Title:  Modernity Out of Joint: Global Democracy and Asian Values in Jürgen Habermas and Amartya K. Sen Author:  Emanuela Fornari Series:  Contemporary European Cultural Studies Imprint:  The Davies Group, Publihers soft cover 230 pp. USD 24.00 ISBN 978-1888570397 September 2007 In Modernity Out of Joint, our global age is redefined as the time in which modernity has gone “out of joint”. What happens to the traditional and well-established notion of “modernity” when we can no longer rely on a single center of the world? How does our conception of rights change when confronted with the “democracy of others”? Modernity Out of Joint deals with these pressing issues through an acute survey of two widely influential paradigms of contemporary democratic theory: J. Habermas’ discourse ethics and A.K. Sen’s capabilities approach. In both cases, the global challenge represented by today’s claim to an “Asian difference” against the Western canon motivates us to revise some fundamental assumptions of modern political anthropology. At the same time, this challenge invites us to revive the unexpressed potential still latent in the building blocks of Western thought and experience, in view of a renewed multilateral universalism. Contents Introduction Part One: Global Cultures, Local Ethics 1. Preamble 2. Asian Values and Human Rights 3. Which Globalization? 4. The Glo-cal  Paradox 5. ‘European Exceptionalism’: Merits and Paradoxes of Weber’s Comparative Approach 6. Protestantism and the Confucian Ethic Part Two: Modernity and the West’s Self-Understanding: The Discursive Paradigm 1. Preamble 2. Between Habermas and Weber: ‘Western rationalism’ 3. Legal medium and social integration 4. ‘Logical genesis’ of law 5. A defense of human rights 6. Beyond individualism Part Three: Pluriversal Justice: Amartya Sen and the Capabilities Approach 1. Preamble 2. Ethics and economics: beyond the homo œconomicus 3. Culture and market 4. Self-Orientalism 5. The intercultural dimensions of freedom 6. The values of development 7. Capabilities and eudaimonia Epilogue: Human Rights, Capabilities and Justice: A Triangular Comparison Bibliographical References The Author Emanuela Fornari is a researcher in Philosophy at the University of Rome III, where she obtained her PhD. She has published several essays on contemporary European philosophy, political theory and postcolonial studies, and is now at work on a book on the themes of cultural translation and the re-writing of history.