The article charts the definitions and concepts of globalization through time. In its initial – and still its most conventional – coinage, the concept of globalisation emanates squarely from the universe of neo-liberal ideology and social practice. The social thought and practice of the metro-leaning, if geographically relatively dispersed, class fraction whose members Tim Brennan has suggestively dubbed the ‘new cosmopolitans’ proceeds upon the assumption that the world market is the overriding motive force of contemporary economic development and that nation-statist policy has therefore become irrelevant.