Local knowledge and the politics of world order: Interpretation and international relations

This dissertation is an exploration of the manner in which western cultures, and especially liberal American world order studies, has constituted normative discussions of world politics. By beginning with the assumption that all such discussions imply rather broad cultural interpretations, the object of the study is initially to reveal the implicit cultural biases in past western efforts to construct a normative vision of world politics. Beginning with the emergence of the law of nations in Grotius, Pufendorf and Wolff, through the enlightenment search for peace through international organization that found its clearest spokesperson in Kant and into the contemporary intellectual world order movement that includes Falk, Galtung and a host of others, it is the western conceived notion of the social contract with underlies all western thought on world politics and, in the opinion of this dissertation, leads it astray from being able to accomplish the normative goals espoused.; To work toward correcting this situation ideas are then presented which might lead toward the purposeful inclusion of cultural interpretations into the study of world politics. This would make world order studies a near relative of contemporary interpretive anthropology especially in the re-evaluation of the importance of local knowledges. This reconstructive effort includes both an exploration of the times and types of historical re-interpretation of politically significant events/periods that will be required to create an interpretive world politics and a tentative exploration of the manner in which future world politics can be discussed from within the western cultures. The emphasis here is placed on an "ethic of toleration." It is the ultimate position of this dissertation that a continued place in world politics for western cultures can only come through such an ethic.