At the turn of the millennium, and now after the fall of the Berlin wall, the best way to map the trajectories of contemporary international relations is hotly contested. Is the world more or less ordered than during the cold war? Are we on the way to a neo-liberal era of free markets and global governance, or in danger of collapsing into a new Middle Ages? Are we on the verge of a new world order or are we slipping back into an old one?
These issues are amongst those that have dominated International Relations Theory in the late 1980s and 1990s, but they have their roots in older...

At the turn of the millennium, and now after the fall of the Berlin wall, the best way to map the trajectories of contemporary international relations is hotly contested. Is the world more or less ordered than during the Cold War? Are we on the way to a neo-liberal era of free markets and global governance, or in danger of collapsing into a new Middle Ages? Are we on the verge of a new world order or are we slipping back into an old one? These issues are amongst those that have dominated international relations theory in the late 1980s and 1990s. But they have their roots in older questions...

Debates about the nature, character and implications of 'modernity' have moved centre stage within contemporary social thought, but there has as yet been little work addressing the relevance of these debates to the agenda of Anglo-American political theory. In this pioneering survey N. J. Rengger remedies the problem by providing a short, accessible and comprehensive account of the modernity debate and an analysis of its implications for political theory.