Emergence of Globalism and Intellectual History of World Order
Description
Or Rosenboim (OR):
"So, the book started off as a project to understand how public intellectuals during and after, immediately after the Second World War, thought the world should be organized after the war. so, as you can imagine, the Second World War led many people, especially in the West, or we can say in Britain and Western Europe and the United States, to rethink about the future, the rise of totalitarianism, let them think that they may need to set up a new kind of order in the post-war era to guarantee peace, but also prosperity and democracy. And so, they came up with various schemes to do that. And the book explores these competing visions that they had about global order. I created a loose network of public intellectuals who were based in Britain and the United States, but many of them were émigrés from Europe. so, they escaped fascism and joined forces with liberal thinkers in Britain and the US to think about the future. And I explored the various ideas that they had about how the world should be organized. so, starting off with the nation state and going in different scales from regional federations, regional blocs to post-imperial organizations, and then obviously to universal orders, I explored their ideas of globalism, because what brought them together was a constant reference to the global as a relevant scale of political order. So, they did try to abolish everything that was smaller than the global, let’s say, but they were keen to argue that everything should be remeasured and reorganized in relation to this new scale of things that was the entire planet. And they perceived new technologies like the airplane or the telephone and also the nuclear bomb as the motivations for this global thinking. But at the same time, they all had different ideas about what this global order should look like. They were keen to argue that democracy must be a common value on a global scale. Yet at the same time, many of them wanted to embrace pluralism because they were concerned that obviously imposing any political order could continue and maintain the same constraints of the imperial and totalitarian age. So, pluralism was also a value. And as you can imagine, these two principles that they attached to the global could also clash. And so, my book explores these kinds of visions that they came up with in pamphlets and in public lectures. So, it wasn’t just a university elite. They were keen to communicate with a wider audience. And the book critically addresses these ideas and tries to understand not only what they proposed, but also what were the limits of this way of thinking about politics on a global scale."
More information
- Video conversation: Or Rosenboim on the History of the Global World Order