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Justin Rosenberg subjects the entire notion of 'globalisation theory' to a fundamental theoretical critique in this book. He argues that a fashionable preoccupation with 'spatiality' has instead generated deep intellectual confusions which stand in the way of a clear understanding of the modern world. And he shows how and why these confusions ultimately condemn the globalisation theorists themselves to a peculiar and quixotic stance: the more clearly they attempt to articulate their arguments, the more equivocal and evasive those arguments become, yielding at best the intellectual equivalent of an architectural folly.
Rosenberg first traces this outcome in the field of international relations. He then turns to the work most widely assumed to have supplied a sociological foundation for globalisation theory, Anthony Giddens' The Consequences of Modernity, and commits it to a thorough, at times hilarious, critical interrogation. In a concluding chapter he draws out the results of this interrogation first for Giddens' own argument and then for the wider discourse of globalisation theory of which it is so emblematic.
