Review Article: Globalization as Boon or Curse

TYLER COWEN. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. vii, 179. 827.95 (US); PETER SINGER. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 235. $21.95 (US).     

From “Holocaust” to “Rational Choice”: Generational Change in Political Science

Abstract

David Walsh has demonstrated a unique gift for reading modernity sympathetically, for discerning within it a certain luminosity, in fact a distinctly Christian luminosity, without losing sight of modernity's darkest possibilities. In the magisterial concluding volume of his trilogy, he seeks to elaborate a “coherence” of modernity that is revealed not in concepts but only “through existence itself.” Finally, though, Walsh's enthusiasm for a purely open and therefore purely formal understanding of practical existence, articulated through brilliant, original, and remarkably comprehensive readings of the greatest authors of the continental tradition, seems to me to draw him very far away indeed from actual moral and political practice, and thus from the reality of our human condition. A truer and more truly “performative” attention to “the nature of practice itself” would be less inclined to praise pure freedom or openness and more solicitous of the actual horizons of common worlds, including implicit metaphysical and hierarchical elements.