Daily life as a twenty-first-century American citizen is a continual testament to our profound need for guidance on the subject of this insightful and meticulously researched book. Its primary aim is to provide what its subtitle calls “a political and philosophical history” of the idea of compromise—or, as Alin Fumurescu elsewhere has it, a “conceptual genealogy” (p. 7) broadly conceived as an exercise in Begriffsgeschichte. As such, while hardly insensitive to contemporary normative concerns, it presents itself first and foremost as an effort to remedy a “lack of historical contextualization” (p. 14) and a “rediscovery of the forgotten genealogy of compromise” (p. 18), particularly as it emerged in Britain and France between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The main argument of the book is that compromise is today understood in two quite different senses, one positive or “commendable” and the other negative or “condemnable” (p. 19), and that the origin of this “dazzling discrepancy” (p. 5) or indeed “radical split” (p. 8) can be “almost pinpointed” (p. 6) to the way this concept evolved in the two very different contexts of Britain and France between the late Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. The positive sense refers to the view of compromise as a political virtue that enables two distinct entities to resolve disagreements without resorting to force and violence, and it was in this sense that the concept emerged in Britain. The negative sense refers to the view of compromise as the violation of the essential integrity of one’s inner self or self-conception, and it was in this sense that the concept evolved in France.

Why this difference? The author’s argument is that “two different kinds of individualism” developed in France and Britain (p. 64; cf. p. 158), which he labels “centripetal individualism” and “centrifugal individualism.” What defines these are two different approaches to “the dialectic of the individual between forum internum and forum externum” (pp. 19–20). The significance of this dialectic for the project as a whole cannot be overemphasized; indeed, perhaps the work’s chief aim and its chief scholarly contribution is its recovery of this “now forgotten dialectic” (p. 10; cf. pp. 24, 46, 95, 100, 116, 131, 267, 269). In brief, forum internum is “the forum of conscience, authenticity, and freedom, subject to no one and punishable by no one except God,” whereas forum externum is that “in which the individual identified himself and was identified through belonging to one of several communities” and was “liable to judgment and punishment by the community” (p. 10). With that claim in place, the book argues that the French context that privileged forum internum promoted the development of a negative view of compromise, whereas the British context that privileged forum externum promoted the development of a positive view (e.g. pp. 11, 193, 269).

Compromise is thus “a concept at the crossroads between representation and self-representation” (p. 91; cf. pp. 4, 195), and collectively the nine chapters that make up the work provide a useful road map to these interconnections. Especially valuable are its illuminations of the ways in which the concept of compromise was decisively shaped by medieval conceptions of the dialectic of the individual, as well as by the differing theories and practices of representation and contractualism in France and Britain in the early modern period.

Aside from these substantive insights, three additional strengths of the book deserve explicit mention. The first is the author’s impressive erudition. This book covers a remarkable amount of ground, examining concepts from representation to individualism to sovereignty to contractualism, as well as thinkers from Aristotle to Avishai Margalit. It also makes good on its promise to provide “dozens of examples from each side” (p. 19) of the concepts of compromise it aims to illuminate. Coupled with the book’s detailed and thorough coverage of the secondary literature is the amount of labor that must have gone into this project, which is impossible not to admire. There are a few instances admittedly where readers might have wished for a bit more trimming; fewer block quotes from the secondary literature would not have hurt the book, nor would the excision of some of the more sweeping claims about what drove “the entire history of the Church” (p. 102) or “the beginning of modernity” (p. 211).

Second, Compromise displays a striking and welcome methodological self-awareness. The author does justice to the complexity of his concept by noting the degree to which it resists study apart from a thick web of political and theoretical developments that shaped its evolution. In this respect, his approach to his subject is guided by the conviction, expressed by James Farr and quoted here approvingly, that “concepts are never held or used in isolation, but in constellations which make up entire schemes or belief systems” (p. 107). At the same time, this approach itself raises a challenge of which the author is well aware, namely, that if concepts can be fully understood only in the context of their relationship to other concepts—which themselves are tied to hosts of other concepts—inquiry into any single concept will need to determine for itself where and how far into this panoply of concepts it needs to go. Fumurescu answers this challenge in part by usefully invoking the “tunnel history” approach that he borrows from J. G. A. Pocock (p. 196; cf. p. 234). It is a welcome move that enables him to survey Spinoza and Locke and Hobbes without allowing his surveys to become sprawling; this approach is in fact so effective that some may wish that it had been employed elsewhere as well.

Third, this book is distinguished by its theoretical acumen. The author often shows himself to be not only a meticulous historian but also an innovative theorist, and offers a host of novel syntheses that deserve further attention, even if some rest on causal chains that might be difficult for readers without the author’s erudition to assess. For example, there is the claim that in France, “increased pressure for conformity applied by absolutism on the forum externum had as a counterreaction a withdrawal of the individual into his forum internum which came to be understood—mistakenly, from a medieval perspective—as the sole repository and last bastion of uniqueness and authenticity, hence the fear of compromising one’s inner self” (p. 114), or the claim that “British centrifugal individualism and the collapse of the two fora into one-dimensional man, once externalized, ended up with the total estrangement of the political from the personal, as a counterreaction to the politicization of the personal” (pp. 274–75; italics in the original).

Compromise begins and ends by suggesting that the failure to recover the dialectic of the individual here being traced will result in our being “condemned to run in the same ruts over and over again” (p. 23) and, indeed, “to run not in circles, but in a downward spiral, with frightening prospects” (p. 286). This message is likely to resonate with many, and while the book’s recovery of this dialectic is principally executed at a conceptual and genealogical level rather than on normative grounds, it deserves and will reward the attention of contemporary theorists of its core concept, as well as the attention of historians of early modern political thought more broadly.