Globalization: Some Critical Issues, Vol. 2

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.

The effects of globalization have led to accentuated social inequality in most first-world countries, above all the U.S. and U.K. International trade and capital flows have tended to redistribute income in ways that aggravate inequality in advanced industrialized nations where relative income levels of the salaried middle class and the working class are being eroded, resulting in a downward mobility of these classes. At the same time, unwaged forms of labor, including forced labor and slavery, in poorer regions more and more replace wage labor in developed countries. Informed by an anthropological, humanistic perspective, the contributors in this provocative volume offer critical analyses and alternative visions.p> Contents:
William H. Thornton, Civil Antiglobalism and the Question of Class - Chuang Ya-chung, Re-Theorizing Social Movements in a Changing Global Space - Wang Horng-luen, Mind the Gap on Post-National Idea(l)s and the Nationalist Reality - Chu Yiu Wai, Postcolonial Discourse in the Age of Globalization thousands of languages, or give rise to new forms of racism or "genism."

Michael Scott Christofferson was educated at Carleton College and Columbia University. He currently is Assistant Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University, Erie and lives in the Cleveland, Ohio.