On the Dialectics of Global Governance in the Twenty-first Century : A Polanyian Double Movement?

Following decades of economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Karl Polanyi’s double movement has been invoked not only to explain what is happening but also to give reasons for being hopeful about a different future. Some have suggested a pendulum model of history: a swing from markets to society leading, in the next phase, to a swing from society to markets, and so on. The double movement can also be understood dialectically as a description of an irreversible historical development following its own inner laws or schemes of development. Going beyond a thesis – antithesis – synthesis pattern, I maintain that conceptions and schemes drawn from dialectics, and especially dialectical critical realism, can provide better geo-historical hypotheses for explaining past changes and for building scenarios about possible future changes. I analyse political economy contradictions and tendencies, and focus on normative rationality, to assess substantial claims about rational tendential directionality of world history. I argue that democratic global Keynesianism would enable processes of decommodification and new syntheses concerning the market/social nexus. A learning process towards qualitatively higher levels of reflexivity can help develop global transformative agency. Existing contradictions can be resolved by means of rational collective actions and building more adequate common institutions. These collective actions are likely to involve new forms of political agency such as world political parties.Peer reviewe

Chris Brown’s Liberal Conservatism, the Process of Moral Learning and Global Institutional Transformations

In the normative theory of International Relations, the major debate has been between the state-centric view and cosmopolitanism. A quarter of century ago I attempted to deconstruct one round of this debate – between Chris Brown and Mark Hoffman – by showing that the debate is both utopian and has an other-negating character. With the help of epistemological discussions and an analysis of two “case studies”, I built a case for a contextualist and dialogical morality, grounded on the concept of judgement. Interestingly, Brown’s 2010 collection of essays is entitled Practical Judgement in International Political Theory. In this paper I first explore whether similar or analogical deconstruction would anymore be possible. Second, I discuss Brown’s ideas about global civil society, democracy and justice, particularly in light of world-historical developments since the early 1990s and in relation to the development of my own thinking on the topic. While Brown has tried to overcome the dichotomy between the state-centric view and cosmopolitanism, I examine whether the idea of universal ethico-political learning and its cosmopolitan implications might explain the divergence in our practical judgements. I conclude by arguing any area of activities in international relations and world society, from property and contract to nuclear safety and global warming, can be subject to normative debates and potentially democratic politics. Good normative arguments often involve designs for better institutions, but they must be realizable by virtue of being connected to real causal processes.Peer reviewe

Brexit: Be Careful What You Wish For?

In this paper, I focus on the British future from Brexit. The institutional form this will take is not yet fixed. However, one can consider likely outcomes based on dominant economic frameworks. From this perspective, it seems unlikely that Brexit will address the actual grievances that resulted in Brexit. These transcend European Union membership

Uneven and combined development and unequal exchange: the second wind of neoliberal ‘free trade’?

With capitalist social relations emerging in a prior system of absolutist states in Europe, the outward expansion of capitalism through conditions of uneven and combined development became dependent on the existence of multiple political entities. States in turn are brought into relations of unequal exchange within the global economy. This article analyses the way in which current neoliberal ‘free trade’ policies are related to these fundamental capitalist dynamics, deepening further processes of uneven and combined development as well as unequal exchange

Forum on Heikki Patomäki’s World Statehood: The Future of World Politics

In this forum, six scholars discuss Heikki Patomäki’s book World Statehood: The Future of World Politics, published in 2023

Change and a Changing World? Theorizing Morphogenic Society

In the following review essay I provide some background in order to place Margaret Archer's edited Volume 3 text, Generative Mechanisms, in context of the series (Social Morphogenesis) from which it derives. In doing so I provide some sense of the significance of the series. Thereafter, I provide an overview of the key substantive claims of the essays, with some comment on how they may be linked together in terms of the theme of the series

A Note on the Contingent Necessity of a Morphogenic Society and Human Flourishing

The Centre for Social Ontology working group project has been exploring the concept of a Morphogenic Society since 2013. The project is now drawing to a close. One of the arising issues from the project has been whether such a society can be and is liable to be one of human flourishing. In this short paper, I explore one possible aspect of the concept of a Morphogenic Society.1 A Morphogenic Society may involve issues of ‘contingent necessity’. Contingent necessity may provide one way to think about human flourishing, and this in turn may highlight the potential significance of the concept of a Morphogenic Society as a resource in positional argument for human flourishing

EU Aggregate Demand As a Way out of Crisis? Engaging the Post-Keynesian Critique: EU Aggregate Demand As a Way out of Crisis?

Post-Keynesians have delivered an important advance in providing explanations of the Eurozone Crisis, not the least in demonstrating how the formation of the European integration project lacked the means to manage effectively the macroeconomic imbalances between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ spaces across the region. Through a critical engagement with such descriptions, this article argues that to account more adequately for the formation of the asymmetrical and crisis-ridden forms of development across the Eurozone, it is necessary to focus on the uneven and combined development of Europe’s ‘peripheral’ spaces and their integration into an expanded free trade regime since the 1980s. It is through a focus on the structuring condition of uneven and combined development shaped by capitalist social relations of production and attendant class struggles that we can better locate the origins of the present crisis

Further reflections on theory as time travel : a response to Morgan

In his review essay on World Statehood, Morgan poses three questions, namely: does my conceptualization imply conflation of agency and structure; is the realist processual account of time contradictory; and have we humans already reached the limit of the possible? I address each question briefly one at a time, arguing that the concept of self-transformative capacity of contexts does not imply conflation; that various processes with different durations can exhibit patterns that can be reasonably discussed and assessed and, with caution, also used in anticipations; and that there is no cosmic law or limit that inevitably hinders humanity's further progress.Peer reviewe