Abstract

This essay examines conditions of globalism and their theoretical and practical consequences for community. More particularly, for example, writers on community see mobility as a central negatively valuated condition for the loss of community. It is maintained that implicit and explicit assumptions regarding placement encroach on notions of community in ways that unreasonably delimit the fresh thinking about community, ethics, and political arrangements that is required by the exigencies of globalism. Rather, selves and communities should be rearticulated as shot through with mobilities of various sorts. In this way a version of globalism can be developed through which human beings are agents rather than passive receivers of its consequences. Taking pragmatic community as its point of departure, a theory of accidentality in inquiry, traveling selves, and communities of interest is developed in order to provide a different approach to the questions of community and globalism. ;The first chapter presents a characterization of globalism as related to the contemporary notions of community as found in communitarian and cosmopolitan thought. The second and third chapters develop a pragmatic notion of community through an examination and interpretation of Josiah Dewey and Josiah Royce. And the final chapter reevaluates contemporary thought on globalism and community, arguing that these versions, as well as the traditional pragmatist idea of community, fail to account for trans-boundary requirements of global problems and new forms of community. An alternative is set forth in which selves are rearticulated as traveling selves and communities as thinner communities of interest