What sparked Steger’s creativity and prompted him to tilt against the mainstream, albeit without discarding standard concerns such as the need for methodological rigor? What are the hallmarks of his intellectual formation? Although there is no pat formula for how to develop a cosmopolitan perspective and become a global citizen, much can be derived from an individual’s story. An important tool, bio-ethnographies of reflexive scholars cast light on the ways that a researcher works and seeks nuanced understanding (see, e.g., Geertz 1995). While entanglement between the self and our calling in the academy is intricate and cannot be cleanly divided, a bio-ethnography offers a window on innovation and potential for parametric transformation. Hardly anecdotal or matters of curiosity, the personal story is melded to professional changes in international studies and, at the same time, reveals the sources of sensibilities.

Years of study and experience outside the university led to Steger’s pioneering scholarship. For him, this early period as a practitioner in the Austrian banking system is marked by breadth of learning, ways of knowing the inner self, and empathy for the plight of others. In his country of origin, Steger earned a graduate certificate in banking and finance at the First Austrian Bank Business College, Vienna, Austria. Subsequently, he worked for six years as an investment and loan officer at the First Austrian Bank in Vienna. From that standpoint, Steger observed the ideas in action and policy framework of national and global capitalism. He learned how money culture, with its rationalist thinking, can erode other forms of reasoning, as in the fine arts, music, and philosophy, not only in Austria but also the European region of the global arena. (This is not to overlook corporate funding for museums, symphonies, and humanistic studies—market-state hybrids in philanthropic capitalism that effectively shrink the public sphere.) Eventually, Steger chose to become a refugee from the world of investment and finance, where he had a bird’s-eye view of the dynamics of financial globalization.

Steeped in an intellectual environment of European philosophy and social theory, he turned to theorists cognizant of the power of intersubjectivity. The oeuvres of Friedrich Nietzsche (1964, 20–21; 1968, 156–63) maintain that social institutions gravitate toward isomorphism and lament that education can breed an unhealthy conformism. Karl Mannheim (1936) chronicles the history of the term ideology and argues that ideologies afford insight into the basis of societies. Moreover, Carl Schmitt (1932, 1950) attracts attention from the intellectual left and the right for his distinction between ‘friends’ and ‘enemies,’ his concept of the sovereign, and the ‘state of exception,’ as today when laws are suspended for the treatment of suspected terrorists and for certain groups of immigrants. These thinkers threw light on the power of ideas. And Steger pursued this avenue of inquiry by tracking the role of the knowing class, those who produce ideologies, disseminate them, and objectify them. He found this route largely through self-reflectivity.

While searching for transcendent meaning in his own life and various belief systems, Steger explored myriad cultural forms and religions. After training in Zen Buddhism, he taught Zen in Honolulu and Princeton. With his wife, the popular writer Perle Besserman, he co-authored books on how to make this spiritual practice accessible in the Western world (Besserman and Steger 1991; Steger and Besserman 2001). These texts reflect Steger’s inquisitive habits of mind and an appreciation for the value of tolerance.

Other long-term interests are the writings of early socialist thinkers, resulting in volumes in German and English on Engels, Marx, and Eduard Bernstein (Steger and Carver 1999; Steger 1996). Meanwhile, Steger’s range spanned studies of violence and non-violence, especially Gandhian ethics (Steger and Lind 1999, plus several journal articles on this philosophy), as well as indigenous knowledge and local experiences.

Steger is also a seasoned university administrator, an inspiring teacher admired by droves of pupils, and an esteemed colleague. He has logged time as dean (head) of the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, as well as director of its Globalism Research Centre, and as senior advisor on international education and globalization in the College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai’i-Mānoa. The recipient of excellence in teaching awards, he has distinguished himself in the classroom. Chapters in this volume authored by his former students, some of them his coauthors, attest to how Steger’s pedagogical skills have opened the gates of learning. He has equipped these cosmopolitan citizens with the abilities to make a better world.

So, too, Steger is known for his generous ways of relating to colleagues, such as writing numerous letters of recommendation, drafting copious comments on papers and dissertations, and refereeing for several journals. In outreach to the general public, Steger has been a consultant to a PBS television series and for government. His many books, some in the Rowman & Littlefield book series he co-edits with Terrell Carver, have won plaudits from reviewers, are written lucidly, and sell widely. They consistently challenge master narratives, everyday representations of a commodified and messy world, and taken-for-granted protocols in the academy. Inasmuch as ideas are powerful engines of historical transformation, as in the French, American, and Bolshevik revolutions, and with various nationalisms, he wades into controversies: among them, that the human condition may be understood in terms of the end of ideology, the end of history, and/or a flat world.

Steger’s mentoring and writing awaken an awareness that subnational, national, and regional identities can be complementary to solidarities at a planetary level. Holding that compartmentalizing membership groups into ‘we’ and ‘they,’ ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ can be used as a form of domination masking multiple self-identities, he views othering as a form of social control. Relatedly, Steger highlights the fluidity, uncertainty, and insecurity in daily life, and explicates the driving forces of modernity, mobility, and interconnectedness. In a word: globalization is understood as ‘the expansion and intensification of social relations across world-space and world-time’ (Steger 2008, 246).

The persistent, most recurrent themes in Steger’s work are fourfold: identifying the limitations of disciplinary social science, rethinking the knowledge structure through transdisciplinarity, developing globalization research and global studies, and translating ideational constructs into action in the form of ‘justice globalism.’ Let us now consider each of these interconnected moves, beginning with how the Americanized disciplines emerged.

Disciplinary knowledge materialized at different times in multiple locations. Whereas Germany preceded the United States and the United Kingdom on this path, American higher education—to have worldwide influence—originated mainly as a hybrid of English and German forms, and gradually developed its own national features. From the 1870s, disciplinary specializations and new graduate programs were established. During the 1890–1910 period, disciplines, in the contemporary sense of academic units, demarcated the organization of knowledge in American universities. Departmental lines were constructed, though the timing of when they were drawn varied by discipline. The growth of universities and career mobility among them meant that the knowledge structure required internal order. Disciplinary networks were channeled according to a division of labor. The market supplied jobs for academics whose intellectual life was arranged in units of concentrated learning (passage adapted from Mittelman 2018, 101, which builds on Abbott 2001, 131–36). It is important to note that this shift was from general education to a disciplinary system. In the American knowledge structure, it blended the English residential college and Germany’s Humboldtian emphasis on research and graduate study (Mittelman 2018, 101).

The trouble is that broad world issues, such as climate change, criminal networks, migration, and pandemics, do not fit tidily within the boundaries dividing disciplines. Alert to the barriers between branches of knowledge, as well as ways in which the notion of territoriality can deflect attention from novel agglomerations of space and time spurred by cross-border flows and extraterritoriality, Steger piloted a transdisciplinary perspective on globalizing processes.

Skeptical of institutionalized disciplines and overspecialization, he recognized knowledge hegemonies, ways of policing in the academy, and forms of gatekeeping in the professoriate. Preferring pluralism, he was ever alert to Euro-centric, top-down thinking. In that, departmental structures favor ideational coh...