Amazon.com Review
As director of the London School of Economics, Anthony Giddens is one of the world's foremost academics. He has served as an advisor to both President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair, and is closely tied to the center-left idea of "third-way" politics. In this brief book on globalization (drawn from a series of lectures delivered in 1999), Giddens writes, "We are living through a major period of historical transition." Globalization is reordering societies all over the planet, and although the results are sometimes unpredictable, they are heading in a generally positive direction. But not everybody agrees, as the author freely admits:
The battleground of the twenty-first century will pit fundamentalism against cosmopolitan tolerance. In a globalising world, where information and images are routinely transmitted across the globe, we are all regularly in contact with others who think differently, and live differently, from ourselves. Cosmopolitans welcome and embrace this cultural complexity. Fundamentalists find it disturbing and dangerous. Whether in the areas of religion, ethnic identity, or nationalism, they take refuge in a renewed and purified tradition--and, quite often, violence.
Giddens is not coy about where he stands: "We can legitimately hope that a cosmopolitan outlook will win out." In what is sure to be a controversial chapter, he examines sex and family life through the prism of this fundamentalist-cosmopolitan divide. He is severely critical of what he calls the "traditional family," which he considers an aspect of fundamentalism the world over and an enemy of sexual equality: "I remember what my great aunt once said to me. She must have had one of the longest marriages of anyone, having been with her husband for over 60 years. She once confided that she had been deeply unhappy with him the whole of that time. In her day there was no escape."
Runaway World is certain to provoke a lively debate--Giddens would surely have it no other way.
--John J. Miller
From Publishers Weekly
Forget the global village, says celebrated London scholar Giddens in this brief, accessible look at the aftereffects of globalization; on the contrary, we've got "global pillage." Based on a series of lectures originally broadcast on the BBC, this book confronts the benefits and dangers of global processes and asserts that life in the coming century will amount to a precarious game of "risk management." Giddens, whose 1998 work The Third Way spurred debate over the course of social democracy, argues that globalization's most profound effects will be not economic but cultural. Drawing on the work of Eric Hobsbawm, Marshall McLuhan and others, Giddens offers thumbnail sketches of broad themes--family, risk, tradition, democracy--as they've been reworked by global political and economic forces. He praises the advent of a "global cosmopolitan society" but cautions that salutary gains, such as equality for women and the spread of democracy, are threatened by a fundamentalist backlash. China has considered making divorce more difficult, he writes, while rhetoric about the traditional family structure remains a pernicious force against change around the world. Many of Giddens's arguments will sound familiar, but certain assertions are bound to be controversial. Sexuality need not be dominated by heterosexuality, he says, at a time when marriage is an increasingly defunct institution. And tradition itself can be seen as a creation of modernity, invented to secure the interests of power. Though our runaway world offers cause for optimism and pessimism in about equal measure, Giddens concludes, democratic ideals are still very much worth fighting for. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
