ABSTRACT
The academic literature that deals with social and political relationships in the world economy has grown enormously in the past decade. Whereas but a generation ago the only scholars who enquired into such matters were either engaged politically (in social movements old and new, in the Fourth International and so on) or else belonged to relatively circumscribed schools of analysis outside mainstream paradigms (world-system theory, for instance, or ‘neo-Gramscian transnational historical materialism’), now several academic fields of enquiry have grown up around the concept of globalization that are giving significance and confidence to scholars of all lineages and tendencies, whether engaged or not.
