Too often, observers of globalization take for granted that the common ground across cultures is a thin layer of consumerism and perhaps human rights. If so, then anything deeper and more traditional would be placebound, and probably destined for the dustbin of history. But must this be so? Must we assume--as both liberals and traditionalists now tend to do--that one cannot be a cosmopolitan and take traditions seriously at the same time? This book offers a radically different argument about how traditions and global citizenship can meet, and suggests some important lessons for the contours of globalization in our own time. Adam K. Webb argues that if we look back before modernity, we find a very different line of thinking about what it means to take the whole world as one's horizon. Digging into some fascinating currents of thought and practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, across all major civilizations, Webb is able to reveal patterns of "deep cosmopolitanism", with its logic quite unlike that of liberal globalization today. In their more cosmopolitan moments, everyone from clerics to pilgrims to empire-builders was inclined to look for deep ethical parallels-points of contact-among civilizations and traditions. Once modernity swept aside the old civilizations, however, that promise was largely forgotten. We now have an impoverished view of what it means to embrace a tradition and even what kinds of conversations across traditions are possible. In part two, Webb draws out the lessons of deep cosmopolitanism for our own time. If revived, it has something to say about everything from the rise of new non-Western powers like China and India and what they offer the world, to religious tolerance, to global civil society, to cross-border migration. Deep Cosmopolis traces an alternative strand of cosmopolitan thinking that cuts across centuries and civilizations. It advances a new perspective on world history, and a distinctive vision of globalization for this century which has the real potential to resonate with us all.

Too often, observers of globalization take for granted that the common ground across cultures is a thin layer of consumerism and perhaps human rights. If so, then anything deeper and more traditional would be placebound, and probably destined for the dustbin of history. But must this be so? Must we assume--as both liberals and traditionalists now tend to do--that one cannot be a cosmopolitan and take traditions seriously at the same time? This book offers a radically different argument about how traditions and global citizenship can meet, and suggests some important lessons for the contours of globalization in our own time. Adam K. Webb argues that if we look back before modernity, we find a very different line of thinking about what it means to take the whole world as one's horizon. Digging into some fascinating currents of thought and practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, across all major civilizations, Webb is able to reveal patterns of "deep cosmopolitanism", with its logic quite unlike that of liberal globalization today. In their more cosmopolitan moments, everyone from clerics to pilgrims to empire-builders was inclined to look for deep ethical parallels-points of contact-among civilizations and traditions. Once modernity swept aside the old civilizations, however, that promise was largely forgotten. We now have an impoverished view of what it means to embrace a tradition and even what kinds of conversations across traditions are possible. In part two, Webb draws out the lessons of deep cosmopolitanism for our own time. If revived, it has something to say about everything from the rise of new non-Western powers like China and India and what they offer the world, to religious tolerance, to global civil society, to cross-border migration. Deep Cosmopolis traces an alternative strand of cosmopolitan thinking that cuts across centuries and civilizations. It advances a new perspective on world history, and a distinctive vision of globalization for this century which has the real potential to resonate with us all.

"Beyond the Global Culture War" is a broad-ranging political, historical, and philosophical account of the clash between liberal modernity and the forces that resist it. The book starts by identifying four ethoses, or self-understandings, that have contended in all civilizations through history. It shows that liberal modernity amounts to an upending of history, the disruptive rise of one of those four ethoses to unprecedented dominance in public culture. In its first third, the book traces how the ethos that underlies liberalism managed to break past age-old checks on it, through a series of ideological maneuvers between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. Then it turns to the global culture war today. On one side is the liberal vision of an "end of history," of markets, moral relativism, and technocratic rule. On the other is the strident backlash from Islamists, populists, the Christian Right, Chinese and Hindu nationalists, and the like.
The book argues that today's resistance is doomed to fail for two reasons. First, all versions of it are insular, and lack the universal appeal that would let them meet global liberal culture on its own scale. Second, they have a peculiar moralizing flatness that means they cannot draw on the rich high-culture currents of the past civilizations they claim to defend. The book's final chapters lay out an alternative vision of a truly cosmopolitan and multidimensional challenge to the global liberal order. That vision involves a partnership between plain folk and virtue-cultivating strata, to avert history's dead-end and forge a post-liberal global polity. The book is distinctive in its cross-cultural breadth, covering issues fromWestern and non-Western settings, both pre-modern and modern. It also stakes out an original intellectual and political position: critical of capitalism and technocracy, sympathetic to traditional virtues and the legacies of past civilizations, and avowedly cosmopolitan in scope and vision.

"Beyond the Global Culture War" is a broad-ranging political, historical, and philosophical account of the clash between liberal modernity and the forces that resist it. The book starts by identifying four ethoses, or self-understandings, that have contended in all civilizations through history. It shows that liberal modernity amounts to an upending of history, the disruptive rise of one of those four ethoses to unprecedented dominance in public culture. In its first third, the book traces how the ethos that underlies liberalism managed to break past age-old checks on it, through a series of ideological maneuvers between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. Then it turns to the global culture war today. On one side is the liberal vision of an "end of history," of markets, moral relativism, and technocratic rule. On the other is the strident backlash from Islamists, populists, the Christian Right, Chinese and Hindu nationalists, and the like.
The book argues that today's resistance is doomed to fail for two reasons. First, all versions of it are insular, and lack the universal appeal that would let them meet global liberal culture on its own scale. Second, they have a peculiar moralizing flatness that means they cannot draw on the rich high-culture currents of the past civilizations they claim to defend. The book's final chapters lay out an alternative vision of a truly cosmopolitan and multidimensional challenge to the global liberal order. That vision involves a partnership between plain folk and virtue-cultivating strata, to avert history's dead-end and forge a post-liberal global polity. The book is distinctive in its cross-cultural breadth, covering issues fromWestern and non-Western settings, both pre-modern and modern. It also stakes out an original intellectual and political position: critical of capitalism and technocracy, sympathetic to traditional virtues and the legacies of past civilizations, and avowedly cosmopolitan in scope and vision.