The Wretched of the Earth

This book demonstrates that people's basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behaviour. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernisation theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernisation is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely. The authors present a model of social change that predicts how the value systems play a crucial role in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions - and that modernisation brings coherent cultural changes that are conducive to democratisation.

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Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence

Some 70 years after its development in Frankfurt, Germany, critical theory retains its ability to disrupt and hallenge the status quo. In the process, it elicits highlycharged emotions of all types—fierce loyalty from its roponents, vehement hostility from its detractors. Such vibrantly polar reactions indicate at the very least that critical theory still matters. We can be against critical theory or for it, but, especially at the present historical uncture, we cannot be without it.

Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

Introduction: from East-West to North-South: US intervention in the 'new world order' 1 From 'straight power concepts' to 'persuasion' in US foreign policy 2 Political operations in US foreign policy 3 The Philippines: 'molded in the image of American democracy' 4 Chile: ironing out a 'Fluke' of the political system 5 Nicaragua: from low-intensity warfare to low-intensity democracy 6 Haiti: the 'practically insolvable problem' of establishing consensual domination 7 Conclusions: the future of polyarchy and global society

Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony

In this book, sociologist William Robinson offers a theory of globalization that follows the rise of a new capitalist class - and a new type of state formation. He explains how global capital mobility has allowed capital to reorganize production worldwide in accordance with a whole range of considerations that allow for maximizing profit-making opportunities. This worldwide decentralization and fragmentation of the production process has taken place alongside the centralization of command and control of the global economy in transnational capital. In turn, this economic reorganization finds a political counterpart in the rise of the transnational state. In the future, Robinson argues, hegemony will be exercised not by a particular nation-state but by the new global ruling class who, regardless of their nationality, tend to share similar lifestyles and interact through expanding networks of this transnational state. In this way, the process of globalization is unifying the world into a single mode of production that is increasingly integrating different countries and regions into a new global economy and society. Robinson concludes that, because the new global capitalism is rife with contradictions, the twenty-first century is likely to harbor ongoing conflicts and disputes for control between the new transnational ruling group and the expanding ranks of the poor and the marginalized.

A theory of global capitalism : production, class, and state in a transnational world

A transnational capitalist class (TCC) has emerged as that segment of the world bourgeoisie that represents transnational capital, the owners of the leading worldwide means of production as embodied in the transnational corporations and private financial institutions. The spread of TNCs, the sharp increase in foreign direct investment, the proliferation of mergers and acquisitions across national borders, the rise of a global financial system, and the increased interlocking of positions within the global corporate structure, are some empirical indicators of the transnational integration of capitalists. The TCC manages global rather than national circuits of accumulation. This gives it an objective class existence and identity spatially and politically in the global system above any local territories and polities. The TCC became politicized from the 1970s into the 1990s and has pursued a class project of capitalist globalization institutionalized in an emergent trans- national state apparatus and in a "Third Way" political program. The emergent global capitalist historic bloc is divided over strategic issues of class rule and how to achieve regulatory order in the global economy. Contradictions within the ruling bloc open up new opportunities for emancipatory projects from global labor. IT IS WIDELY RECOGNIZED THAT WORLD CAPITALISM has been undergoing a period of profound restructuring since the 1970s, bound up with the world historic process that has come to be known as globalization (Burbach and Robinson, 1999). One process central to capitalist globalization is transnational class formation, which has proceeded in step with the internationalization of capital and the global integration of national productive structures. Given the transnational integration of national economies, the mobility of capital and the global fragmentation and decentralization of accumulation circuits, class formation is progressively less tied to territoriality. The traditional assumption by Marxists that the capitalist class is by theoretical fiat organized in nation-states and driven by the dynamics of national capitalist competition and state rivalries needs to be modified. We argue in this essay that a transnationa l capitalist class (hence- forth, TCC) has emerged, and that this TCC is a global ruling class. It is a ruling class because it controls the levers of an emergent trans-national state apparatus and of global decision making. This TCC is in the process of constructing a new global capitalist historic bloc: a new hegemonic bloc consisting of various economic and political forces that have become the dominant sector of the ruling class throughout the world, among the developed countries of the North as well as the countries of the South. The politics and policies of this ruling bloc are conditioned by the new global structure of accumulation and production. This historic bloc is composed of the transnational corporations and financial institutions, the elites that manage the supranational economic planning agencies, major forces in the dominant

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Towards a global ruling class? globalization and the transnational capitalist class

Globalization is a relatively new concept in the social sciences. What this concept exactly means, the nature, extent, and importance of the changes bound up with the process, is hotly debated.1 But few would doubt that it is acquiring a critical importance for the academic as well as the political agenda of the twenty-first century, or that it poses a distinctive challenge to theoretical work in the social sciences. The historic limitations of social theory, insofar as it has been informed by the study of "national" societies and the nation-state, are brought into focus by the universalizing tendencies and transnational structural transformations bound up with globalization. To what extent is the nation-state a historically specific form of world social organization now in the process of becoming transcended by capitalist globalization? This is the question that underlies the present essay, although the matter I intend to address is more circumscribed.

William I. Robinson

Papers

Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony

A theory of global capitalism : production, class, and state in a transnational world

Towards a global ruling class? globalization and the transnational capitalist class

Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state

A theory of global capitalism