John Ralston Saul has produced—over the last decade and a half—some of the most interesting, thought-provoking and accessible critiques of our contemporary social and political climate. In The Collapse of Globalism—which examines the rise and fall of global economic ideology—he has added to this impressive body of work.
Saul’s past work includes the now famous philosophical trilogy Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion and The Unconscious Civilization, which looks broadly at the West over the last few hundred years, since the inception of modern democracy; his more focused study on his native Canada, Reflections of a Siamese Twin (which has as yet no comparable study in Australia); and his timely re-evaluation of humanism, On Equilibrium.
For those who have been following Saul’s work so far, this latest offering may on first reading seem to be covering old ground. His theme of the collapse of globalisation was floated in Australia in lectures presented in January and August of 1999 (both broadcast on the ABC). It was then put forward in an article he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in the United States—‘The Collapse of Globalism: And the Rebirth of Nationalism’—in March 2004, and reprinted here in the Australian Financial Review. This formed the groundwork for his latest book, developed around themes already examined in his previous works.
On closer inspection, far from simply repeating himself, Saul has provided a fresh and compelling perspective on the debates surrounding globalisation. But most importantly, he has brought to the foreground much that has been left out of these ongoing debates, and the reality that has been masked by them. In doing so he has reworked his previous themes—such as the centrality of citizenship and democracy—in order to demonstrate their continued relevance, and to add yet another level of depth to his previous analyses.
For those who have not been following Saul’s works, or who are trying to decide the best point of entry into them, The Collapse of Globalism will not disappoint. In it he examines the ideology of globalism—which looks at the world through the prism of a certain theory of economics—and shows that, as with all ideologies, and especially economic ones, they have beginnings, middles and ends. Usually the end creates a political vacuum that needs to be filled by something, and this then plants the seeds for the next big ideology. Globalism, for example, grew out of the vacuum left by the end