Small Is Powerful, Yet Frustrating

Abstract

Small Wonder: Global Power and Its Discontent. By Fred Dallmayr. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005. 256 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-4967-4), $27.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-4968-2). At the heart of Fred Dallmayr's Small Wonder is an invitation. The book invites its many possible readers to recognize and identify the multiple, perhaps innumerable, small ways in which they and their lives are already functioning within global interactions and interrelations with other people. Dallmayr tries to show his readers how their lives have global relevance and impact, whether or not they enjoy direct authority with respect to the politics and violence of interstate relations or the commerce of transnational capital. In this respect, he presents not so much an argument as a recollection of the ways in which all people—whatever their status—are involved in interpersonal networks that cut across geopolitical and corporate boundaries and, thus, have the potential to shape the world anew. In the process, Dallmayr draws attention to what he sees as the awe-inspiring “small wonders” of human life, in which he finds the possibility for effective and positive global change. In contrast, Dallmayr is motivated by a fundamental doubt that humanity can effectively meet today's massive global problems with solutions of equal scale. Although he spends very little time discussing or analyzing the contemporary worldwide catastrophes that motivate the book, the premise of Small Wonder is that humanity now faces truly vast social, political, and economic problems that inflict enormous brutality on the world's population. In reference to contemporary …