Jeremy Arnold's Across the Great Divide: Between Analytic and Continental Political Theory is an intelligent and innovative analysis of two traditions of thought typically deemed incommensurable to one another. It is a unique addition to recent works that explore the development of Anglo-American political theory in the postwar period; neither wholly polemical nor simply an intellectual history, the work is attentive to the “how” of scholarly reading. Thus, the “between” in Arnold's title refers to the aporetic tensions of cross-tradition theorizing that he develops as part of his way of reading the works he discusses in the book. Aporias (from the Greek meaning “without passage”) are the “blocked paths, paradoxical needs that cannot be met” (15). The ambition of Arnold's book is to claim that scholarly reading in political theory can remain within the tensions of the aporetic, without the need of having to synthesize or overcome those tensions.

In chapter 1, Arnold looks to recent developments in realist theories of legitimacy and specifically to the ideas of Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss. Here he shows that the limit to realist theories of legitimacy is state violence, which, he argues, is something that realist theories cannot justify. “State violence is never legitimate,” he says (45), by which he means that there is no justification that can establish the legitimacy of coercion. Chapter 2 focuses on Stanley Cavell's account of consent that develops the idea of citizenship as fellowship; that is, for Cavell citizens are not role holders but people to whom we must respond and thus whose suffering in the face of violence and injustice we have to acknowledge.

The last three chapters of the book shift in both tone and style of analysis. Here Arnold puts on display his innovation of aporetic cross-tradition theorizing. The previous chapters had shown how a synthetic style of scholarly reading is insufficient because synthesis always falls short in its effort to overcome tensions and contradictions. The aporetic accepts and admits of the impasse where the work of the “between” of thinking, reading, and theorizing begins. The key thinkers he engages in these final chapters are Philip Pettit, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Jacques Derrida; and what Arnold shows in his analyses is not the incommensurabilities that constitute the great divide, but the incompossibility of how “two necessary but incompatible features of a concept must be, but cannot be, reconciled” (76). I take this sentence to be Arnold's most succinct definition of the experience of the “between” in his title.

I will eschew a detailed engagement with these final chapters so as to avoid spoiling the experience for the reader; by which I mean that one is well served to read these chapters on one's own. I focus here on the political stakes involved in Arnold's approach. Aporetic theorizing challenges the emphasis we traditionally place on judgment in political criticism. This is explicit in the intuition many of us share that a political-theoretical problem requires solutions, whether practical or philosophical. The task of political theory is to provide conclusions in the form of judgments. The legitimacy of such judgments may be grounded on a derivation or a verification of a proof, or they may be the result of a collective reflection and intersubjective exchange. Either way, judgments are needed for political change. But the impasse of the aporetic makes the appeal to judgment a problem rather than an expectation of political theorizing.

A second consideration is even more of a challenge. A central virtue of aporetic cross-tradition theorizing is an attitude of philosophical openness and responsiveness, Arnold's treatment of which is indebted to Cora Diamond's account of, and attunement to, “difficulty.” Following Diamond, Arnold contends that difficulty does not describe the intricacies of a problem; rather, it accounts for a disposition towards a reality to which one is resistant: it is difficult for me to give my attention to people whose ideas, behaviors, and beliefs I loathe; to offer reasons why I should do so does not alleviate that difficulty but accentuates it. In short, difficulty is the affective disposition of the aporetic.

Both of these challenges require attitudinal changes, not just arguments. The difficulty is not epistemological, where hard problems require a theoretically sophisticated set of procedural moves to puzzle out solutions; for Arnold, it is the ontological difficulty of the impasse that does not offer a way out. At a very basic pedagogical level, such difficulties require a willingness to learn how to read differently and to take on the challenge of understanding how others read (not just what words mean, if they mean anything at all), and why words are expressed as legible in specific ways rather than others. This means going beyond just reading different works or authors; it means learning to read unfamiliar or difficult works in ways difficult or unfamiliar to oneself. This is difficult because it requires acknowledging that one does not know one's way about.

In the case of the great divide that Arnold addresses, for instance, it is impossible for readers trained in Anglo-American theory not to read a work of French theory other than as a causal chain of propositional statements that we call “making an argument.” However, every modern philosopher in France is shaped by two fundamental institutions that instruct them to make arguments differently: the first is the agrégation exams that are rigorous assessments of one's knowledge of the history of philosophy; and the second is the explication de texte, a formalist style of expository reading and writing. Both of these are state-sanctioned qualifications (by the French Ministry of National Education) for teaching philosophy in France at the secondary and postsecondary levels, and every agrégé (or student participating in the agrégation) is required to pass both written and oral exams, in multiple languages, so as to demonstrate excellence in one's ability to articulate the problematic (i.e., impasse) of a philosophical oeuvre. Neither of these qualifications for philosophical mastery is amenable to an Anglo-American analytic style of reading that expects one to outline criteria of verification, legitimacy, and meaning for the function of problem solving. Reading a work of French theory not for argument but for explication is difficult, especially given that most Anglo-American readers of philosophy and political theory are unaware of the expectations for an explication de texte.

One final thought in this vein: Arnold focuses his analyses on traditional concepts familiar to political theory readers: consent, violence, domination, freedom, equality, and so on. But it would seem to me that a further “difficulty” raised by an aporetic disposition is not to presume the Kantian conceit that concepts are the basic building blocks of political thinking. What if the actual aporetic impasse of the “between” in Arnold's title is that the philosophical concept is not a stable unit of theoretical expression and political meaning? No doubt, this is an insurmountable difficulty to cross; a true aporia of theorizing.