Transformation of the world

Volume 3 Culture and Thought

The Transformation of the World
Under the General Editorship of Anouar Abdel-Malek this
series is part of the United Nations University's project
entitled Sociocultural Development Alternatives in a
Changing World. The project falls within the Human and
Social Development Program of the UNU led by Vice-Rector
Prof Dr Kinhide
Mushakoji.
Further volumes in the series are:
1: Science and Technology
2: Economy and
Society
4: Religion and Philosophy
5: The Making of the New International Order
About this book:
Both tradition and modernity in today's changing world are
underlaid by struggles for national and popular
self-determination, and claims to both must be evaluated in
terms of such struggles. Does a given tradition provide an
avenue for resistance to domination or does it serve as a
means of reinforcing corruption, passivity and dependence?
Is a given programme of modernisation the mobilisation of
creative potentials or the extension of an institutionalised
inferiority complex?
This volume seeks an open, careful, scientific approach to
questions such as these, with an approach based on
sensitivity to the historical particularities of large, hitherto
neglected, cuibural areas, and contributing effectively to a
more equal, democratic and prosperous world. At the heart
of the book is a re-evaluation of the dialectics of tradition
and modernity, a critique of the stereotype which portrays
these two terms as disjunctive within a unilinear scheme of
progress', and an appreciation of the subtleties of
sociocultural subjection and liberation in a variety of
specific formations.