ABSTRACT
Demographic and governance shifts may require a paradigm shift in our understanding of both sites and actors in global politics. This chapter describes the ontological and paradigmatic developments preceding modernity and then the more or less widely held modern notion of the world, one characterized by secularity, self-interest, rationality, objectivity, state-centric sovereignty, national cultures, ideological pluralism, market systems, and an interstate arrangement of power to respond to the systemic condition of anarchy. The core of idealism/liberalism is at the heart of modernity, that the individual is the center of societal institutions and that among these institutions the market system is critical to the development of society. The chapter focuses on scholars in other social sciences who write about the changing role of sub-national units of governance, and especially of the city, in organizing global political relations.
