Abstract

This chapter reflects on why and how the forces of globalization have altered the conventional political belief systems codified by social power elites since the French Revolution. In order to explain these dramatic transformations, the chapter discusses at some length the crucial relationship between two ‘social imaginaries’—the national and the global—that underpin the articulation of political ideologies. The chapter suggests a new typology of three contemporary ‘globalisms’ based on the disaggregation of new ideational clusters not merely into core concepts, but, perhaps more dynamically, into various sets of central ideological claims that play crucial semantic and political roles. These three globalisms—market globalism, justice globalism, and religious globalism—represent a set of political ideas and beliefs coherent and conceptually thick enough to warrant the status of mature ideologies.