ABSTRACT
This discussion poses a central and fateful question: whether globalization represents just another – and merely the most recent – of the false or compromised universalisms which have emerged within human history and been offered as providing the key to its immanent logic, its irresistible trajectory. The answer to be offered – ‘perhaps, but perhaps not’ – may seem unsurprising and even unsatisfactory. But what matters at the outset is not the question’s answer but its meaning: what does the idea of a false or compromised universalism suggest and why does it matter? Clarifying these issues involves a serious analytical engagement with a question with which many popular and facile theories of globalization – all the unexamined rhetoric of a ‘borderless world’ and the ‘global village’ – merely play: the gradual emergence in our time (or just over our temporal horizon) of a comprehensive and inclusive human interdependence, and its effect upon the human moral imagination.
