Engaging with Andreas Wimmer in a “Critical Dialogue” and having my book National Secession paired with his book Nation Building is both flattering and humbling. National Secession certainly falls prey to the sins listed in Wimmer’s review. Mea culpa! Yet, these are largely the results of purposeful choice rather than oversight. Whether the choices in National Secession are fruitful for political science research is an important debate with implications far beyond the present works.

I would make just one clarification, however. Although it is correct that the theory presented in National Secession focuses on secessionist leaders, its emphasis is on leaders building links with, and so being constrained by, very independent political actors. All are independent thinkers, whether they are intellectuals or peasants, homemakers or clerics. The emphasis is on building ties with each of these reasoning individuals, who know as much as the secessionist leaders, but typically know different things. I return to this clarification in my final point.

The review points to three major issues for our discipline. First, the theory in National Secession conforms to a practice in which first-order, often microlevel, assumptions and causal links are not tested directly. Case-study materials are introduced to illustrate causal linkages, but empirical tests focus on the macrolevel patterns that are predicted by the theory. In much political economy and political sociology work on civil wars, for example, assumptions of individual greed or grievance are not tested directly, but the larger societal patterns of the relationship of opportunity and deprivation to violence are tested. By contrast, the theory in Wimmer’s Nation Building chooses to leave unexplored many of the underlying motivational and causal assumptions because its approach to theory building does not require identifying integrating assumptions. These two approaches to theory and testing have long complemented one another in political science and enriched one another. Perhaps this is no longer true, and the time has come for a new discussion of the structure of empirical theory in our discipline.

Second, the theory in National Secession synthesizes findings from many specific studies conducted by others and questions the necessity or centrality of a few; however, in most instances it seeks to identify the larger logic that accounts for the patterns that emerge across many different studies. In the development of this synthesis based on its integrating logic, it emphasizes some concepts such as campaigns and persuasion over such usual concepts as movements and framing that would be inconsistent with its core assumptions. Whether synthesis on an integrating logic is a fruitful approach to theory building should be the subject of an open discussion in the profession: National Secession breaks with the practice that many first experience in graduate seminars, and see confirmed daily in contemporary political discussions, whereby alternative views are dismissed, differences are overdrawn, opportunities to bridge intellectual gaps are not engaged, and knowledge is not cumulative. Perhaps the time for synthesizing empirical theory has passed, and we need a discussion of better ways for knowledge to advance in our discipline.

Third, a major theme of National Secession is a view of politics as a realm of thought and action that is not simply a superstructure on a psychological, cultural, or economic base. The book presents politics as the process by which people come together to achieve common purposes. Individuals typically come with diverse micro-motives, emotions, identity repertoires, and interests, and this diversity leads them to have diverging orientations to the common purpose as an end in itself or a means to other ends. National Secession seeks to identify the conditions under which the pursuit of a common goal of independence among such individuals emerges. Certainly, the discipline has learned much from theories based on abstract individuals motivated solely by identities, norms, consumption, or power, and there is still much to be learned from proceeding with these rigorous theories of political psychology, political sociology, political economy, and political realism. And yet National Secession presents the claim that part of the hard theorizing that needs to be done should focus on how individuals with diverse motivations come together in political action for common goals. My book places on the agenda the task of improving on its admittedly elementary theory about this political process.