (111–112), surely the ground had already been laid in the previous forty years, with the American example, Napoleon’s constitution-drafting throughout occupied Europe, and more (all of which Britain had actively resisted in the 1776–1815 period). Was Britain the author of a hegemonic political culture, or simply eventually on the right side (as a liberal hegemon must be) in a period in which popular forces in innumerable countries already viewed constitutionalism as the most legitimate political form? Answering such a question would send us elsewhere—back into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and before, to a history of the accumulation of political norms and other practices across polities over time. This book has yet to be written, but Taylor brings us close to such a narrative, while coming to the opposite conclusion about the causal relationships.

Where To Now?

Finally, if we tackle one of the big questions raised by globalization—Where did it come from?—we must also address the other obvious one: Where is it taking us? Both authors are quite nervous about where the world stands in the late 1990s. Broadly, Cohen and Taylor agree—rich countries live in the world they made themselves, and the newly negative aspects of globalization are the result of production processes they themselves put in place. But the two go from there to very different places.

Cohen has his points of critique, but in the end embraces globalization as “inevitable” and beneficial. He uses the idea of a “new individualism” to describe in very plain terms the political economy of globalization’s course in many countries (106–109). As with any economic change, there are winners and losers, and it appears as if the winners of globalization are cutting themselves off from the losers. In America this has already happened; in France the process is under way, one of the things so upsetting to people there.

What to do about the crisis of Keynesianism and the welfare state? Cohen offers largely neoliberal solutions, with a hand-wringing and shoulder-shrugging accompaniment. He takes the neoliberal critique of labor unions, that they are protection rackets that create a labor elite, and applies them to France as a whole (98–99). For example, social security provisions and wage-indexing in France, part of post-WWII social solidarity there, actually discriminate against the unemployed, who find it much harder to get work. Nor is social solidarity evident across age groups: those aged 60–74 are very well off, but other cohorts struggle to find work and care for children.

As palliatives, Cohen presents ideas that are a mix of stalwart neoliberalism and traces of social democracy. He dislikes the EU because it is protectionist and powerful. He wants to deal with inequality, but the welfare state needs rethinking—one simple measure he proposes is a guaranteed minimum wage. At times, Cohen uses word play to contradict the received wisdom about how to respond to the challenge facing rich countries under attack. He does not agree that the welfare state needs to be dismantled, for example, but it does need to be “adapted,” not to the pressures of globalization, but to a new world that is not the 1950s—permanent prosperity and full employment cannot be counted upon or afforded (111–112). Where such a course would take us, he does not really say. He also disagrees with the idea that rich democracies must “internationalize” their political reach, to somehow manage globalization.

Much of Cohen’s book shows signs of the infamous “TINA syndrome”: There Is No Alternative. He is nervous about inequality within countries, but, then again, the poor are always with us. And, on the other hand, he points to the happy evidence of increasing equality between countries—“the great hope of the twenty-first century” (120).

Peter Taylor addresses this question of “What next?” in greater depth than Cohen or most books on the global 1990s, and his deep historical perspective allows us a much more thoroughgoing understanding of the world that liberal practices and liberal hegemons have constructed for us. The subtitle of Taylor’s book actually mentions “World Impasse,” so we know this is something he wants to spend time on, and he does explore declinism, endism, etc., in baroque detail. He devotes an entire chapter (154–188), for example, to “post-hegemonic trauma,” the national psychosis that has hit each hegemon in its decline phase. His attention to the politicocultural and spiritual aspects of hegemony across history allows Taylor unique insights into America’s position today. Particularly interesting is his argument that, while still dominant in several spheres of social power—economically, financially, militarily—this does not matter: “Power is not enough to make a hegemon, that power has to be presented on a universal plane, to define a new world future” (167). And America is lacking. (Japan, another potential hegemon, suffers from the same weaknesses, Taylor argues [182–185].)

Another hegemon? No, says Taylor, this system is at its end! The globalized economy prevents another world leader from developing. By taking capital accumulation to its global limits, “the USA has created an increasingly trans-state world that is superseding the orthodox inter-stateness of the modern world system” (186). This means impasse and system change: “[T]here is no way forward for our world.... [T]here will be a transition to a postmodern world-system” (212; emphasis added). After quick consideration of the possibilities, Taylor latches on to “green scholarship” as the locus of the most imaginative thinking about replacing the modern world-system. In other words, the next world-system must address the material limits of growth and consumerism and be eco-friendly or at least eco-friendlier.

For many, this turn to the green will be too familiar, predictable, even hackneyed. But Taylor rises to the challenge with interesting things to say and a more elaborate logic than the cursory explanation at the end of Cohen’s book. Taylor offers the reasoned speculation that the breakdown of the present system will involve some kind of cathartic attitudinal change and can be a process in which existing elites (rich people, rich countries) maintain control of the events, or one in which no one has control. The former might produce, he argues, a kind of “eco-fascism” in which the rich, newly cognizant of the limits to growth, scramble for control of the remaining resources and, subtly or overtly, the poor get population control, strict international limits on immigration, euthanasia, and genocide. Conversely, in the ending that no one controls, individual attitudinal change brings everyone to their own deep green “ecosophy,” in which they realize that their lives must exist within the greater web of life; the total world view that “all things hang together”; the ultimate universalism.

Taylor devotes several pages to each outcome, their ideational origins, and the kind of politics and world-system each would produce. But Taylor honestly does not expect either of these ends to occur, and he says as much. Paraphrasing Wallerstein, he points out that asking someone today to predict the next world-system is like asking someone from the fourteenth century to predict the world of today. What we share with the medieval, however, is a sense of doom, that the world as we know it is coming to an end.

No matter what one may think of his forecasting, Taylor’s perspective—its conceptual apparatus and set of key social relations—is a great advance in studying what globalization is and where it came from; he develops perhaps the most sophisticated, inclusive historical explanation of globalization yet written. A key to his success is that he brings in culture, the power of shared meanings, and the role of human agency, all analytic innovations that in many ways reflect our late/post-modern period itself. No one ends their analysis of globalization on a cheery note; even Cohen here is full of warnings. But a glimmer is there, perhaps, in the arguments of Taylor and others, and the idea that the postmodern analytic turn also reveals that we need not end with postmodernist funk, but with cautious optimism, or at least recognition of the possibilities of human action in the face of structural forces. If we are so newly and unusually aware of globalization, with the wisdom of a millennium behind us, perhaps we are also unusually empowered as well.

References

Albrow, M. 1996. The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Axford, B. 1995. The Global System: Economics, Politics and Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Clark, I. 1997. Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Meyer, J. W., J. Boli, G. M. Thomas, and F. Ramirez. 1997. World Society and the Nation-State. American Journal of Sociology 103(1):144–181.

Moisi, D. 1998. The Trouble with France. Foreign Affairs 77(3):94–104.

Robertson, R. 1990. Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept. Theory, Culture & Society 7(2–3):15–30.

Spybey, T. 1996. Globalization and World Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Teeple, G. 1995. Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform. Toronto: Garamond Press.