ABSTRACT
Conclusions are best when they are short and sharp rather than protracted and prolonged. The key issue that emerges from this collection is whether globalization will corrode culture and community on the one hand or whether it will sustain and enlarge democracy on the other. Can we draw an optimistic conclusion that globalization may create conditions for the emergence of both wholly new communities and a cosmopolitan consciousness? Will globalization destroy the underlying foundations of solidarity and conviviality that make life tolerable if not enjoyable? Will globalization foster and expand the opportunities for friendship, sociability, and intimacy? Some commentators see globalization as the religion of a new economic god dominating our lives and the driving force behind the capitalist destruction of the world. Thus
[t]he priests in globalization (the small group of families with disproportionate private ownership and distribution power of the world's wealth) and those who accept the leadership of this ‘clergy’ act as if concentrated monopoly, finance capitalist wealth is a god … Globalization is a religious system of capitalist wealth concentration on a global scale, rapidly pursuing its object of faith – an indefinite increased concentration.
(Hopkins, 2001: 19)