In this book, Fred Dallmayr tries to discover what intellectual resources are available for peacemaking today, in a world that he believes to be fundamentally violent. To do so, he scans the world's philosophic and religious traditions to find their arguments on behalf of peace. He takes as his starting point Erasmus, whose The Complaint of Peace of 1517 begins with a personification of Peace: Querela pacis, “Peace talks.” Dallmayr's book starts with an analysis of what Erasmus said about how to make peace, then goes on to survey other such arguments and practices in the world's philosophical and spiritual traditions. The work is remarkably wide-ranging, as it examines in some depth figures as varied as Aristotle, Confucius, Grotius, Kant, Gandhi, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martha Nussbaum.

The book is divided into 10 chapters, each of which (after the first) explores a different source of arguments and practices for making peace. The first chapter explains the author's goal, which, he says, is to “explore Erasmus's Querela pacis and its repercussions and intimations during subsequent centuries down to our present time” (p. 12). Chapter 2 is a close reading and defense of Erasmus's writings on peace. Chapter 3 explores the resources for peacemaking in the tradition of natural jurisprudence exemplified by Grotius, Kant, and John Rawls. Chapter 4 looks at the tools for peace offered by various kinds of spirituality; Dallmayr first distinguishes “knowledge-oriented” from “erotic-mystical” spirituality and then shows what each offers to the cause of making peace.

The remaining six chapters concern peacemaking in the contemporary world. Chapter 5 examines recent attempts to create peace through a global cosmopolitan ethic, both in the religious work of the Parliament of the World's Religions and in the more secular theory of Martha Nussbaum's “Stoic cosmopolitanism.” Chapter 6 favorably analyzes Hannah Arendt's essay “On Violence” (1969) as a diagnosis of the cause of conflict. Chapter 7 offers an interpretation of the theories and activities of Gandhi as a model for a certain kind of peacemaking. Chapter 8 looks at the resources for peace in East Asian societies, especially in the writing of Confucius. Chapter 9 examines the place of education in the struggle for a less violent world. And the final chapter surprisingly holds out the philosophy of Heidegger as a last example of a philosophical model of peacemaking; it concludes with an appendix essay titled, “Lessons of September 11.”

This book has great strength but also a few significant shortcomings. The most important service it offers is that it gives both general readers and scholars a sense of the tremendous powers for peacemaking contained in the world's philosophical and religious traditions. This is particularly important today when the dogma of “the clash of civilizations” not only offers a convenient excuse not to listen to what other cultures have to say but also makes violent conflict seem inevitable and therefore justified. Dallmayr shows that such a clash is not inevitable because all of the traditions he discusses offer far more arguments on the side of peace than they do on that of war. He also does an excellent job of arguing that elites tend to benefit from conflict, through increased prestige and war profiteering, while the more general mass of humanity suffers most. This leads him to an interesting argument in Chapter 5 that one important avenue toward peace is “a global democratic praxis.”

This great strength of Peace Talks is, however, also its weakness. By covering so many figures and traditions, Dallmayr sometimes falls into overstatement and excessive simplification. Part of the problem stems from the general tone of the book, which some readers may enjoy but which I found to be overdone. Most chapters contain such statements as “Wherever one turns hatred, ill will, aggressiveness, and warfare seem to be the order of the day” (p. ix) and “Barely a decade after the end of the Cold War, the fury of violence has been unleashed around the world” (p. 89). While one ought to look squarely at the world's problems, I think that this kind of rhetoric obscures as much as it reveals about the present situation, not the least of which is that it erases the remarkable and sometimes successful work of those now laboring in the name of peace.

The more theoretical and more serious problem is that Dallmayr advocates two mutually exclusive things. On the one hand, he says that the world must be taught to listen to Erasmus's argument for peace; on the other, he offers a robust defense of multiculturalism. The obvious problem is that not all people care equally about peace, and so to get them to care more, one must try to change their beliefs and traditions, and therefore impose oneself on them at some level. He says that one of the problems of moral universalism is that it tends toward “Western bias” or the “de-emphasis of difference” (p. 105). But Erasmus's argument for peace is itself a form of moral universalism in the sense that it says that something, namely peacemaking, is of overriding moral importance.

This problem is particularly serious in Dallmayr's discussion of education. He thinks that one problem with political liberalism is that it does not do enough to encourage peace: “Strengthening the ethical fabric undergirding politics inevitably requires attention to the education and character formation of social agents—in a manner transgressing the boundaries of public (liberal) ‘neutrality’” (p. 19). But the purpose of liberal neutrality is precisely to prevent the kind of moral imperialism that he is worried about. I cannot see the point of first saying that liberal neutrality is bad because it does not do enough to strengthen peacemaking and then arguing that we must be careful to be neutral and not impose our opinions on others because in doing so we “de-emphasize difference.” The claim that peace is the highest good (or is among a small set of basic goods) is a substantive moral claim of its own that excludes other views. The case for peace is not strengthened by obscuring this point.

Although Dallmayr does not resolve this central tension in an adequate way, the book is extremely interesting and useful. It is a helpful guide through the resources of peacemaking found throughout the world's cultural traditions. And it does a superb job of arguing that while people often pay lip service to the horrors of war, the cause of many conflicts is simply a lazy unwillingness to use our own philosophical and spiritual assets to work for peace. This is worth bearing in mind the next time one hears people say that they did not want to go to war but circumstances forced them into it.