Here are two challenges that the world has had to face in 2008: 1) Construction of the Large Hadron Collider was recently completed. Experiments using this machine will yield new knowledge of a fundamental kind. There is also a theoretical risk, believed to be vanishingly small but not zero, that the machine could create a black hole capable of destroying the Earth. Should the machine be turned on? 2) Fertilizing “desert” regions of the oceans with iron is expected to stimulate phytoplankton growth, sucking carbon dioxide into the oceans and thus helping to mitigate climate change. It might also alter vital ocean ecosystems. To know the full consequences of ocean fertilization, large-scale experiments are needed. Should they be allowed?

As in his book, Scott Barrett seizes the reader's interest by describing a dramatic situation of choice. Who cannot be struck by the example of the Large Hadron Collider and the possibility of accidentally annihilating the Earth with it? What does precaution require here?

Amid the steady stream of quantitative and game-theoretical studies of conflict published in recent years, Marc Howard Ross's Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflict comes as a welcome reminder of the ineffably human dimensions of conflict and violence around the world. His panoramic account of ethnic conflict goes beyond the establishment of statistical correlations and the modeling of “iterated games” to trace the complex processes by which conflicts emerge, escalate, and unravel, as well as the role of culture and identity in these processes. Making sense of ethnic conflict, Ross shows, requires an understanding of meaning—of how symbols, rituals, places, and events evoke emotions, inspire narratives, and inform identities in diverse settings around the world. The research agenda he pursues and promotes is thus in no small measure ethnographic and interpretivist, focusing on the (inter)subjective (self-)understandings of participants in ethnic conflicts, rather than the ostensibly objective conditions under which conflicts unfold.

John T. Sidel's thoughtful review of my book raises two important, intertwined issues that I focus on here: the nature of group identity and the differences he sees between interpretivist and poststructuralist accounts of ethnic conflict. He offers two views of ethnic groups: One argues that strong identities and a sense of groupness precedes, and forms the basis for, conflict, and the other asserts that identities are necessarily incomplete, inadequate, and accompanied by anxiety, and that conflict is constitutive of ethnic identities. He attributes the former position to me while suggesting that I ignore the latter.

Indonesia is a country that seems to violate a number of widely held assumptions that comparative political scientists hold. For example, under Suharto's 30-year rule, corruption soared, but so did economic growth. In Riots, Pogroms, Jihad, John Sidel offers another false generalization for consideration, namely, that despite the rise of ethnic and religious violence in the world since 1990, the widespread religious violence experienced in Indonesia since the mid-1990s is not best understood as part of a global trend. Rather, he argues that “such broad-brush accounts offer little to illuminate the specific modalities of religious violence observed in Indonesia or to help examine the discernable but seemingly inexplicable shifts … in the forms, targets, processes of mobilization, and consequences of this violence in successive periods” (p. 11).

The argument that religious identities are haunted by anxieties is firmly grounded in anthropology, psychology, and social theory. The evidence for such anxieties in Indonesia comes from close reading of Islamic publications in Indonesia and of ethnographic accounts of localities that subsequently experienced episodes of religious violence. There is abundant descriptive evidence of these anxieties in ethnographic accounts and discourse analysis, much more than what readers will find in my book.

“Why would a group legitimize its own subservience and, in doing so, abdicate its capacity for self-preservation?” is the question asked at the start of Ruling Oneself Out (p. xi). Focusing on the Center Party's vote for the enabling act of March 1933, which gave Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution, and on the Vichy parliament's vote to grant full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain in 1940, Ivan Ermakoff studies how these decisions looked to the actors themselves, and finds that the pervasive uncertainty that characterized the situation leading up to each vote, and the actors' tendency to look to their peers for guidance, complicate monocausal accounts of groups marching to their death. Many prevalent attempts to explain these seemingly inexplicable collective actions tend to emphasize coercion, miscalculation, and collusion. Each of these explanations has its merits, and some are more persuasive than others. Yet each has its problems. Coercion, for example, which is the most compelling explanation of the lot, might lead one to expect those threatened to submit, yet fear just as often causes consolidation and vigorous collective resistance to the challenger.

In a book written more than four hundred years ago (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1548), La Boétie conveyed his astonishment about people “acquiescing to their own servitude.” Ruling Oneself Out restates the problem: why do groups legitimize the prospect of their political incapacity and, by way of consequence, the possibility of their servitude? I address this question by considering two parliamentary decisions of crucial historical significance: the parliamentary surrenders of constitutional authority in Germany (March 1933) and in France (July 1940). These events have paradigmatic value because they are clear-cut cases of collective abdications and because they lend themselves to explanations that seem as obvious as they are commonsensical. People abdicate because they face coercive pressures. They abdicate because they misjudge the consequences of their action. Or they abdicate because their ideology predisposes them to do so.

This book may be read from two complementary and enlightening perspectives: as a history of political thought centered on the role played by fear in group formation, and as a theoretical treatise on “negative association,” that is, collective action based on a principle of identification in opposition to others. Both perspectives sustain each other. The first draws attention to a rich and insightful reinterpretation of classical and lesser-known texts. The peculiarity of this history of political thought is that it records not inflection points but continuity and resilience. The second perspective is intended to bring about positive knowledge. This conflation of genres is an appealing facet of the book. In tracing a continuity of thought, Ioannis Evrigenis purports to demonstrate the validity of a theoretical claim about the centrality of negative association. By the same token, the historical exposé lays bare the set of premises that sustains the claim.

I would like to thank Ivan Ermakoff for his comments and Jeff Isaac for inviting us to participate in this critical exchange about our work. As Ermakoff points out, the continuity of negative association in the history of political thought is striking, and this continuity is an important part of my argument about the role of negative association in collective action and the lessons that ought to be drawn from this. The precise nature, extent, and limits of this continuity, however, are indispensable parts of my story, ones that Ermakoff leaves out. As I note in Fear of Enemies and Collective Action, when one looks more closely, one realizes that the genealogy of negative association consists of episodes of action and reaction. The thinkers I study agree about much, but they also disagree quite strongly. Taken together, the continuity and disagreement show that it is a mistake to consider the discourse, as Ermakoff does, to be simply atemporal and represented by any single thinker.