Daniel Carey rehabilitates a dispute among John Locke, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson “focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistency could be located in mankind” (p. 1). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in distinct ways respond to Locke's attack on innateness, the idea that “God had implanted ideas or predispositions in the soul which guided the moral actions and beliefs of mankind” (p. 51). Shaftesbury and Hutcheson do so by evoking a “Stoic conception which saw nature as a fund of normative ideas, predispositions, or prolepses that embraced benevolence, sociability, disinterested affection, and the divine, explaining our attachments to friend, family, and nation” (p. 200).

Carey is not solely interested in ideas confined to time and place. By looking to the present in light of the past, Carey argues that “we not only historicize the present, but we also gain some added perspective on the powers and limits of current configurations, as well as an assessment of the strength and weaknesses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legacies to the present” (p. 201, my emphasis). In this light, he contends that the struggle prefigured by the British Enlighteners is evident today in the clash between anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Tzvetan Todorov. Geertz “asserted that the vocation of anthropology is not to seek out a specious consensus omnium but rather to locate the truly salient differences marked by culture” (p. 12). Geertz is a contemporary version of Locke. “An alternative approach that attempts to define some common resources in human nature, even if they are not fully moral, appears especially in the philosophical anthropology of Tzvetan Todorov” (p. 12, my emphasis). Todorov is a contemporary version of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Todorov accomplishes this, we are told, by “emphasizing ‘sociality’ as a unifying force, although he defines it in ways that avoid the pitfall of normative or teleological reasoning” (p. 13). A final accommodation among the various positions old and new seems to rest with Chandra Kakathas's The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (2003). The virtue of Kathakas's work is that it attempts “to recover a unifying concept of human nature … although [Kakathas] wisely avoids determining, prescriptively, the ‘content’ of conscience or the moral sense” (p. 30, my emphasis).

As an attempt to recover the differences among Locke, Shaftsbury, and Hutcheson and to consider the prospects for accommodation, Carey's book succeeds. He provides a lucid reading of the Enlighteners and, in so doing, reminds us that the Enlightenment did not usher in a totalitarian project. By harking back to Greeks and Stoics, Carey shows that our perennially vexed ruminations about the relationship between difference and sameness were not recently discovered by postmoderns. Common sense alone speaks to a ubiquitous human diversity as well as to shared thoughts, feelings, and experiences that seem to indicate that we are encased in something like an ongoing human condition. That Carey reads forward and backward testifies to his own belief in the dictates of common sense. Here lies the rub.

As an attempt to come to terms with the tension between sameness and difference, Carey is less successful. His work is stamped firmly with the imprint of Quentin Skinner's volatile and wavering assertion that ideas are the product of time and circumstance. Is this an untenable position? If each thinker is confined to context, is this not true of Carey himself? Also of every author he reads, ancient and contemporary? Do we contextualize Carey and every author he reads in infinite regress? How is the infinite regress intelligible if we are insulated by “history”? What does Carey mean by saying that his argument about old and new historicizes the present? If historicizing is the product of the historicist who claims that we can only understand “ideas in context,” has not the historicity of the present ruled out access to the past? If historicizing the present means that we situate present disputes about sameness and difference in the context of an historical argument that is not confined to any particular time and place, has Carey escaped the historicist premise?

That Carey ignores arguments of nonhistoricist political philosophers in favor of anthropology is revealing. Carey wants to preserve the notion that we are malleable historical beings but in ways that do not commit him to a fixed, permanent, and ubiquitous human nature. Carey's language and sources are telling. Todorov unlike Geertz is supposedly a proponent and adherent of a “philosophical anthropology.” In what way, to what end, in what character has philosophy emerged in the historical anthropology? Carey immediately shies away from pursuing the difficult question of what the new anthropology is willing to say about the enduring features of our nature by complementing Kathakas's wisdom in avoiding the “content” of conscience or moral sense. He heaps equal praise on Todorov's nonteleological (though somehow philosophical) anthropology. Shying away from content saves Carey from having to specify what features of human nature persist through history. In so doing, does Carey call into question the very thing he seeks? The overarching appeal to human “sociability” may not save the day. Thomas Hobbes reminds us of why humans are driven into society: We love contemplating and exercising our own relative power; we seek honor; we relish conquest; we love to tame the superior beasts and issue preemptive strikes because we cannot judge the “wit of another.” Sociability cuts a number of ways. Nor would we know in the absence of a penetrating philosophical argument why the sociability referred to here is as present in the past as it is in the present. Do we mean what Shaftsbury and Hutcheson mean by sociability? As long as the ideas remain in context, the answer to the question is most likely no. So once again, the content of our socializing nature needs to come to the fore. In this enterprise, philosophical anthropology is no substitute for philosophy itself.