I am grateful to Shalini Satkunanandan for her thoughtful review of Political Responsibility. It raises important questions that I can only touch upon briefly.

Avoidance. Satkunanandan suggests that I underestimate the “work on the self” necessary for the forms of political solidarity that a political ethic of responsibility demands. Yet political skills, values, and principles are forged on the basis of common experiences and predicaments, shared actions and struggles. Stated differently: through political engagement and a modicum of shared power, political skills are practiced, learned, and accumulated. Work on the self, however, seems the preferred strategy of contemporary liberals. Right-thinking liberals, who in their neither/nor morality (what Roland Barthes famously called “the fine morality of the Middle Party”) often tie themselves in knots, may well need work on the self to unwind and actually take a (duly normative) political stance. But the historical trajectory of liberal ethical politics is not very reassuring. This or that injustice may be denounced at home or abroad, but never the structural system that produces them, which is frequently misrecognized, idealized, or euphemized.

Ethics. Satkunanandan contends that I waver between asserting the immanence of political values to the political field and reintroducing ethics under the guise of mediations. This characterization conflates two different levels of the argument. That some ethical positions are more congenial to the political ethic the book defends is clear in my treatments of Aristotle, Hegel, and Adorno. Ethics, qua ethical activity and practices, needs to avow social and institutional mediations for it to have any traction in everyday realities. But even these ethical traditions are politically indeterminate. The critical point is thus to resist the imposition of ethical criteria on the political field. Just as the terms “good” and “bad” have different meanings in reference to an artwork than they do in reference to character, so too do values immanent to political life, such as equality, fraternity, freedom, and shared power, which bind one’s conception of collective agency and citizenship. Politically speaking, however, Brecht’s ironic dictum remains sound: “There are few activities . . . that so damage one’s morals as the preoccupation with morality.”

Realism. “Do realist critiques arise from the same sources generating the machismo of much contemporary populist politics?” Satkunanandan asks. Whatever else this may mean, I am tickled by this question’s perfect illustration of what ethical approaches misrecognize. Like yesterday’s totalitarianism, populism today amounts to an all-purpose undifferentiated sandbox to which any challenge to the liberal-capitalist status quo is moralistically and condescendingly consigned, with detrimental effects on political literacy. Similarly, associating the matrices of Trump’s bravado with realism’s is just off the mark. Whatever else may be said about the current president, few would consider him a realist in the mold of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci and Bertolt Brecht, E. H. Carr, Perry Anderson and Raymond Geuss. But the suggestion remains instructive: it betrays the reduction of politics to character that goes hand in glove with the individualization underwriting ethical politics.