ABSTRACT
Still, political life is hardly that simple. We live, today, in a complex and worldgirdling system of global governmentality, one whose center is almost impossible to pinpoint-there is no “there” there-and there is no single place-or even places-that can be identified as the originary source of contemporary global rule. Indeed, the shift of “political authority” from the national to the international level, from polis to experts, visible in institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the practices of global governmentality, has been the intended result of the “depoliticization” of the domestic political economies of democratic market societies (e.g. Ruggie 1982). Efforts to create a global public sphere, visible in the mostly market-oriented projects and campaigns of global civil society, have so far done little more than reinforce the “economic constitutionalism” of international affairs (Jayasuriya 2001). It is clear that such projects are neo-liberal in inspiration, organization, and practice-not entirely surprising, given that global governmentality, such as it is, largely mirrors the governmental system of the United States-and rely, for the most part, on market mechanisms to achieve their distributional ends.
