Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy. By Fred R. Dallmayr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. 224p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper

In this book, Fred R. Dallmayr again provides his characteristic meditations on the writings of other scholars, which illuminate an issue, in this case, globalization. He examines the process of globalization along two axes: “localglobal and self-other trajectories” (p. ix). The book is organized in two corresponding parts. The first proceeds thematically, including essays on globalization, cosmopolitan democracy, “Asian values” and global human rights, and fugitive democracy, culminating in Dallmayr's response to Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). In the second part, Dallmayr provides close readings of Calvin Shrag on “transversal communication,” Bernhard Waldenfels on “asymmetrical interlacing,” Jacques Derrida on “friendship,” Paul Ricoeur on “little ethics,” and Martin Heidegger on “Macht,” “Machenschaft,” and “creative praxis.” Although the two parts seem to mirror the trajectories Dallmayr identifies, he wonders in his conclusion whether their order should be reversed, placing the more personally and philosophically demanding selfother relations first. To do so might better illustrate his central thesis, “that globalization cannot properly be achieved except laterally: that is, through the cultivation of multiple selfother and cross-cultural encounters” (p. 211).