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The social evolution of world politics
The present book proposes a framework for understanding long- term change in world politics in terms of social evolution. ‘Change’ deliberately includes the very emergence of world politics as a recognizable realm in its own right within the social world and its constant transformation thereafter. In order to provide such a framework, this book offers a condensed, yet quite far-reaching, reading of what it means to understand change in the social, and therefore also the political, world in terms of evolution, as well as several empirical applications from the realm of world politics. It is written on the premise that understanding social evolutionary processes is central to understanding historical change. Yet, there is a difference between the historical and sociological approaches to social evolution. While we maintain that the approaches do not necessarily stand in mutually exclusive opposition to each other, evolutionary accounts are not compatible with some understand- ings of history, particularly those, based on a philosophy of history, that assign meaning to history itself (and therefore come with, for example, underlying eschatological or teleological motives).
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