Liberal Globalization and Peripheral Justice

The increasing salience of cultural conflicts in the post-Cold War era brings the problem of peripheral justice, defined as the equal attainment of social justice, to the center of current debates on globalization. Specifically, they force us to directly confront the toughest challenge posed by the Weberian tradition: If the principles of justice and equality are beyond the peculiarity of the Occidental civilization, how then may we give a full explanation as to why in the West-and only in the West-the ideal of public reasoning by private people has been materialized? The present study seeks to address this fundamental challenge by drawing on the Marxist tradition of public hegemony developed by Confucian Marxists and Gramsci. I argue that at the core of the problem of peripheral justice is an intrinsic linkage between Eurocentricism and the liberal paradigm of civil society. The prospect of equal justice, therefore, hinges on the development of a new conception of the social that reverses the liberal interpretation of the relationship between bourgeois subjectivity and the social and derives from the primacy of the ethical life for social formation