In the mid twentieth century two world wars devastated large areas, killed many people and caused havoc to the European ideology on global governance. While international powers had formerly relied on agreements, concerts and treaties between them, a new system based on international organisations was constructed to cope with the risk of massive war on new grounds. Simultaneously, intellectuals reacted to that shock by disseminating an ideological confidence on the continous progress of countries towards collective welfare. That expectation initially appeared to be confirmed by sound post-war economic growth. In this context, USA President Harry Truman labelled it as ‘development’ in his 1949 Inaugural Address (minute 9:35) and economists elaborated WW Rosstow’s Model. This model attempted to make sense of the international distribution of GDP per capita by hypothesising a sequence of societal stages from stagnant traditional societies, through an economic take-off up to the affluent mass society. However, current analyses of global development have challenged two assumptions that those politicians and experts shared, namely: their faith in continuous progress and their use of ‘national societies’ as units. While classical and mid-twentieth centuries had both relied on progress, recent analyses have actually retrieved the global perspective of classical sociologists that most of their post-war followers had overlooked.
To start with, in oder to spell out the laws of history, early sociologists (e.g. Comte, Spener) drew on the philosophers who found out the meaning of history in continuous improvement (Condorcet, Hegel, Marx). Thus they rejected alternative accounts of human diversity and the the cycles of history (Vico, Herder,Maistre). However, between the world wars some philosophers became extremely sceptic on the potential of progress, and highlighted the banality of evil to the extent that ordinary men often used technology for mass murder (Benjamin, Arendt). Afterwards, post-modern, post-structuralist, post-colonial and post-development writers have dismissed the Euro-centric narrative of modernity as a linear advancement (Foucault, Said, Escobar).
Moreover, in the mid twentieth century social scientists were not aware that classical sociology had not considered ‘national states’ to be a relevant unit of analysis. Marx thought that the emergence of capitalism responded to a distinct European process of original accumulation of capital in which international trade had place a very relevant role. Durkheim portrayed a social division of labour that cut accross national borders. Weber did not choose states but religions as his main units of comparison, and saw national legitimation as the consequence of a wider, international phenomenon such as the emergence of legal-rational domination.
Recent analyses draw on methodological rather than speculative philoshophy of history so as to account for the two waves of globalisation in the late nineteenth (the first one) and twentieth (the second one) centuries. This methodology requires to look at contingent but regular structures of causes (mechanisms) that provoke social changes (Popper, Elser, Archer, Hedstrom), as well as to unveil either the social configurations and networks (N. Elias, S. Sassen) or the systems of strategic interaction (R. Boudon, P. Hall) that generate global transformations. Thus, globalisation is a social transformation featured by multi-layered geographies, the social construction of knowledge economies, complex international relations revolving around many political issues, and eventually individualisation and the making of new identities. In this vein, each of these social changes has to be accounted in terms of causal mechanisms and social interaction.