SOURCE: “In the Faculty Club,” in Times Literary Supplement, August 20, 1999, p. 8.

In the following review, Berger criticizes The Cultures of Globalization, which he finds “one-sided” and reflective of insular “faculty-club culture.”

The Cultures of Globalization is a collection of papers delivered at a conference held in 1994 at Duke University. It is part of a series co-edited by the literary theorist Stanley Fish, and is dedicated to Edward Said. One notes these signifiers (if that is the correct term) with apprehension. And as one labours through almost 400 pages of the text, it becomes clear that the apprehension was justified.

It is not, of course, that the book’s topic is unimportant. The concept of globalization refers to a central reality of the contemporary world—the increasing dominance of a global capitalist system, which has immense consequences beyond its immediate economic facts. The political and social consequences have been in...