Explaining Old Worlds

This Comment treats each of Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus’s three subjects - entrepreneurship, democratic activity, and cultivation of solidarity - in turn. Though marred by inattention to moral consequences and an accordingly unjustified meliorism, the authors’ insights reaffirm and strengthen a number of convictions obscured in current political-theory debates. In particular, their account of the virtuous citizen, and of a variant of solidarity which grows out of such citizens’ activity, deserves recognition. The basic contention that humans are ‘at their best’ when self-consciously engaged in transformative activities is accepted, with the essential caveat that such activity can only be sustained for relatively short periods of time by individuals and polities alike.