Global Studies, Early Academic Approaches to

Although the field of global studies is still being defined, it is possible to identify some of the intellectual roots of the field in an earlier generation of scholarship. Since global studies is regarded as a new and relatively autonomous discipline, it is somewhat difficult to identify its origins. It could be argued, for example, that the beginning of global studies was the publication in the early 18th century of Vico's New Science. However, for the sake of convenience, it is probably more helpful to say that early global studies may be taken to refer to a mixture of comparative and systemically global academic inquiry that began in the middle of the 18th century. In any case, even at the present time, there is considerable conflation of these two perspectives, the global and the comparative.

On the one hand, many people take “global” to mean an expansion of the comparative, whereas, on the other, the term global is taken to indicate phenomena that are literally—or at least intended to be—global in reach. This means that we must acknowledge this difference, even though few intellectuals were more than comparative.

It should thus be said that what has become known as global studies had its origins in 18th-and 19th-century comparative sociology and anthropology, although some of the work of historians of that period also qualify. Specifically, several philosophers of the European Enlightenment compared European societies with those of West and East Asia. More empirical comparisons began with the highly influential work of Alexis de Tocqueville, most outstandingly his Democracy in America (1835 and 1840), who also addressed French, British, and Indian societies. Thereafter, a considerable number of social scientists made what should be called temporal comparisons, meaning that they compared societies with respect to their development or evolution over time. In fact, this was the hallmark of early global studies during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. This developmental or evolutionary approach was to be found in the works of such people as Henry Maine (England), Herbert Spencer (England), Ferdinand Tönnies (Germany), Émile Durkheim (France), and Leonard Hobhouse (England). The thrust of the writing in this genre was the characterization of societies as they had “progressed” from the “primitive” to the “modern,” with a particular emphasis on the features and problematics of the latter.

Max Weber, a German, differed from this approach in that he, although concerned with historical change, was particularly concerned with civilizational comparison. Most notably, he made comparisons between Western societies and Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and, to a much smaller extent, Japanese societies, with the intention of showing how and why non-Western societies had progressed much more slowly than most of those of the West. In sum, Weber's primary axis of comparison was between the Occidental West and the Oriental East. It should be emphasized that, in several respects, Weber followed in the tracks of the earlier work of German intellectuals, such as philosopher, Georg Wilhelm, Friedrich Hegel, and polymath Karl Marx. Hegel and Marx had interpreted world history in the form of the apparent triumph of the West over the East. Weber rested his own vast studies of Eastern and Western society on the same kind of approach, emphasizing that Western progressiveness was an assumption rather than a fact. The principal difference between the highly influential work of Marx and Weber was that the latter placed much emphasis on the significance of religious ideas in contrast to Marx's materialism. In fact, Weber did not discuss Christianity as a whole, justifying this neglect by pointing to the work of his German contemporary Ernst Troeltsch, who wrote a vast amount about the history of Christianity and its superiority to Eastern religions. (Here it might be noted that African and Latin American societies were given virtually no attention in these German endeavors.) As Weber said in introducing his essays on the respective consequences of Protestantism and Catholicism—the former being considerably more progressive than the latter—it was equally plausible to emphasize ideal factors rather than material ones. This remark was clearly aimed at Marx. (The essays in question, although initially written by Weber in the years 1904 and 1905, were subsequently combined into the highly influential book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which his introduction of 1920 appeared.) Another major contributor to the relationship between religion and capitalism was Werner Sombart, whose book on the Jews and modern capitalism was much disputed by Weber. Sombart's The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911) was considered to be sympathetic to the Jews but subsequently has come to be regarded as anti-Semitic.

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