Globalizations Avant la Lettre: A Comparative View of Isomorphization and Heteromorphization in an Inter-Connecting World

The academic world has undoubtedly become smaller in recent decades. Chinese-, Spanish-, English-, Arabic-, French-, Russian-, Germanand Italianspeaking academics, intellectuals, and feuilletonists discuss ‘the end of history’ or ‘the clash of civilizations.’We all seem driven by the cycles of boom and bust that govern the planetary intellectual marketplace. New concepts such as ‘modernization’ or ‘post-modernity’ periodically appear in the centers of academic and political power, then diffuse through mechanisms of persuasion and mimicry, until they become part of mainstream discourse—only to disappear ten or fifteen years later under the impact of other key concepts that come to conquer the minds of a new generation of scholars and intellectuals. Nowadays, such processes of diffusion and convergence are called globalization. Indeed, globalization itself is such a buzz word that seems to have achieved hegemonic status in the social science vocabulary. No global understanding has been reached, however, as to the exact meaning and implications of ‘globalization.’ Considerable debate has evolved, not only about the more obvious economic, but also the political and cultural as-