Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections

Acknowledgments

A work such as the present one owes an immeasurable intellectual debt to so many formative influences. Each whose name and work is invoked here is a contributor to a dialogue along a pathway of thought I have been following for over two decades. The text of this work is but a rough outline of this dialogue , leaving much unthought and unspoken as the silent yet omnipresent context. Heidegger, of course, is my principal interlocutor, and thus it is to him that I owe the greatest debt and with whom my philosophical friendship most abides. Yet, there are so many interpreters and commentators on the Heidegger corpus whose works, while unmentioned and uncited, have helped to prepare me. I am no less indebted to these Heidegger scholars. I acknowledge specifically Bernard P. Dauenhauer, until recently University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Georgia. Dauenhauer, as friend, teacher, and colleague, has always given generously of his time and effort to assist my understanding of Heidegger and the implications of Heidegger ’s thought for political philosophy in general. I am and remain immeasurably grateful for his fruitful guidance, and trust that this present work honors his place as my most consistent teacher and interlocutor. My engagement of Heidegger’s thought in world order perspective is due in large part to the abiding formative influence of Richard A. Falk, until recently Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University. This present work attests to the need for a personal response to the phenomenon of planetary crisis, a response that Professor Falk provoked in me as an undergraduate student that I have been working out slowly since then and that I now entrust to him and the community of world order scholars. Of the latter I mention Saul Mendlovitz, Rajni Kothari, Ali Mazrui, and R. B. J. Walker—one and all colleagues who encouraged and supported my early efforts to address world order issues. I mention also Professor Acknowledgments ix Hwa Yol Jung of Moravian College, political theorist of the first rank, who has ably spoken of “the crisis of political understanding” and whose analysis has contributed to my frame of thinking. I hereby also express my gratitude to the following for permission to use previously copyrighted material in epigraph to chapters: Basil Blackwell Publishers , HarperCollins Publishers, Yale University Press, Vittorio Klostermann GMBH. I am grateful also to the editors/directors of the journal Dialogos for permission to adopt, revise, and expand the version of chapter 4 printed in the July 1997 issue of that journal. Finally, but not least, I express my gratitude to colleagues of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, for their sustained philosophical and personal friendship and inspiration in the course of completing this scholarly work. Fairbanks, Alaska August 2001 x Crisis Theory and World Order ...