Reason, Culture, Religion

Reason, Culture, Religion book provides a systematic overview of the study of world politics. The author then locates modernist world politics in its sacral context by discussing Taoist strategics, Buddhist economics, Islamic civics, Confucian Marxism, Hindu constructivism, Pagan feminism and Animist environmentalism. It concludes by asking what a world affairs worthy of the name would be.

"Ralph Pettman, long one of the most eloquent and open-minded of that small band of scholars who have insisted that there must be some other way of thinking about international relations, explores a rich vein of neglected possibilities. This provides an effective context in which to contrast a range of more "spiritual" possibilities, which Pettman sketches with his usual economy, elegance and wit. The result is an engaging account of world affairs as a renewed process of "global learning," an account that offers much needed relief from all those embarrassingly righteous stories about the end of history and the clash of civilizations."

- R.B.J. Walker,Professor of International Relations, University of Keele, UK, and Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria, Canada

"Ralph Pettman has written a fascinatingly original account of world politics that is both a critique of conventional rational approaches and a coherent program for the enlargement of the political imagination to encompass cultural and religious sources of knowledge. As we search for ways to interpret political life from a genuninely global perspective, Pettman has provided us with a pioneering roadmap that deserves the widest possible readership and professional appraisal." - Richard Falk, Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University

"Writing from the antipodean distance Ralph Pettman has always been ahead of the Anglo-American IR discipline. Hewrote of dependencia and the World System years before it became registered here by which time he already moved on. Now he has done it again. The strength of this volume is in no one part but in the whole, in the sum total of the parts showing the tremendous complexity of the world affairs." - Dr. Vendulka Kubálková, Professor of International Studies, University of Miami

RALPH PETTMAN holds the Foundation Chair of International Relations at the Victoria University of Wellington. A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, his previous appointments include teaching and research posts at the University of Tokyo, Princeton University, and the Australian National University. Among his published works are Commonsense Constructivism, or the Making of World Affairs (2000) and Understanding International Political Economy, With Readings for the Fatigued (1996).