Children often wonder why things are the way they are. Although a child appears to enjoy what can become a never-ending game of asking ‘but why?’ after every answer given by an adult, the child is innocent enough to be dissatisfied with what the adult is forced by experience to take for granted. Children are naturally curious and question what the adult has become accustomed not to question. The child's logic challenges the adult's custom. So might the curious social observer challenge the legal status quo. In this vein, I seek to investigate what globalisation can teach us about law in the Western tradition, and what the Western legal tradition can teach us about globalisation. The subtitle of this book anticipates my conclusion that globalisation demonstrates recurring patterns of law and authority. Recognising these patterns is crucial to advancing law in the third millennium. To appreciate these patterns requires the child's sustained wonder, and the uncommon sense that the world we see today began long, long before the adult's lifetime.

Philosophy has its origin in simple wonderment perhaps akin to that of the child. Such simple wonder at things being the way they are is captured in the Ancient Greek concept of thaumazein, for example in the dialogue of Socrates with the perceptive youth Theaetetus. This curiosity is a ‘playful looking about when one's quite immediate vital needs are satisfied’, which, if unchecked, develops into the philosophy of philosophers. An enquiry which proceeds explicitly under this banner may hazard being childish, especially when the enquirer has worked long enough in the legal profession to be considered an adult or at least a youth who knows his way about.