Bentley Allan begins his gracious review by observing that my book is not in any strict sense a contribution to international relations theory. I agree with him entirely. Instead, I take my book to be a contribution to social theory writ large. By telling a story about the unfolding of modernity over several centuries, I signal both an affinity with scholars in the humanities and a recognition that my story is only one of innumerably many possible stories about an event—a social construction—consisting of innumerably many events. Every possible story has a “story line,” just as every theory depends on a model. Story lines are models, and vice versa. As centuries pass and events pile up, the story I tell is ever sketchier, more tentative, less satisfying. The book’s “open texture” and “multiple registers” may complicate, but never obviate, its story line.

Despite the tighter texture of Allan’s book, he is also telling a story, one that bears a considerable resemblance to mine. I make a great deal of my debt to Foucault’s The Order of Things in constructing a model of periodic change driven by ruptures in what it is possible to think. In my review, I fault Allan for minimizing Foucault’s relevance to his conception of successive cosmologies. Here, I fault Allan’s review for failing to acknowledge sufficiently Foucault’s importance for my story and, even more, the opportunity Foucault afforded me to work out a model of modernity’s periodization. Allan concludes that my book “offers a looser model” than he would like. I believe it is a tighter model than the open texture of the book allows him to see.

Periodization is not just a device for marking the story’s several chapters. Raising “the broader question” of periodization, Allan wonders whether “we need a specific understanding of modernity as a distinct unity.” I suggest that we seem to be stuck with periodization—this is how we deal with the passage of time. Yet we can make sense of periodization only by presupposing a unity. As Aristotle taught, parts are wholes, wholes are parts. Allan would have us tell stories and build models “across periodizations.” By the terms of my model, periodic ruptures are moments of massive social construction. The periodization of modernity as a whole, a unity, is one of the great social constructions making modernity what it is. Let me say: Social theory is most of all concerned with social construction.

Allan also faults me for ignoring colonialism. Yes, both our books are Eurocentric. When he argues that colonialism “becomes constitutive of modernity,” he is unquestionably right. As a scholar, I came too early to appreciate fully the extent to which this is so. Instead, I was steeped in the lore of the American founding, of revolution and republicanism. British North Americans helped to constitute one of modernity’s periodic ruptures by refusing to see themselves as colonial patsies or pawns. My story, like Allan’s, is a story of ruptures first, and only then of successive interimperial orders.