Forum: The hierarchicalization of political community

To respond to Andrew Linklater's The Transformation of Political Community is to walk a very fine line between admiration and perplexity. I have admiration especially for his willingness to confront some of the most important and difficult questions of contemporary political theory. To pursue the claim that we need to rethink the accounts of political community that anyone with credibility as a political analyst would much prefer to leave as a constitutive assumption of almost everything they want to say, takes some courage. And this is certainly a bold book, both in its sweep and its ambitions. It is one of the very few books in the contemporary theory of international relations that provokes more than passive surrender to the tediously familiar and the three-fold typology. Even so, I remain perplexed at the way Linklater manages to keep retying himself up in all the knots he tries so vigorously to disentangle.