ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter is obviously a variation of the sacred trinity of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. From 1789 to 1989, the Western world’s leading political thinkers (as well as lesser lights) have been engaged in a furious heated set of debates about the first two terms and their relation to the critical question: “what is justice?” The rise and decline of imperialism, the spread of globalization, and the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights has expanded this debate to include the entire world within its provenance. However, this apparent advance to a consistent cosmopolitanism is complicated by ambivalent attitudes towards modernity, modernization and modernism in both the West and the rest of the world.
