Princeton University

Specialization:

Adam K. Webb has broad interdisciplinary interests that touch on political theory and world politics. He was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003-04, and is presently Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard. A revised version of his dissertation was published by Routledge in 2006 as Beyond the Global Culture War. It offers a cross-cultural critique of global liberalism and argues for a broad-based challenge that can meet it on its own scale. His second book, tentatively titled A Path of Our Own: An Andean Village and Tomorrow's Economy of Values, is completed and under contract to ISI Books for publication in early 2008. It traces the experiences of a village in highland Peru and reflects on modernity's challenges for traditional peasant communities. He is currently working on a third book about premodern contacts across civilisations, and the lessons they can provide today for an alternative vision of cosmopolitanism and world political culture.

PhD, Princeton University; MA, Princeton University; AB, Harvard College

Thesis Title: Ethoses and the Global Culture War (published by Routledge in 2006 as Beyond the Global Culture War)

Committee: Paul Sigmund, George Kateb, Richard Falk

Abstract: BGCW offers a new perspective on the rise of liberal modernity and the global culture war it has sparked. The book identifies four ethoses, or self-understandings, that have contended in all civilisations through history. In its first third, the book traces how the ethos underlying liberalism managed to break past age-old checks on it between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. Then it turns to the global culture war today. On one side is the liberal vision of an "end of history." On the other is the backlash from communitarians, populists, Islamists, the Christian Right, Chinese and Hindu nationalists, and the like. The book proposes room for a more genuinely cosmopolitan and multidimensional challenge to liberal modernity than traditionalists around the world are now able to offer. I also have two more recent book projects underway: A Path of Our Own: An Andean Village and Tomorrow's Economy of Values (under contract to ISI Books; in final stages of revision for publication in early 2008). This project uses the experiences of a Quechua-speaking village in Ayacucho, Peru, as inspiration for reflecting on how traditional communities encounter the modern world. It draws on field research conducted in 1995 and 2006, as well as over a century of literature on alternative economic thought (Chesterton, Belloc, Mari?tegui, Schumacher, and others). The book's narrative element traces the experiences of the village through the social changes of the 1940s to 1970s, the disruption of traditional authority structures and economic practices, the violence of the Sendero Luminoso insurgency, and the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s and later. This narrative leads into a broader normative argument that neither market liberalism nor Marxism have offered a vision of development that aligns with peasant values. The book brings the resources of a traditionalist critique of liberalism to bear on themes of global social justice. It also maps out space for an "economy of values" that can build on the strengths of these communities and enhance their political power, rather than presupposing their disappearance with modernisation. Another Globalisation: From Worlds Under Heaven to the New Cosmopolis. This project, underway since 2003, centres on the idea that premodern world history suggests an alternative vision of globalisation for our own time. The first half of the book explores older flavours of universalism (e.g. the Roman and Chinese empires), as well as high-culture encounters at the edges of the great traditions (e.g. Alexander the Great, the Jesuits in China, and interreligious dialogues at the Mughal court). Based on many such examples, the book maps out a promising alternative mode of globalisation, the fulfilment of which has so far been frustrated in modernity. It rejects the widespread assumption that today's globalisation-centred on ethically neutral political machinery, consumer culture, and an erosion or bracketing of strong traditional commitments-is the only possible one. It suggests that traditionalists can and must be cosmopolitans too, and could shape a future world political culture more akin to the civilizations of the past. The book pays particular attention to the translatability of substantive commitments across the world's thought traditions, the intellectual and institutional pressure points for such cosmopolitan networking, and the possible philosophical underpinnings of a postliberal world-state.