My comments on Kahan’s new history of liberalism have a relatively narrow focus: the book’s organizing concept, fear, rather than its insightful accounts of different authors and movements. I suppose that makes me a “lumper,” in the familiar dichotomy between lumpers and splitters that Kahan cites in his introductory chapter. But I’m afraid that even historians have to lump it sometimes. For you need to know just what idea you’re splitting up, even if your goal is to trace its different manifestations. You need to identify the genus correctly if you want to record the lives of its most interesting species.

In this article a widespread misperception of Aristotle's political thought is challenged, a misperception shared even by his champions among recent political theorists: that his concept of political community is derived from an image of organic growth and identity, and thus does not account for political conflict. Familiarity with liberal political thought and institutions has led most of Aristotle's contemporary interpreters to look for counterimages to liberal images of political society in his work. As a result, they tend to ignore or underplay the connections which Aristotle draws between political community and political conflict. By interpreting Aristotle's concepts of political community and political friendship in light of his analysis of political argument in Book 3 of the Politics, the article tries to uncover these connections and their implications.

Modern Peoplehood. By John Lie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 394p. $49.95.

This book is a valuable addition to the literature on social identity and modern politics. In the manner of historical sociologists, John Lie synthesizes a vast body of scholarly literature—the book has a 100-page bibliography—in order “to illuminate and sublate the categories of modern peoplehood” (p. ix).

In this essay I argue that Hegel's concept of monarchy, far from being more evidence of his supposed abstract rationalism or deference to Prussia, is the most complete modern account of the necessary political conditions of a rational state. Hegel believed that the peculiar historical development of European monarchy made the rational state politically possible. Who rules is the fundamental political problem. Some person or persons must have the final power of decision, even in constitutional and parliamentary regimes, and thus stamp the regime with their own particular views. Hegel believed that only the constitutional monarch of a modern state, bom to sovereignty regardless of his personal abilities or constituencies, limited by harsh experience and public sentiments to legitimization of public acts, could depoliticize this final power of decision. This alone would allow unimpeded public administration according to rational legal standards. Marxist and technocratic dreams of rational administration will remain mere dreams as long as the dreamers offer no alternative solution to the fundamental political problem.