This book measures the current institutional and political realities surrounding globalization against philosophical ideals. Though the contributors share no particular orthodoxy, they do share the conviction that human responsibility is possible in circumstances that often appear to deny human agency.

Written by a religious historian, this is an introduction to early Christian thought. Focusing on major figures such as St Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa, as well as a host of less well-known thinkers, Robert Wilken chronicles the emergence of a specifically Christian intellectual tradition. In chapters on topics including early Christian worship, Christian poetry and the spiritual life, the Trinity, Christ, the Bible, and icons, Wilken shows that the energy and vitality of early Christianity arose from within the life of the Church. While early Christian thinkers drew on the philosophical and rhetorical traditions of the ancient world, it was the versatile vocabulary of the Bible that loosened their tongues and minds and allowed them to construct the world anew, intellectually and spiritually. These thinkers were not seeking to invent a world of ideas, Wilken shows, but rather to win the hearts of men and women and to change their lives. Early Christian thinkers set in place a foundation that has endured. Their writings are an irreplaceable inheritance, and Wilken shows that they can still be heard as living voices within contemporary culture.

This much-needed volume represents all that is new in the field of global ethics. It recognizes the emergence of the search to move beyond relativism and the study of ethical aspects of globalization, acknowledging aspects of globalization that make ethical reasoning itself a challenging task. As such the young field of global ethics is a search for new approaches and methodologies that go beyond existing ones and succeed in addressing these ethical issues of globalization. This volume presents these new developments, focusing specifically on how to re-conceive ethics in order to come to grips with ethical and political life today. It sets out an agenda for the field of global ethics, addresses the critiques and illustrates the rapprochement of global ethics. This is a valuable collection of essays that connect theoretical innovation with substantive issues in the public realm and hence is suitable for a wide audience across philosophy, politics, international relations and development studies.

Globalisation is widely understood as a set of processes driven by technological, economic and cultural change. Few have successfully defined the changing character and role of politics in global change. Political institutions such as the nation-state have been seen as undermined by globalisation, or needing to respond to it. This book clarifies the tensions which global change has provoked in our understanding of politics. Politics and Globalisation suggests that globalisation is a process which is politically contested and even politically constituted. The volume presents five key intellectual and political contests in globalisation: · the extent and political significance of globalising changes in economy and society · how and how far the relations and forms of nation-state organisation are transformed · whether the given concepts and methods of political science as a discipline can be applied to global and regional politics, and whether they require radical reformulation; · the role and significance of ethical questions in global change · whether global change is constituted by, or denies, radical political agency.

For anyone concerned about the world we are creating, this book, written by one of the most important living theologians, offers a cautionary look at the coming global society.

`A lucid, comprehensive analysis of normative approaches to international relations, and an original contribution to critical theory′ - Andrew Linklater, University of Keele `Hutchings combines a valuable account of the current state of the art with a lucid expositon of her own, highly distinctive, position. This will be required reading for students in international political theory, and indeed anyone interested in normative issues in international relations′ - Chris Brown, London School of Economics and Political Science Providing an invaluable overview of the competing schools of thought in traditional and contemporary international theory, this book seeks to path the way forward for new ways of thinking about international political morality. First, the role and place of normative theory in the study of international politics is explained before a discussion of mainstream approaches within international relations and applied ethics. Here the student is introduced to the central debates between realists and idealists, and cosmopolitans and communitarians. Second, the conceptual challenges of contemporary approaches in critical theory, postmodernism and feminism are outlined and then used as a platform to develop the author′s own Hegelian-Foucauldian approach for doing normative international theory. Third, the insights drawn from each approach are applied to the study of two key topics in contemporary theoretical debate: the right to self-determination, and the idea of cosmopolitan democracy, and conclusions drawn for transcending the theoretical deadlock in international relations. Accessibly written and wide-ranging, this text will quickly become essential reading for all students and academics of politics and international relations seeking a deeper understanding of the underlying tensions and future potential of international theory today.

Preface International conferences are not organized overnight—especially not when high ranking personalities from politics, business and academia should be offered an adequate platform for addressing and discussing highly relevant contemporary issues. The conference on “The Role of Law and Ethics in the Globalized Economy,” which took place on May 22 and 23, 2008 in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich, was no exception. When the first preparations started at the end of 2006, neither the subprime crises nor the general crises of the global financial system, whose shock waves have rocked the financial businesses in subsequent months, were known; nor were they predictable or even imaginable. Based on our monitoring of the globalization process and its apparent impact—not only on the economic and technological environment, but also on the social en- ronment—it was appropriate for the conference to begin by serving as a platform for analysing the status quo of the process of globalization, as relevant to politics, business and academia, and for exploring how the interest groups in those domains cope with the challenges of globalization. In the end, however, the purpose of the conference was to produce proposals for conditions for “upwards” global compe- tion, meaning that minimum conditions should be worked out to enable people to live and labour humanely. Such conditions would be those which should help avoid otherwise inevitable frictions in society, both nationally and internationally.