3 - Worldviews

Summary

Even a realist like former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger is at a loss to describe the world in a comprehensive way. He told a conference in Washington recently: “It's probably not possible to have some overarching concept.”

news item

[The passing of the Keynesian welfare state] represents much more than a series of strategic responses to a changing international political economy. It signals a paradigm shift in governing practices – a historic alteration in state form which enacts simultaneous changes in cultural assumptions, political identities and the very terrain of political struggle. Restructuring represents a prolonged and conflict-ridden political process during which old assumptions and shared understandings are put under stress and eventually rejected while social forces struggle to achieve a new consensus – a new vision of the future to fill the vacuum created by the erosion of the old.

Janine Brodie

The sense of disarray that underlies these epigraphs exemplifies a widely shared concern over where the world is today and where it is headed tomorrow. Yet, the concern need not be paralyzing, albeit more is required - much more - than puzzlement, anomalies, and a sensitivity to change to comprehend governance along the Frontier in a turbulent world. Sure, thinking afresh requires us to acknowledge our puzzles, be open to recognizing anomalies, and be ever ready to discern transformative dynamics;but such orientations occur in a context and as analysts we need to be continuously aware of that context - namely, the ontology, paradigms, and theories that, taken together, might be called the “worldview” on which any observer relies to describe events, to draw causal inferences, to evaluate policy implications, or otherwise to infuse order into whatever he or she observes.