Markus Dirk Dubber has provided the readers of the Review with an erudite and fascinating essay that traces a change in modern western penal thought since the Enlightenment. What he presents is a very brave attempt to mount a left critique not only of contemporary vicious trends toward the escalation of retributive criminal penalties, but also of the therapeutic concepts of fundamental difference that have characterized rehabilitationist theories of punishment. In Dubber's view, rehabilitationism wandered from the path prepared by the Enlightenment and thereby invited barbaric reactionaries once again to dominate the field of criminal punishment. While the essay makes an important point about the blindness of rehabilitationists to the need to justify and legitimize the imposition of punishment, and while it brings to the attention of Anglo-American specialists the importance of figures from the German Aufklärung, such as Fichte, Kant, and Hegel, and rehabilitationists, such as Krause and Röder, it leaves the reader wondering about how to transcend the limits of the formalism of Enlightenment abstract identity and how to root the geistesgeschichtlich erudition of the author's idealism in the soil of social history.