The culture of strangers

"The Culture of Strangers challenges the conventional wisdom underlying the intense debates over multiculturalism and globalization. It asserts that modernity is the inescapable consequence of epochal cultural forces, which first appeared in the commercial societies of the West and which now dominate the globe. Far from "celebrating cultural diversity," this study cautions that the powerful cultural forces which globalization represents are in fact largely incompatible with those which animate primitive and traditional societies. Instead, it champions a global civility based on institutional commitments focused in reason-based communications. Based in neither religion nor kinship, state nor business enterprise, a globalized "culture of strangers" enables humanity to realize its penultimate potential to create freedom through fully exercising the unique human capacity to make and to keep promises, which has always animated commercial culture, and to create more advanced values through institution building."--BOOK JACKET.