Abstract
This book is about agency, yours and mine: our ability to effect changes; change in ourselves and in our environment, at whatever level we choose from local to global. Choice is key, we must choose to be active and we must choose the issues that we wish to be the focus of our direct action and of our varying degrees of support through voice, loyalty, and contributions in cash and/or kind, including that scarcest of resources, our time. We must also choose the means that we wish to employ, what combination of words and deeds, what form of expression, whether ‘merely’ staying informed and maintaining a questioning attitude; writing letters to the editor, scholarly works, op-ed pieces, poetry, or plays; engaging in direct political engagement, participating in campaigns; or any one of countless other modes.
[T]he point of a nation is not to draw a line in the sand and keep its members behind it, but to create world citizens who are secure enough to treat others equally.
—Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem
We are in danger of losing the idea that a future is created, bit by bit, out of our political desires and choices. That’s why we need positive visions to balance the fashionably cynical ones, need them now more than ever.
—Mark Kingwell, The World We Want: Virtue, Vice and the Good Citizen
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Estanislao Zuleta, Educación y democracia: un campo de combate (Bogotá, Fundación Estanislao Zuleta: Corporación Tercer Milenio, 1995).
George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose: 1945–1950 (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 156–70.
William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
and Barry K. Gills, ‘American Power, Neoliberal Globalization, and Low Intensity Democracy: An Unstable Trinity’, in Michael Cox, G. John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi, eds, American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 326–44.
Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London: Verso, 1992).
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
André Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Development in Latin America: Historical Studies in Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).
Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1987).
Ibid., pp. 185–203. See also Riane Eisler and David Loye, ‘Chaos and Transformation: Implications of Nonequilibrium Theory for Social Science and Society’, Behavioral Science 32 (Jan. 1987), pp. 53–65.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, Beacon Press, 1957).
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1967).
Thorstein Veblen, ‘Salesmanship and the Church’, The Portable Veblen, Max Lerner, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1948), pp. 499–506.
J.E. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Simon Winchester, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
William L. Thomas Jr, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
Pablo Neruda recounts how, when he was a Chilean Senator in the 1940s for the nitrate-producing areas, his constituents asked him to use his influence to assure that shipments of tea reached them regularly. Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido: memorias (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1974), p. 240.
Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1971).
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 26–78.
Clark Blaise, Lord of Time (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000).
Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Müller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).
Thornton Wilder, The Skin of our Teeth: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Harper, 1942).
William H. Calvin raises the possibility that global warming, rather than being a continuing unidirectional process, may soon lead us to a switch point, which will reverse our course and take us within decades, not centuries, to a new ice age. William H. Calvin, ‘The Great Climate Flip-Flop’’, The Atlantic Monthly, 281 (Jan. 1998), pp. 47–64.
Nevil Shute, On the Beach (New York: W. Morrow, 1957).
Nicholas Sanchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America: A History, Translated by W.A.R. Richardson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).
Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1915).
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Scribner’s, 1904).
Jack Beatty, ‘Who Speaks for the Middle Class?’, The Atlantic Monthly 273 (May 1994), p. 66.
‘This search for the methods of a world pax is essentially an intellectual matter, a psychological problem; it is an attempt to save mankind from the insane obsessions of patriotism; it is a race of education to avert another and greater catastrophe.’ H.G. Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (London: William Heinemann, 1932), p. 650.
William Ladd, An Essay on a Congress of Nations for the Adjustment of International Disputes Without Resort to Arms, 1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1916).
James Lorimer ‘Book V. The Ultimate Problem of International Jurisprudence’, The Institutes of the Law of Nations: A Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political Communities, II (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1884).
Leonard Woolf, International Government; Two Reports Prepared for the Fabian Research Department, with an Introduction by Bernard Shaw (London: Allen, 1916)
and John Hobson, Towards International Government (New York: Macmillan, 1915).
John Williamson, ‘Democracy and the “Washington Consensus”’, World Development, 21 (Aug. 1993), pp. 1329–36.
E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from The New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. 20–23.
Jane Jacobs, The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty (New York: Random House, 1980).
Matthew Arnold, Mixed Essays (London: Murray, 1903), p. 62.
Humberto Maturana, La democracia es una obra de arte (Bogotá: Cooperativa Editorial Magisterio, 1995), pp. 13–14.
The exact quote is ‘Do not listen to those who say you want this rather than that … You always want both.’ Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1964), p. 116.
‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away … All that is solid melts into the air …’ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1848-CM/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2004 Myron J. Frankman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Frankman, M.J. (2004). Our World. In: World Democratic Federalism. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500174_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500174_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-51750-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50017-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)