The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)

In this context, O’Neill emphasizes that the categorical imperative does not posit any substantive goals. Its regulatory function is negative. It only prevents any person or group from claiming a special privilege or harming the interests of others. Thus, it undertakes the standpoint of everyone else – a universal point of view. Significantly, O’Ne

The relationship between circulatory history and transcendent authority is a fundamental historical problem I probe in this work. As we have noted, transcendent movements are also historically prone to become congealed or institutionalized in orthodoxy or high Culture – such as Christianity, Hinduism, state Marxism, modernization theory, etc. – unt

To reconstitute sovereignty in its nineteenth- to twentieth-century form at a global level would amount to reproducing the Leviathan of all Leviathans, almost certainly a disaster of unimaginable proportions

It was when a mode of community-formation that I have called confessional nationalism became suitable for the competitive pursuit of global resources that doctrinal differences became salient.

But, as Romila Thapar has recently argued, this is equally true for the most notorious exemplar of a non-historical culture, India.

Interestingly, we may see this in his conception of history, particularly in the essay “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” Whereas transcendent religions equate the universal with God, Kant’s starting point of inquiry into the history of humans is not God. Rather, it is, as he says, “this idiotic course of things human

Nonetheless, what is notable is that a national agency with local roots has, in close collaboration with a global NGO, taken the lead in changing environmental consciousness in China.

While Zhao acknowledges that the post-Qin ideal of tianxia is transformed, his conception continues to offer a top-down method of political ordering as the essence of the tianxia system. I submit that I have trouble with this model.

In many respects they represent a weak force but can be sufficiently resilient to outlast the strong. One of their great strengths as a moral force is their ability to mediate the sacred with the rational. Armed with scientific, legal, technical and, not least, local knowledge, these coalitions represent our principal hope.