Therborn - The world: a beginners guide

PROLOGUE: IN THE BEGINNING THERE IS

Most of us are beginners on the planetary terrain of humankind. We are much more familiar with our own country, occasionally with our own continental region, be it Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America or a part of Asia, but rarely all of it. And each and all of us are beginners in the twenty-first century, a century which promises at least one thing that it will be very different from the past one. Therefore, this is a beginners guide, written for all those of us who are curious about this world, those of us who do not already know everything we want to know, who do not know everything we need to know about the evil, the good and the salvation of this world. On offer is not a primary of mainstream wisdom, it is an individual scholars vision, coming out of half a century of social study and carried by his personal passion for human freedom and equality, and for empirical evidence.

In this book, you will find a sociocultural geological map of the world, a compass outline of the fundamental drives of human society and a specification of how they operate in the world today, a picture of the current world stage with its major actors. You will be invited to a worldwide human life-course journey, from birth to after-life. In another sense, this is also a guide of beginning, of snapshots never shown before (outside my Cambridge classrooms), although pixelled together from the vast archives of human research and experience.

This is a guide to the world after the stardust of globalization has settled, when the global vista is clearing up. What is opening up then is a new space of social imagination, no longer just national, no longer the North Atlantic region writ large as the universe, of a first or second, solid or liquid modernity, or of postmodernity. It is a finite planet of enormous variety, interdependent and intercommunicating. This new world is a world of plural civilizations, each with its living history, not the binary one of yesterdays North Atlantic leaders putting (our) civilization against the barbarians threatening it. It is a world of emerging powers and re-emerging cultures, and not just one of global markets, a world of alternative possibilities and of different life-courses.

Intellectually, this may the hour of global sociology, taken as scholarship, with its sensitivity to variety and limitations as well as to connectivity, and its refraining from policy pontificating. Half a century ago, I entered university, in Lund in Sweden, with a view to studying politics and economics, but in the process I learnt about sociology, as a more scientific approach, which may have reflected local circumstances more than a universal truth. Later on, in the Netherlands, I had a chair of political science, and political economy has always been prominent on my mind, although my favourite scholarly writers have mostly been historians, models of erudition-cum-style. Nevertheless, I think sociology offers the best vantage-point from which to comprehend the world as a whole, the past and the contemporary together. It is wide open to different expertise and disciplines, itself pluralistic, driven by an unbound, non-paradigmatic curiosity, and by an ambition of connecting as much evidence, as much human experience, as possible.

However, after all, academic disciplines are important only within the small compounds of academia, and this book is concerned with the world outside. It is written by a scholar-citizen to fellow citizens of the world. Suddenly, besides everything else we are, we have become fellow residents of a planet and members of humanity.

Finally, a word of thanks. I am a craftsman sociologist, neither an armchair theorist nor a research manager. Most of the empirical evidence on which this book is based I have dug out with my own hands, voraciously and gratefully picking up fruits from institutional data collectors as well as from scholarly colleagues of many disciplines. But I thankfully acknowledge the assistance of my student Maruta Herding on cultural exchange. I further want to thank all my students at Cambridge for a most challenging and stimulating teaching experience, and for intercultural learning. My editor and colleague, Professor John Thompson, is also one of my creditors, for his sharp critical acumen as well as for his generous support.

Cambridge, England / Ljungbyholm, Sweden