The aim of this book is to present a coherent vision of the discipline of law and of jurisprudence as its theoretical part in response to the challenges of globalisation. Western traditions of academic law have a rich heritage, but from a global perspective they appear to be generally parochial, narrowly focused, and unempirical, tending towards ethnocentrism. General Jurisprudence presents an alternative vision and agenda for legal theorising that includes creating reasonably comprehensive overviews of law in the world; constructing and refining cross-cultural analytic concepts; critical evaluation of our stock of theories about law, justice, human rights, diffusion, convergence of laws, and legal pluralism; and the construction of a workable normative basis for co-existence and co-operation in the context of a world characterised by pluralism of beliefs and dynamic multiculturalism.

The central thesis is that most processes of so-called ‘globalisation’ take place at sub-global levels and that a healthy cosmopolitan discipline of law should encompass all levels of social relations and of normative and legal ordering of these relations. The mainstream Western canon of jurisprudence needs to be critically reviewed and extended to take more account of other legal traditions and cultures, and of problems of conceptualisation, comparison, generalisation and critique about legal phenomena in the world as a whole.

What is a healthy discipline? One answer is given by a report prepared for the British Academy in 2004 on the actual and potential ‘contributions of arts, humanities, and social sciences to [a] nation's wealth’.