I would like to thank Sean Fleming for his careful and incisive reading. There is little I disagree with, except for the minor point of his description of my take on Hobbesian personhood. It is the case that I am more interested in Locke’s “person” because it has more decisively shaped contemporary notions of selfhood and personal identity. However, my treating Hobbes as the pivot between a theological, trinitarian personhood and Locke’s idea shows the extent to which I apprehend Hobbes’s concept in metaphysical, not corporeal terms. Indeed, this theological notion is key to the magical, decidedly noncorporeal operation, whereby the one becomes the many (and vice versa), that Hobbes also needed for his theory of representation and in ways Fleming shows. This enables me to clarify an important point about my corporeal lens; namely, that it is not simply (dogmatically, nor indeed, I hope, blindly) applied everywhere. Nevertheless, the disagreement is minor, insofar as Fleming’s embrace of what I have called Hobbes’s constructivism with regard to the Hobbesian concept—which he has considered more closely than I have (personhood)—reveals a perhaps unexpected resonance between our readings on this point.

Fleming invites me to engage with the differences between my book and Bentley Allen’s Scientific Cosmology. My focus is neither on (in Fleming’s words) “ideas” only, as is Allan’s; it is just as much on practices, legal and medical notably. Nor is on how science “shaped” the state, but just as much on the other way around; that is, how they mutually constituted one another, notably around the dissected body. This ability to apprehend “the other way around” is what is missing in causal thinking, which is always unidirectional: from the “cause” to the “effect that must therefore be held strenuously separate. It misses much of the complexity of what it sets out to study. To give but one example, in Allan’s reading, raison d’état is collapsed onto state interests (p. 99), rather than seen as indexing, much more richly, a distinctly new, post-theological form of reason and the new political form it was bound up with—the state.

Allan does not, in fact, apprehend “how science and politics came together”: Fleming’s formulation suggests a much more open and complex set of interrelations, of the kind that I have sought to plow. Rather, Allan considers how the former caused the latter to evolve. This emphasis on change, together with causality, is consistent with conventional constructivism, where change has classically afforded it the wedge with which to establish itself in the discipline’s mainstream and make the case for its advantage over more traditional approaches. However, it leads to holding as “givens” that which, in a critical perspective, requires being deconstructed, like the state. For Allan, the state is pre-given. That I sought to go all the way down and back in understanding the construction of this given, methodologically and substantially (or historically), meant that, on both counts, Allan, like most of conventional constructivism, could not afford me a starting point. Revitalizing the constitutive theorizing that lay in constructivism’s foundations contra causal thought was one of the key purposes of my book.