This thesis emerges most clearly in the signature essay, “Achieving Our World Democratically: A Response to Richard Rorty,” which serves as the transition—and pivot—between the two trajectories Dallmayr would illustrate. Dallmayr praises Rorty's dual commitments to a more democratic America and a more engaged philosophy. Rorty, he notes, counters a “mood of dejection” characteristic of our “post”-oriented politics and culture with a renewed vision of America's egalitarian promise. According to Rorty, the new Left, especially in its academic guise of cultural studies, has disengaged from practical politics and adopted a “spectatorial approach to the problems of its country” (p. 96). In contrast, Rorty calls for a renewed “commonality” among Americans and a “reinvigorated”—left liberal and/or democratic socialist—reformist politics on a national scale. It is here that Dallmayr expresses his reservations, suggesting that Rorty's defense of leftist agents and reformist practices risks a technocratic and ethnocentric politics. Dallmayr urges instead a more cosmopolitan democracy, dedicated to building bridges between not only old and new Left, but, more important, “theory and practice, inside and outside, private and public and also between nation-state and global community” (p. 99). Such a politics moves well beyond Rorty's “national solidarity” and, Dallmayr suggests, back to an Aristotelian tradition of democratic friendship in which respect for difference and equality are now extended to the cosmopolis.

The remaining essays in Parts I and II explore this collective and individual process, along the axes mentioned. The first set stresses international relations to reveal the ambiguity and complexity of processes of globalization. Even as Dallmayr highlights the affinities between global and modern politics, he recognizes the dangers of hegemony and the need for grassroots, bottom-up alternatives. With this recognition comes renewed attention to the diversity of local cultures and the need to create a “global civil society” that involves multiple, overlapping traditions alongside Kantian universalism (p. 44). So understood, human rights take their meaning from a dialogue across cultures, rather than abstract principles of justice. Liberal self-interested individuals, as well as postmodern decentered subjects, are potentially transformed into citizens of an ever-changing and expanding democracy. In Part II, Dallmayr explores philosophically what might be called modes and/or resources for this process of transformation at the level of the self. “Transversal unity” (Schrag) describes a universalism created through interactions between concrete, situated subjects with their diverse, multiple viewpoints. It requires a form of dialogue (Waldenfels) that is decentered, lateral, reversible, separable, and interlaced. For Dallmayr, the accompanying disjunctions and inruptions do not result in a Derridean “anchoritic community,” but instead an ethics of friendship (Ricoeur), albeit one that is vulnerable to power and manipulation (Heidegger).

As this lateral process, globalization navigates a path that weaves in and out, between and through, standard categories and false dichotomies. What distinguishes Achieving Our World and Dallmayr's work more generally is the extraordinary care with which he undertakes the journey. Comparisons are easily drawn to Jürgen Habermas's The Postnational Constellation (2001) and John Rawls's The Law of Peoples (1999), as well as Rorty's Achieving Our Country Dallmayr's chosen catalyst and foil. Whereas Rorty overplays American patriotism, neither Habermas nor Rawls delves deeply enough into the human costs of a hegemonic liberalism or the human desires that might motivate a cosmopolitan civic culture, although both are surely aware of them. Perhaps these omissions reflect their philosophical and political commitments to a disenchanted modernity and, if recent events are any indication, an alltoo-secular liberalism. Dallmayr writes about globalization from another place, with another spirit. He tells the story of mediations as a mediator, but without compromise on principles. As he puts it, “it is impossible to ‘achieve our country’ without attempting to ‘achieve our world’” (p. x). Recognizing that this book, even more than its predecessors, is “written against the grain of current developments,” he suggests that “what seems most urgently needed in our time is tolerance, an open mind (or as the Chinese say, an open ‘heart-and-mind’), a sincere commitment to social justice, and a willingness to struggle against injustice and exploitation in nonviolent ways (following in the footsteps of the Mahatma Gandhi)” (p. 213). As globalization compresses space and time, creating a “runaway” world, Dallmayr gently, but no less urgently, calls human beings to account, to reflect and to act, accordingly. It is a call political scientists should be uniquely qualified to heed.