Reason, Culture, Religion: The Metaphysics of World Politics

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Summary: Revisioning International Relations
Review: The volume is at its most visionary in the chapters that deal with alternative world sacral paradigms.
What is world politics? Most Euro-Americans would tend to answer this question by highlighting the politics of the globalization process whereby a particular cultural project, the Euro-American project, is being transformed into a global one. They would do so, what is more, in a characteristically Euro-American way, promoting in the process the sort of person Euro-Americans tend to represent.

What, then, is world politics? Read with the word "world" italicized, other agendas begin to emerge, that locate these politics in larger contexts. Such a reading not only suggests the possibility of seeing world affairs as world ones. It also anticipates a world affairs discipline more worthy of the name.
This study attempts to answer the questions posed above, though to answer the second reading (what is world politics?) it must first of all answer the first. It begins, then, by briefly outlining the modernist study of world affairs. It goes on to compare these world affairs- and the culture of which they are a part-with world affairs as described and explained from other politico-cultural perspectives. It ends by comparing these world affairs, and the religion of which modernist culture is part, with world affairs as described and explained from other politico-spiritual perspectives.
The key purpose of this work is to show how the modernist prioritization of reason as an end in itself not only clarifies and extends our capacity to explain world affairs, but also constrains and skews every relevant explanation. These limits and distortions are most clearly demonstrated by subjecting modernist world affairs to analyses from communalist and sacralist perspectives, analyses that not only transgress the limits modernity sets, but also compensate for the distortions they create.
In attempting to extend the reach of the discipline, this is a study that moves outside the discipline's mainstream concerns. The discipline itself continues to grow, however, as the singular character of the cultural milieu in which these particular world affairs arose becomes more apparent, and as the singular character of the sacral milieu in which this particular cultural milieu arose becomes more apparent too.
When particular current events challenge the discipline's construction of its own mainstream, the need for a more comprehensive account of world affairs is seen to be acute. The need is a chronic one, however, since the modernist project never ceases to skew and constrain how world affairs are described, explained, and prescribed for in policy terms.
In seeking to augment what the discipline represents, the following study is obliged to interrogate the theoretical integrity of the foundations of modernist world affairs. It should be said at the outset, however, that it does not seek to abandon these foundations. Rather, it seeks to under-stand the consequences these foundations have for the study of the subject, to bring to bear upon them some relatively unfamiliar cultural and spiritual outlooks and insights, to extend the perimeters that modernist analyses impose, and to counter the misrepresentations that modernist analyses make.