Reason, Culture, Religion

Book Summary

"Ralph Pettman, long one of the most eloquent and open-minded of that small band of scholars who have insisted that there must be some other way of thinking about international relations, explores a rich vein of neglected possibilities. This provides an effective context in which to contrast a range of more "spiritual" possibilities, which Pettman sketches with his usual economy, elegance and wit. The result is an engaging account of world affairs as a renewed process of "global learning," an account that offers much needed relief from all those embarrassingly righteous stories about the end of history and the clash of civilizations."--R.B.J. Walker, Professor of International Relations, University of Keele, UK, and Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria, Canada In Reason, Culture, Religion, Ralph Pettman calls for wider recognition of, and greater commitment to, the "new" international relations, a discipline much more comprehensive and cosmopolitan than the "old." He first documents the way modernist analysts describe and explain world politics. Pettman then explores two ways in which the constraints on modernist thinking are transgressed: communalist ("pre-modernist") alternatives to the modernist project and sacralist ("anti-modernist") alternatives to the Christian tradition of which the modernist project is a part. The first part of the book provides a systematic overview of the study of world politics, first in analytic form, and then in the form of a film script. The second part of the book highlights the modernist construction of this study by providing a detailed account of the world politics of world heritage. The third part of the book locates modernist world politics in its sacral context by discussing Taoist strategics, Buddhist economics, Islamic civics, Confucian marxism, Hindu constructivism, Pagan feminism, and Animist environmentalism. It concludes by asking what a world affairs worthy of the name would be.

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