Emerging Globalities and Civilizational Perspectives

This innovative volume provides insight into the vast changes in societies now and in the near future, and highlights the need for a new sociological approach to analyse these changes. It particularly reviews and critiques existing theories of globalization and analyses how global changes affect all subsystems of social membership systems: the scientific, academic, legal and political systems. The authors propose a new theoretical paradigm in sociology to analyse this “next society”. The book studies emergent communication structures between these systems and looks at the concept of membership as a new research area in the study of the next society. In this context, it particularly assesses the problems of further modernization of Chinese society, and the directions of this modernization.
This book is of interest to researchers and students of social theory, globalization studies, theory of evolution, and those studying modern Chinese society. 

This book introduces into the current global ethics debate models of humanism developed in classical Chinese traditions, which have not yet been comprehensively presented to Western scholarship or integrated into the framework of global discourses on social ethics and morality. It creates new paradigms for an understanding of humanism that meets the demands of our time. It begins by presenting European descriptions and critical assessments of this discourse, and then moves to an exploration of humanistic ideas shaped through historical developments in Asia, with a focus on the Chinese tradition. In this sense, the book is written from a transcivilizational perspective. The methods used in the research transcend---that is, surpass and overcome---the rigid, isolating, and essentialist concept of civilization. At the same time, the book points to the possibility of transformation through the exchange of knowledge and ideas between different civilizations. Within this framework, the book starts from the assumption that the ontology of civilizations and cultures is not based on immutable substances, but on the relations between different factors that constitute them as categories. The transcivilizational perspective rooted in transcultural dialogues between philosophies that originated in different cultures and civilizations is particularly valuable because of the globalized world in which we live today. This means that the problems that affect people in different parts of the world and the issues that are embedded in different geopolitical and developmental frameworks also affect all of humanity.

This book is of particular interest to scholars and students of global ethics, globalization, Asian philosophy and Sinology.

This book makes the powerful argument that Latin America needs to be a more central part of the discourse on emerging globalities and in the pursuit of an inter-civilizational focus to avoid West-centric perspectives. It deploys a cultural political economy approach that sees the global political economy as inescapably cultural and allows us to avoid the hyper-rational analysis of economics. It explores various aspects of contemporary Latin America from the revival of dependency theory, the ‘pink tide’ governments since 2000 and, in particular, the potential of the Andean Buen Vivir political philosophy, to offer a distinctive paradigm for sustainable global development.

The readership for this book includes all who are fascinated by the globalization lens on the one hand, and the experience and lessons of Latin America on the other hand.