Political philosophies of the global : a critical overview

Despite a long tradition of universalizing philosophies, it is relatively recently that debates explicitly calling for a systematic global ethics have extended beyond the work of philosophers, critics and clerics. In the 1990s, global ethics became for the first time a regularized and institutionalized part of global politics linked to the generalization of a globalizing civil society. The term 'global civil society' is itself a recent term. For centuries, philosophers have debated political philosophies of universal, global or world-wide human relations, but a series of moments in the 1990s stand out as marking a concerted and explicit call for political formalization of ethics at a global level.