The “great divide” between analytic and continental philosophy announced in the title of this book is often presented by advocates on both sides as a necessary choice for political philosophers: you can be an analytic philosopher or a continental philosopher but not both. It is a welcome feature of this book that it rejects the straitjacket of this false either/or. However, Jeremy Arnold’s ambition is not merely to reject the necessity of a choice between analytic and continental modes of political philosophy but to advocate a specific approach to negotiating their relationship. The intriguing proposal at the heart of this approach to political philosophy is based on what the author calls “aporetic cross-tradition theorizing,” which is designed to demonstrate that working across the competing commitments of both analytic and continental approaches is necessary to come to grips with fundamental issues of political philosophy and that doing so discloses the limitations of each approach.

The argument is offered through a series of case studies that are selected to make it appear plausible and attractive. The first two are intended to perform the negative role of suggesting that an alternative approach that seeks to work across the divide through what Arnold calls a “synthetic” approach does not hold out much prospect of success. The final three offer examples of Arnold’s preferred aporetic approach. The strengths and limitations of a case-study approach in empirical social science are well known, and related considerations emerge here. On the one hand, Arnold’s studies provide him with the opportunity to engage in some depth with his chosen examples and, thereby, to make his argument through them. On the other hand, this methodological choice entails that the strength of his overall argument is contingent on the persuasiveness of his treatment of these examples and the scope of his argument is dependent on the representativeness of his examples.

It is presumably with this latter point in mind that Arnold begins with a rather sketchy account of the emergence of the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy (one that does not notice the role of analytic Marxism in promoting the distinction between analytic and continental political philosophy). In Arnold’s telling, this distinction amounts to something like the claim that analytical political philosophy is largely ahistorical, largely liberal (in some very broad sense), and preoccupied with justificatory projects, whereas continental philosophy often engages with history, is often skeptical of liberalism, and pursues critical reflection on our current practices of reasoning. As a very rough gloss, this has some surface plausibility, but it is notable that the two continental thinkers with whom Arnold engages—Arendt and Derrida—both emerge from the tradition of post-Heideggerian phenomenology; by contrast, there is no more than very occasional passing references to other traditions in “continental” thought such as, to pick an obviously relevant example for social and political philosophy, the Frankfurt School. The question of scope is a serious one for this book to which I return.

The first two chapters address, respectively, political realism in its Raymond Geuss and Bernard Williams variant and the work of Stanley Cavell. Arnold takes each of these to represent “synthetic” approaches to the analytic–continental divide, by which he means approaches that seek to draw on the resources of each tradition in a way that does not treat their relationship as aporetic. Political realism is said to aim at combining the historical orientation and attention to ideology-critique of the continental tradition with the conceptual idiom and justificatory focus of analytic political philosophy. Cavell is portrayed as offering a practice of reading texts that extends across both traditions. Arnold’s strategy in relation to both approaches is to argue that they are, for different reasons, unable to come to grips with the problem of state violence.

In the case of political realism, Arnold focuses on Williams’s reorientation of political theory around the basic legitimation demand and argues that this approach is unable to offer justifications of state violence to those persons subject to it. This matters on his account because, for political realism to be an attractive form of cross-tradition theorizing, it needs to be able to show that it can combine the analytic justificatory project with the focus on contingency, history, and ideology of the continental tradition. In the case of Cavell, Arnold argues that Cavell’s discussion of consent focuses on human community, on the conditions of and obstacles to articulating our common humanity, and, in doing so, elides the specific features of political community in a way that leaves it in no place to address the question of political obligation acutely raised by those subject to state violence. Whereas political realism is in the game of justification but fails to reconcile this with its simultaneous commitment to taking history and ideology seriously, Cavell’s approach never really enters the justificatory game. Although there is much that political realists and Cavellians may dissent from in Arnold’s readings, they are clearly and intelligently laid-out interpretations— and in this respect do the job of indicating why he thinks that these approaches are unlikely to succeed in overcoming the analytic–continental divide and thereby open up the space for his own preferred aporetic approach to cross-tradition theorizing. This argument is presented as an education in limitations that aims to deepen our understanding of what Arnold refers to as the “density” of our political concepts. By this he means something like the complexity that they have acquired over the histories of their use or, to use terms Arnold does not, the multi-aspectival character of these concepts considered as historical institutions.

The first two case studies intended to recommend this approach focus on Philip Pettit and Hannah Arendt in reference to “freedom as such” in chapter 3 and to political freedom in chapter 4. Arnold’s basic claim is that Pettit is committed to an account of freedom theorized as “discursive control,” which makes sense of our intuitions concerning the relationship of freedom and responsibility; however, this picture of freedom cannot be reconciled with Arendt’s account conceived in terms of non-sovereign agency and theorized in terms of “natality” that makes intuitive sense of cases of “spontaneous, improvised, but nonetheless intelligible, free activity” (p. 98). In chapter 4 Arnold focuses on Pettit on freedom as nondomination in relation to Arendt on freedom as isonomy. The problem for Pettit is that his attempt to distinguish himself from the problems he identifies in the Rousseauvian republican cannot be sustained, whereas the problem for Arendt is that freedom as isonomy is not compatible with institutionalized structures of rule. The moral to draw from these chapters is that, for Arnold, “freedom is a dense phenomenon” (p. 135) and that an aporetic approach illustrates the insights and limitations of both traditions. It is notable that this reading of Arendt requires upholding the view that her reflections are structured by the opposition of rule and freedom, a position challenged most prominently in the work of Patchen Markell, which Arnold references but does not seriously engage (p. 193, fn23).

The final case study is that of Rawls and Derrida in which Arnold argues that both engage in a turn to history to articulate their “post-metaphysical” conceptions of justice—Rawls to underpin the justification of liberal-democratic political society and Derrida to underpin the normative validity of law—but in neither case can this turn provide the resources required for their projects. This is an original and engaging argument, but it also raises an obvious question: there is another major contemporary theorist who famously also proposes a “post-metaphysical” view of justice and explicitly engages with the role of history in the emergence of such a view, namely, Jurgen Habermas. Yet, despite referencing Habermas’s sympathetic criticisms of Rawls, Arnold writes as if the kind of synthetic cross-tradition theorizing that Habermas represents (and if anyone is a synthetic cross-tradition theorizer, then Habermas surely is!) is simply absent from the field of reflection. This does, it seems to me, fairly severely limit the scope of the argument being advanced. It also raises a final set of questions that are motivated by my sense that much of the most original and interesting political philosophy of the past 50 years has emerged from people drawing from work across traditions—Habermas is one example as is, from the same generation, Charles Taylor, while Iris Marion Young and James Tully may be mentioned as others. So, why do we need to treat “analytic” and “continental” political philosophy as if they are silos sealed off from one another that necessarily stand in an aporetic relationship?

Yet although I remain skeptical concerning the scope of the thesis advanced by Arnold, Across the Great Divide is an original and provocative book. Arnold’s writing is always clear and intelligent; his studies are sufficiently detailed for serious argument to engage. Further, the perspective of aporetic cross-tradition theorizing offers a standpoint that may be helpful in revealing features of how we theorize political concepts that are otherwise elided and in disclosing unnoticed assumptions and limitations in particular theoretical orientations. This work deserves to be widely read both for its general claims and its case studies, which should be addressed in more detail than I can offer in this short review.