Professor Fred Dallmayr is a peace scholar in the absolute sense. He believes in the value of democracy, and concurrently the utility of what he calls “dialogic cosmopolitanism.” The latter may sound like a mouthful, but it is actually a war cry, if one may leverage exclusively on the passion of this term sans the destructiveness, to our collective redemption. In fact, the first few lines in this book are a quick give away: How do we call ourselves ‘civilized,’ as we often do, when nuclear arsenals are the weapons of our self-defense? Weaponsthat can literally blow whole cities and civilizations into smithereens. Obviously, the picture is skewed, if not altogether wrong, when we invoke the concept of civilization, Frank Dallmayr admitted just as much.
But even as the “illogic” of nuclear weapons and violence continue to proliferate, there is a need to reclaim some of the vocabularies of peace that have been suppressed, censored, lost, or simply over- looked. In “Civilizations and World Order,” Fred Dallmayr, through the help of numerous authors, seeks to correct the anthropocentric nature of humanity at large. Instead of a me-first mentality, Fred Dallmayr argued that it should be “we all”. Everyone has the right and responsibility to use their mental faculties well, to love the other and their neighbors.