I WANT TO FOCUS ON A SINGLE WORK OF LITERATURE. It is not directly concerned with war among states, though its author, Choderlos de Laclos, was in fact a soldier, an artillery officer, and an expert in fortifications. It deals with other kinds of war. My goal today is to consider the place of reason—of rational choice in the commonsense version of this term—and, specifically, of rational choice...

This paper aims to show the centrality the concept of progress occupies explicitly and implicitly in social theory, in relation to the theorization and understanding of modernity; it also raises the question whether in times where Eurocentrism, logocentrism, and indeed almost every claim of supremacy are rightly viewed with suspicion, it is possible to think of modernity without relying on some...

All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason becomes improbable.. .. Does the good historian not, at bottom, contradict? —Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak We changed " extract " in the first page of the article to " epigraph. " Please check. Precisely because the experience of the 2001 HOPE conference was a bit unnerving, I want to start out with a...