This study expands the narrow economic-commercial focus of the topical media and places globalization in a multidisciplinary context as a continuing process and a permanent condition that transforms human living and society. Early chapters review the development of globalization as creating and diffusing knowledge, expanding people's perspectives on living, and continuing progress. These chapters introduce globalization as an iterative, human, and deliberate process of creating new knowledge and using it to reinterpret the world, time, and man's place in both. The later chapters present the major analytical perspectives of globalization—political, cultural, and economic—and a comparison of the primary carriers of globalism and barriers to globalization.
Drawing on classical and modern analysis, as well as narrow, topical journalism, the work focuses each perspective on people through the human processes of creating knowledge and living together. The work expands the economic perspective beyond the fashionable focus on trade and investment into the triggering and shadowing relationships between economic growth, political conflict, and social stress. The political perspective expands international politics and law to global governance, triadic dispute resolution, and global civil society. The cultural and antiglobal perspectives reflect the success of economic globalization in bringing people directly into the narrowly rational processes of international politics and economics. The final analytical chapter collects and compares observations and develops conclusions about globalization across the several perspectives. Speculation about alterative futures for globalizing humanity can constitute a coherent standard, ideal, or direction for policymaking, or an agenda for continuing research and debate.