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This essay takes shape as a review of a review: Rosario Lopez’s admirable ‘The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual History’, itself a review of Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, Global Intellectual History. Lopez proposes that ‘the quest for the global’ entails a critique if not an abandonment of the concept of ‘context.’ The attack upon context entails questions about both ‘political thought’ (or ‘theory’) and ‘intellectual history’ (if not ‘history’ itself). This is because, as Lopez, Moyn and Sartori apparently agree, it extends as far as an attack on the notion of context as formed in spatial-temporal frameworks. The beginnings of the ‘global’ critique are well known and may as well be accepted as common ground. They reduce to the assertion that ‘Cambridge’ scholarship in this field is ‘Eurocentric’; that is, that it has dealt exclusively with the ‘political thought’ generated in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, transmitted to medieval and modern Europe, and taken up in the Euro-colonized Americas and a world (or ‘globe’) subjected to European or ‘western’ domination. This is obviously true, and calls for reformation. We recognize, but are not afraid to accept, that ‘political thought’ in a society distant from the European may be different in deep-seated ways from that we have learned to study, and that the meanings of the basic terms we shall apply to learning it may require restatement so drastic that we will find it hard to comprehend them. At this point the authority by which we ascribe meaning to both ‘their’ terms as we learn them, and to ‘ours’ as we employ them in seeking to understand ‘them,’ will require investigation and defence; on what disciplines of enquiry does it rest? But at this point the meaning of ‘global’ is no more than ‘multicultural,’ the transition from one ‘context’ to another; and we already know from Lopez that the ‘global turn’ may require us to go much further than that.
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