“It was by making myself a Catholic that I won the war of the Vendee [the war of counter-revolution in western France], by making myself a Muslim that I established myself in Egypt, in making myself Ultramontane [a devotee of the papacy] that I won men’s hearts in Italy. If I were to govern a Jewish people, I would re-establish Solomon’s Temple.” Napoleon Bonaparte
It is with Napoleon’s astonishing remark that I decided to give you some light of what Globalization refers to and why I choose to write about it as one of the two pillars of my research.
The term Globalization (also referred to as Globalisation) refers to what many different historians considered a process of interrelation (or unification) of the world. It was a process of cultural, political and economic relations that for the first time in history united all mankind.
It has been the aim of historians to identify When does Globalization begun and How it begun. But also, it has been their aim to question if Globalization as a process has already concluded or if it is an ongoing process in the 21st. Century. As well, historians are still trying to explain if Globalization should be judged (or not) as the result of only positive (good) results in regard to increasing the wealth, culture and technology of the world; while other historians argue that Globalization has also resulted in poverty, losses, conquest and cannibalization.
Globalization has been studied from different approaches in Social Sciences. Sociologists and Anthropologists have focused on the cultural effects that the transfer of technology, mass migrations, institutions and products has had in different regions of the world. Political Theorists studied how Globalization affects the institutions, norms and hierarchical authorities in specific regions and how changes in other regions may have had altered the status quo. Economists study how globalization increased the commerce and transactions between regions and territories through trade, investments, and flows of capital just to mention a few.
In this blog I’ll aim to discuss Globalization as a process and a result of the interconnectedness of human’s psycho-epistemology in specific contexts and periods of history. My mission is to study how human behavior is not determined by nature and how human free will (action that results from rational or irrational reasonings chosen between opportunity costs) has shaped the course of history until the present.
NOTE:
The Oxford English Dictionary is still shortsighted in defining Globalization as:
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌgləʊblˌʌɪˈzeɪʃn/ , /ˌgləʊbəlʌɪˈzeɪʃn/ , U.S. /ˌgloʊbələˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ , /ˌgloʊbəˌlaɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/
Globalization & Capitalism 
I wrote some thoughts on globalization in fact in the first blog post I ever wrote (http://trascendentales.blogspot.com/2005/09/globalizacin-normalmente-para-definir.html) back in 2005 defining globalization as the possibility of relating to any person any where in the world, or the shifting of interpersonal relations to the global level.
My intention then was to argue against the idea that globalization was a somehow new phenomena and that it was evil and has to be rejected and reverted.
It is reassuring to see your opinions and data on the historic roots of globalization.
On the other hand I find it interesting to see the use of the compound concept expressed by “psycho-epistemology”. The term epistemology seems to be quite popular among objectivists (Randians) but not the concept of “gnoseology” as the theory of how individuals obtain knowledge about reality. The difference between epistemology and gnoseology lays in what type of knowledge they study. For scientific knowledge there is epistemology and for general knowledge it would be gnoseology. Psycho-epistemology seems to emphasize the individualized nature of knowledge and maybe the best term for that would be gnoseology. Just my opinion.
I’ll keep visiting.
Hello Leonel, thanks for your comment and your visit to my blog!
The problem with Kan’t gnoseology is that he considered the world to be a conventional construction of philosophy and science. Objectivist Philosophy on the other hand does not consider the world to be a conventional construction but the result of recognizing the fact that the world is the result of objective elements of a realistic nature; and thus I lean to take this position because of its rational explanation denying the existence of any type of instrumentalist nature. To further expand on this Crucial and Very interesting topic I wonder if you have already read David Harriman’s The Logical Leap in which he elaborates on the subject brilliantly?
Thanks for replying Guillermo!
I think several philosophers including Aristotle, Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, and of course Kant, have their own theory on individual knowledge, i. e., their own gnoseology. Kant’s gnoseology is basically flawed as you point out, for him there are several barriers that prevent human mind to reach external objects (reality) and other philosophers know about those flaws and developed better theories (better gnoseologies). Seeing your answer I am afraid that what may be wrong with the term is its association to Kant, but the term itself should be recovered.
Regarding the book “The Logical Leap” I read some rather negative reviews of it, some arguing that it had errors telling Galileo’s history and others. I don’t plan to read it soon, those reviews have influenced me negatively and would make it difficult to read (I would keep thinking that I am reading a wrong version of history of science, which is one of my favorite subjects) otherwise the point of the book is very important: the relation between the logical induction and the logical deduction and how one makes the other possible.
Well once more we found your “mission statement” very interesting and your forthcoming articles / blogs worth considering as the other side of the same “coin” we are working on.
Our current understanding is that free will exist only to a degree in balance(?) with group thinking and that opportunity costs as a model is redundant. In its place we utilise pure institutional analysis and complex systems theory to determine the degree of influence social structures have on individual human behaviour and the inner-workings of institutional entrepreneur-ism.
The Gaianomy think-tank