Professor Jørgen Møller has for years given us his trenchant thoughts on the rise of new Europe after two disastrous wars in the twentieth century. I have had the privilege of spending many hours in conversation with him, listening to his critical examination of the current travails of both Europe and the United States. He also demonstrated a keen knowledge of the troubled experiences of Asian modernization. His deep concern that there should be better understanding in the West of what is happening in Asia has often encouraged me to think afresh about what we in Asia often take for granted. At one end, those who accept the Western model of growth as inevitable, also invariably believe we must get even closer to the West and absorb all its secrets. At the other, those who are determined to go beyond that model would ask us to think, wherever possible, out of the Western box in search of some Asian way. And, in between, there are those who have begun to doubt that there is any such thing as Asian and Western today as we take in each other's washing in this small and shrinking world.

In his new book, Professor Møller depicts the nature of politics in its many dimensions, sometimes bombastic, lofty, totalistic and awesome, but, at its core, he also shows that it is all too often petty and local. He ought to know, having worked as one of his country's most senior public servants during decades of European political turmoil. He is no less objective in his assessment of his own field of expertise, that of economics. He knows that economists can often sound like housewives counting pennies and keeping good accounts, but he also demonstrates that economic ideas and policies have the capacity to make or break nations and civilizations. There is little doubt that the cumulative power of nation states and their empires and various models of rapid economic growth have, over the past 200 years, transformed every corner of the world. The rising rate of technological and material progress, and the obsession to better that rate, has dominated global discourse for so long that, now and then, this has driven poets and philosophers to wonder about the future of social cohesion and shared cultural values.