This ambitious study rewrites the terms of debate about globalization. Martin Shaw argues that the deepest meaning of globality is the growing sense of worldwide human commonality as a practical social force, arising from political struggle not technological change. The book focuses upon two new concepts: the unfinished global-democratic revolution and the global-Western state. Shaw shows how an internationalized, post-imperial Western state conglomerate, symbiotically linked to global institutions, is increasingly consolidated amidst worldwide democratic upheavals against authoritarian, quasi-imperial non-Western states. This study explores the radical implications of these concepts for social, political and international theory, through a fundamental critique of modern 'national-international' social thought and dominant economistic versions of global theory. Required reading for sociology and politics as well as international relations, Theory of the Global State offers a historical, theoretical and political framework for understanding state and society in the emerging global age.