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Religious responses to globalization seem to contribute little to the overall globalization critique put forth in venues such as the World Social Forum. This essay suggests that in the struggle about globalization, religious actors are more important and religious voices more articulate than many have realized. Empirically, this analysis yields a more detailed picture of the directions that “religious rejections of globalization” take. Analytically, it sheds light on the relative significance of religion in the formation of global civil society or at least one sector thereof.

This chapter briefly explores the consequences of gender uniessentialism for feminist politics. It argues that gender uniessentialism directs our attention away from individual psychologies, their conscious and unconscious biases, and “deformed” processes of choice, and toward the social world, its available social roles, and the ways in which its available social roles can and cannot be blended into a coherent practical identity. Moreover, according to gender uniessentialism, our practical identities are essentially gendered. Taken together, these ideas suggest that political and social change for women will require changing existing social roles that (as they overlap, clash, and thread through a life) disadvantage and oppress women.

The social world of the Roman Empire as well as the social world of first‐century Christianity and, specifically, urban Christianity are the focus of this chapter. Christians in this century spanned the social range but the majority were merchants and craftspersons, many of whom were freed persons (ex‐slaves). The communities of the Apocalypse were likely no exception. They were probably also constituted by merchants and craftsmen (including many freedpersons) who were intent on bettering themselves economically by accumulating wealth.

The central theoretical arguments of the manuscript are outlined in this chapter. This chapter starts with a discussion of the limitations of understanding feminist debates about peace around equality/difference divides. It then grounds my theoretical analysis in a constructivist ontology of social construction and suggest the need to move beyond epistemological and ontological differences to focus on methodology to develop a theory of emancipatory agency. After describing what feminists would require of such a theory, the chapter draws on Brooke Ackerly’s influential methodology of Third World Feminist Social Criticism (TWFSC), highlighting its contributions and weaknesses for a theory of emancipatory agency. The chapter suggests that its methodological tools are critical to compel openness to new questions, self-reflection on power dynamics, and continuous self-assessment. They are, however, incomplete to induce action in the direction of emancipation. The chapter thus develops my alternative account.

This chapter cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to describe the timeless process by which human beings believe in their own creations. As seen before, Europeans influenced by new ideas in the seventeenth century were freed to believe in spiritual objects in much the same way they believed in mundane ones, as acts of sovereign judgment. With the category so perforated, there was no intrinsic reason why belief had to remain bound to objects judged “true” in a transcendent or universal sense; it might also alight upon objects judged true in more provisional or instrumental ways. Crucially, this included the social world: ephemeral human creations, the ideas and things that humans themselves make.

This chapter explores the three worlds made by consciousness and its future. In the physical world made by consciousness, the human being has found means of transforming that world by treating it as a world ordered in the dimensions of consciousness, time and space, and as a world which respects the ordering projected onto it by the self-ordering of consciousness. In the social world made by consciousness, the human being has found means of integrating natural human energy into structures and systems which reproduce the self-ordering of consciousness to serve purposes conceived by consciousness as human survival and prospering. In the individual world of consciousness of each human being, consciousness orders itself into the structure and the system which is the unique identity of each human being, as each human being seeks survival and prospering.

This chapter summarizes the empirical findings and returns to the assessment of whether Ackerly’s theory of TWFSC adequately represents WILPF’s methodology in the context of the postwar liberal West. Drawing on and expanding this theory, the chapter outlines a methodology of emancipatory agency that better adapts to the context in which WILPF, like many other Western peace organizations, operates. The chapter takes inspiration from a methodological tool whose elements were described by outgoing WILPF International Chair Dorothy Hutchinson in 1968. Hutchinson claimed that WILPF used “intelligent compassion” to formulate policies that challenged the economic, political, and ideological status quo. Intelligent compassion complements and enriches TWFSC. Together, intelligent compassion and TWFSC constitute a superior feminist critical methodology for emancipatory social change. The story of WILPF suggests not only that a feminist understanding of peace is dynamic and always changing but also that we should indeed shift away from trying to define once and for all what is social change, emancipation, or even peace and rather focus on peace as a continuous and holistic process of building justice.

Sex differences in play have led many scholars to suggest that boys and girls grow up and live in separate cultures. The differences have considerable significance for mental health, social relationships, and cognition across the life span. This chapter addresses the following questions: What are these differences? How do they come about? What do they mean for the world outside of play? What can they tell us about sex differences in other characteristics? Sex differences in childhood play are important for many reasons: they are large, they lead to sex differences in other characteristics (including cognition and adjustment), and they reflect the joint effects of biological predispositions, the social world, and children's constructions of that world.

This chapter considers a second approach to the sociological perspective, which has to do with the effort to make clear that the social scene and the individual persons who compose it can be viewed as quite different entities. Sociologists know how to approach their subject matter as an assembly of parts. At the same time, they are cognizant of the fact that the social world, in essence, is a continuous field of force—a thing of drifts and tides and currents and flows. Human beings are all caught up in those drifts and flows, often without knowing that to be so. Autonomy is not a quality gained by asserting it to be so (“we believe in free will”). It is a quality to be gained by becoming aware of and coping with the social forces that make up the world in which we live.

This book has outlined a reconstruction of the concept of alienation to show that it is only by relating appropriatively to the social practices that determine our lives and not by abstractly negating them that an unalienated relation to self is possible. If, as the book has argued, the self emerges only in relation to something—if it emerges only as the permanently rearranging result of a process in which the world is appropriated—this world is always a social world. If self-alienation is also alienation in and from the social world, then the problem, understood as a disturbed relation to self and world, can be solved only in—not beyond—the world of social practices. The problem of alienation leads us to the question of the nature of our relations to social practices and institutions and to an account of the demands we should make on them as the social conditions that make self-determination and self-realization possible. By way of conclusion, this book explores the sociality of the self and of freedom, arguing that a successful relation to self is also contingent on a successful relation to the social world.

Reviews on previous literature on young people's bereavement show that the acknowledgement of their social worlds has not been fully explored. This chapter discusses and draws on various theoretical perspectives, empirical research, and practical examples in order to explain the role of the school community in supporting its bereaved school community members. The discussion eventually aims to close this gap in the literature on the subject regarding bereavement in schools.

This chapter presents a close study of the Proustian social world in an attempt to illustrate the degree of separation in the novel between the narrator and external reality, and the role of the world as an allegorical representation of the narrator's psychology. The analysis includes the aristocracy's glamour; society as a work of art; reflections of Marcel's psychology in the social world; the variety of characterization in A la Recherche du temps perdu; and the distinction between Marcel the character and Proust the author.

This chapter seeks to rescue human rights by developing an alternative epistemology of human rights associated with the phenomenon of ‘globalization from below’. This relates to the emergence of transnational networks of social movements, NGOs, and umbrella groupings such as the World Social Forum, which call into question the neoliberal paradigm and its version of human rights. A transformed rights discourse would be rooted in the politics of the global South which rejects the human rights used in the justification of colonialism and the dominance of international corporations. Rather, the emphasis is on public health over property rights and on the differences rather than universal features of human cultures. An example is the globalization of Western economic and social rights which privilege developed countries in international markets. If the Western dominant epistemology of human nature underlying the modern human rights movement is challenged, this gives us further reasons to be sceptical about current top-down methods of institutionalizing human rights.

Fulfilling lives are led in co-operation with others. This chapter explores the implications of a denial of a capacity to co-operate. It accepts the link between reasonableness and justice, and focuses on the ramifications of unreasonableness in social worlds that must necessarily be co-operative, however specific terms of co-operation might be worked out in particular texts. It notes that evil is unreasonable, but no one would contend that unreasonableness should always be equated with evil. Unreasonableness, however, always undermines basic reciprocity between human beings. The fact that unreasonableness offers a spectrum of positions, with evil at one extreme, actually highlights the seriousness of ordinary engagements in which free and equal status is denied.