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Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept

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1.
1. It is of more than passing interest to note that in speaking of communism as a radical branch of one of the `the great “reform” movements of postmedieval Western history' — namely, socialism — Talcott Parsons said in 1964 that `it seems a safe prediction that communism will, from its own internal dynamics, evolve in the direction of the restoration — or where it has yet not existed, the institution — of political democracy' (Parsons, 1964: 396-7). On the other hand, Parsons insisted that the internationalism of communism had made a crucial contribution to world order.
2.
2. Ronald Inglehart (1990: 33) observes in the course of his empirical analysis of culture in advanced industrial societies `that the publics of the three major Axis powers, Germany, Japan, and Italy, all tend to be underachievers in life satisfaction. The traumatic discrediting of their social and political systems that accompanied their defeat in World War II may have left a legacy of cynicism that their subsequent social change and economic success has still not entirely erased.'
3.
3. I owe the precise phrases `local-global nexus' and `global-local nexus' to Chadwick Alger.
4.
4. I argue specifically in this connection that images of world order are central to global culture as responses to globality (Robertson, 1990b).
5.
5. I discuss the growing significance of globe-oriented movements in Robertson (1989, 1990b).
6.
6. I argue also (Robertson, forthcoming) that at a higher level of generality globalization can be analyzed in terms of the global institutionalization of the relationship between the universal and the particular (see also Robertson, 1987a, 1989). In a manner which differs from the position of Albert Bergesen (see his piece in this volume of TCS), I try to turn world-systems theory `on its head' by emphasizing culture and the agency aspect of the making of the global system.

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