“Should we put locality before citizenship, citizenship before human obligations?” This is the central question animating Richard Vernon's new book. He defines the three sorts of relationship it invokes as follows. Ties of friendship are those partial relationships which “arise from the particular and local character of our lives, lived as, clearly they must be, in particular local contexts”; ties of citizenship are those that “arise from sharing political space, from common subjection to law, and from participation in institutions and processes through which consent to political authority is generated”; and ties among strangers “arise among those who are ‘only humans,’ [who are] categorically but not concretely related to us” (3–4). Vernon recognizes that all three are important, and that is why he believes we need to face “the question of priority of attachment.” He himself does so through an investigation of citizenship, which he pursues in two ways. First, with a number of fascinating chapters—all of them models of scholarship in the history of political ideas—that examine how the question of priority of attachment was dealt with by eight writers, four English (Locke, Wollstonecraft, George Eliot and Mill) and four French (Rousseau, Comte, Proudhon and Bergson). Vernon claims that his question has, for historical reasons, been particularly pronounced in these two countries, although I must say that I cannot think of one country in which it has not. Regardless, he then deals with it more directly, in chapters about the notion of a crime against humanity and about the very nature of special ties and what they imply we owe each other. Finally, in the book's concluding chapter, Vernon offers us an outline of his own solution to the question.

If I have a difficulty with all this, it is with the question itself, as well as with the assumption that it is capable of being “solved.” For how could it be that “we”—by which Vernon means everybody—could ever agree upon any single answer given the many differences between us, as well as between the various situations each one of us faces? Surely it would be right for some people, given who they are and their particular contexts, to put their local ties before those deriving from their citizenship, while others should be doing the opposite, and the same may be said of how one prioritizes obligations to foreigners. We need to be facing such questions, moreover, only when they have emerged out of these specific conflicts. That is when those involved ought to engage in dialogue, which is to say politics.

Vernon, however, is among those who reject such a “particularist” approach (as he, following Jonathan Dancy, would call it). Instead, he favours an antipolitics, of the kind that would have those involved in a conflict apply an abstract theory of justice rather than engage in dialogue. Now, while I shun the development of such theories in my own work, I do not agree with those, such as Martin Heidegger and Richard Rorty, for whom theories arise from the asking of bad—in other words, abstract or “metaphysical”—questions. This is because I find it hard to deny that such questions have, on occasion, been a spur to creativity, as I believe has been the case with Vernon's book. Essentially, Vernon ends up offering us an answer in the spirit of subsidiarity: he starts with the affirmation of universal rights, but thinks that the entitlements based upon them should be increasingly waived as we advance through levels of personal relationship, as such connections would be undermined by asserting these rights. The point of this process, he says, is to minimize the vulnerability of those involved in the more personal or local associations. While I doubt that his, or any other such theory, can do that, I nevertheless believe that Vernon has developed a genuinely original conception, indeed one that all thinkers about justice can benefit from considering.