Abstract

In my contribution I argue that globalization cannot be reduced to an economic process that takes place regardless of the participant’s conceptualizations of it. The very process of globalization as such has repercussions in the symbolic order where agents represent the meaning of sociopolitical events to themselves. In particular, this feature becomes manifest when reflecting on the fact that theories of globalization bear all the marks of the phenomenon they aim at characterizing. The global market of ideas, which globalization is, is inscribed in globalization as its symbolic counterpart, without which the phenomenon itself would have been something different. This leads me to the conclusion that an ontology of a plurality of worlds is an apt way of making sense of the profound conceptual changes forced upon social scientists and philosophers alike when it comes to theorizing about globalization.