The political philosophy latent in Borges's works rests on the belief in a self-sufficient individual, the preeminence of liberty, a distrust of government, and nostalgia for anarchy understood as a self-organized order. Yet Borges also emphasizes the fallibility of individuals and warns against the civic indifference brought about by an isolated individualism. A paradox seems to emerge from these simultaneous convictions: would anarchy work if individuals are unable to do much in and by themselves? Can an individualistic disposition be conducive to a rich and orderly civic life? Borges's notion of fallibility is consistent with his defense of liberal anarchism because fallibility carries less pernicious effects under liberal anarchism than it does under alternative political arrangements. Thus, his notion of liberal anarchism is compatible with his concern for civic order if we look at the ethics of self-restraint that sustains Borges's simultaneous advocacy of a self-organized order and a stable civic life.

In the decades after World War Two, most scholars working on genocide focused on particular cases, providing historically detailed descriptions of the causes and patterns of mass violence but rarely branching out beyond a specific case. The study of the Holocaust is typical of this; the vast majority of works on the Nazi genocide had little comparative dimension and instead examined the ways in which anti-Semitism and certain policies condemned disfavored minorities to persecution and extermination. These earlier works are particularly important because they gave us rich understandings of the origins, sequencing, and dynamics of mass violence, as well as the roles of dehumanizing cultural views and ideologies that facilitated extermination. Nevertheless, multi-case studies were the exception, and generally received little attention in the social sciences.

Michael Gillespie's Theological Origins of Modernity provides a historically grounded and philosophically ambitious, at times even provocative, account of the deep unity of the modern tradition. The book is more historical than most works of political theory, and exhibits a healthy freedom from received wisdom about who the important thinkers are and about what they might have to say. Yet it would be quite wrong to read this book as a simple history: it is also—perhaps even primarily—a philosophical diagnosis of the present. Gillespie's thesis, stated far too crudely, is that the familiar Enlightenment story of an age of reason preceded by an age of darkness, superstition, and religion is far too simplistic. We late moderns, too, have thoughts about first things and divinity; but we hide the enduring presence of those thoughts and questions from ourselves by the pride we take in having overcome the atavisms of theology. Gillespie argues that, so far from being wholly novel, those thoughts are in fact the descendants of the theology of late medieval nominalism. Where others speak of the secularization of Christianity, Gillespie prefers to speak of the transference of divine attributes from God to man or nature.

Alexis de Tocqueville has recently come under the scrutiny of two scholars who, for all their resemblances, have produced strikingly divergent accounts. Both are Scandinavian by birth, both prolific writers, and both aim to show other social scientists how they might benefit from paying closer attention to Tocqueville. Each of these books might also shine a bright light on the other, for their authors approach their self-appointed tasks with fundamentally different mindsets. Jon Elster starts from what we now know and digs into the pages of the past to find prefigurations and anticipations. His Tocqueville proves to be a shrewd practitioner of the kind of social science analysis that Elster has long been advocating. Richard Swedberg is less inclined to plumb Tocqueville's depths for laws, mechanisms, or even firm conclusions. Instead, he listens in hope of learning how Tocqueville thought about the phenomena he came to observe. His Tocqueville is a persistent searcher and self-questioner—traits Swedberg would have us admire and emulate in our own work.

In The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie has given us a big book. At once learned and lively, it enters the lists not simply of “origins of modernity” stories, but more particularly of those stories that engage the proudly secular and rational self-image of the age. Among the latter, its most explicit interlocutors are Hans Blumenberg and Martin Heidegger, but its effective resonances and dissonances extend, if more subtly, to Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Amos Funkenstein—and perhaps to the likes of Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze, and others as well. Indeed, in its insistent probing of connections between modern science and late medieval theology, this book is arguably in dialogue not only with a range of continental thinkers, but also with such Anglophone philosophers as Whitehead, Collingwood, and E. A. Burtt.

In political science, democracy is generally associated with high levels of economic development. However, some scholars note that this is true only as long as economic development is not based on possession of rich energy resources. Many resource-rich states are nondemocratic regimes. This is sometimes called the “resource curse.” This means that “natural resource abundance may stimulate rent-seeking behavior that, together with highly concentrated bureaucratic power, induces corruption in the economy and hence lowers the quality of institutions.” It also means that “resource wealth itself may harm a country's prospects for development” and that “oil and mineral wealth tends to make states less democratic.”

Martin Heidegger observed in his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg in 1929 that the profundity of all fundamental questions lies in the fact that they call into question not merely the subject of the inquiry but also both the questioner and the act of questioning itself. To put this another way, any comprehensive explanation must be able in principle to account for the one who is giving the explanation and for the explanation itself, and any account that cannot do this disproves itself in the very act of its narration. Thus, if any such account does not make clear the nature of the narrator and the narration, it is suspect on these grounds and readers may reasonably ask for an explanation. Since I did not discuss or try to justify the methodology or the nature of the narrative that I employ in my book, it is not surprising that all three of my critics either explicitly or implicitly raise this as a question. Kirstie McClure perhaps poses it in the most straightforward fashion by asking about the character of my narrative, suggesting quite plausibly that it might be read as an account of the adventures of the divine predicate. Less directly, Tim Fuller seems to make a similar claim with his characterization of my position as middle Hegelian. Since I argue that in modernity the divine, as Tim Fuller eloquently puts it, is “absorbed” by the individual, it is certainly reasonable to ask what kind of account I imagine I am giving. Or to put it a bit more maliciously than my three interlocutors do, one might reasonably ask who I think I am. It seems to me that this is not only a fair question, but also a very penetrating one, and one that I must try to answer. I imagined my own goals to accord more with Tom Merrill's characterization of my thought as an attempt to bring about an encounter with the fundamental questions that underlie the basic assumptions we make about ourselves and our world. But to give no more explanation than this would hardly be satisfying. Moreover, since I complain at the beginning and the end of the book that we moderns need to pay a great deal more attention to the example of Oedipus and not forget who we are and where we come from, it is incumbent on me to explain myself and what I think I am doing more fully. I will try to do this after first attempting to clarify my argument and responding to several other questions my critics raise.