“Ization” versus “Ism”

Globalization is in free-fall. This is the conclusion of two prominent public intellectuals—one a historian and the other a philosopher. If they are right, there will be egg on more than a few faces. A large cadre of politicians, CEOs, management consultants, journalists and academics have staked their policies, fortunes, strategies, slogans and careers on the idea that the future is increasingly global. While drinking the globalization Kool-Aid, such figures have dedicated little time to conceiving of alternative scenarios. Instead, the electorates in established as well as new democracies have been presented with an unstoppable juggernaut: globalization as the inevitable force that is better to join than to beat.

Yet if the challenge levelled at this prevailing orthodoxy is similar, the line of argument taken by each author is different. For Niall Ferguson, in “Sinking Globalization,” an article in the March/April 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, the...