Keith Breen's new book responds to two recent developments within the subfield of political theory. First, it is situated against the backdrop of a growing interest in comparative investigations that systematically engage with two or more thinkers and their concepts. Second, the work is part of a new wave of studies that reassess the surplus of conceptualizations of modernity for political theorizing. Under Weber's Shadow expresses the unfolding (re)turn to modernity as a relevant concept that can help engender self-reflective, critical diagnoses and that has implications for thinking about political subjectivity in our time—rather than relegating “modernity” as an artifact to history or judging it as a totalizing discourse that should be rejected because it obscures our view of a world that is both irreducibly heterogeneous and constructed.

After an introduction and a brief chapter on Weber that sets the stage, the book is organized in three parts, dedicated to each of the three political theorists he examines. Breen analyzes one thinker after another in exegetical chapters that unfold their theoretical projects, each followed by chapters critically evaluating the theorists' limitations. While this structure may be conventional, the choice of thinkers is certainly not. Breen's study focuses on two of the most studied theorists that have shaped political thought in the twentieth century and beyond: Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. Breen adds to this Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work significantly influenced the liberalism-communitarianism debate of the 1980s. That this is a peculiar mix of political theorists is particularly due to their different epistemologies: Habermas's discourse-theoretical presuppositions and neo-Kantian critical theory, Arendt's unique political phenomenology and, most strikingly, MacIntyre's nostalgic neo-Aristotelianism. However, Breen takes great effort to make the case for studying them in one context. That context is Weber's path-breaking though also problematic understanding of “modernity”—and its ramifications for politics.

Breen argues that all three theorists largely accept Weber's downcast diagnosis of modernity, translated into “one-sided rationalization” or “colonization of the life-world” (Habermas), the rise of the social and the “loss of worldliness” (Arendt) or modern “bureaucratic individualism” (MacIntyre). Yet all arrive at visions of politics that fundamentally challenge Weber's antinomical dynamic, namely that presumably irreversible modern developments of secularization, rationalization, and bureaucratic rational-legal authority are juxtaposed with a subjectivist ethics of responsibility and “charismatic heroism” (p. 22) that shapes Weber's political vision—a subjectivization that is supposed to hold the bureaucratic “iron cage” in check but that ultimately affirms it. Thinking beyond Weber, Habermas, Arendt, and MacIntyre all seek to ground political alternatives that escape both the logic of domination and Weber's subjectivism. Breen claims that those alternatives are based on striking commonalities: Weber's isolated subject is rejected in favor of an intersubjective subject—defined either in terms of communicative action (Habermas), a plural world-building through acting together in the political realm (Arendt), or shared historical practices and ethical communities (MacIntyre). This engenders conceptions of politics oriented not to instrumental mastery over the world and humankind, but “to a non-manipulative politics premised on the realization of elementary human potentialities” (p. 24). However, according to Breen, by separating modern political reality into “free and fallen realms,” into areas of domination and areas of freedom, all three theorists produce new problematic dualisms that are not only false but that amount to “a covert surrender to the ‘iron cage’, a denial of possibilities” (p. 150).

For instance, Breen questions Habermas's conceptual dichotomization of strategic and communicative action and the “ontological spatialization” of system and lifeworld, which “purges lifeworld of contestation” while suggesting “dualistic politics in which citizens' capacities suffer significant curtailment” (p. 78). Similarly, Arendt is charged with separating politics from the social and purging the former from the reality of conflict instead of conceptually mediating instrumental and intersubjective elements of political action. However, while much of Breen's argument about theoretical bifurcations in Habermas and Arendt is compelling, Breen fully appreciates neither Arendt's agonism and implicit challenges to ontological spatialization, nor her engagement—in contrast to Habermas—with extraordinary, unregulated, extralegal politics that may legitimate a break with exhausted formalized legal rule. Likewise, Breen underestimates the impact of Habermas's evolution toward a two-track model of deliberative democracy that subjects administrative power to political will-formation by weak and strong publics. In Habermas's work, law now also stands between lifeworld and system as a transformer that challenges his own dualism. To illuminate problems of Habermas's theoretical turns with regard to Weber, it would have helped to engage John McCormick's work on Habermas's progressing “capitulation” to Weber's theory of modernity as the final stage of history (Weber, Habermas, and the Transformation of the European State, 2007).

The chapters on MacIntyre, though also insightful, are a bit of a letdown. Breen praises MacIntyre's non-subjectivist ethics and his concept of human flourishing—the development of uniquely human powers—through meaningful communal practices and “conversational dialogue” that are presumably blocked by modernity. Breaking with Weber's subjectivism, MacIntyre is credited with providing a “non-dichotomous theorization” of practical learning that views, in opposition to Habermas and Arendt, “system” and “the social” as “integral ethical concerns” (p. 206). But while Habermas and Arendt seek to critically situate (inter)subjectivity within political modernity's constitutive problems and possibilities, MacIntyre simply scorns modernity. His is a sweeping, decidedly anti-liberal and anti-pluralist outright rejection of modern rationalism and politics, as Breen himself critically observes. This opposition grounds a one-dimensional partisanship for presumably “consensual,” nostalgically construed pre-modernity over manipulative, instrumental and “conflictual” modernity—a dubious starting point for any critical theory of political modernity and subjectivity. MacIntyre's dualism, reflected in his dichotomous division between the modern state and virtuous local communities, begins before any serious engagement with the Janus-faced nature of modernity and politics. The “modern question” is ultimately external to his theorizing. To be sure, Breen does a good job exposing contradictions in MacIntyre, among them the fact that his Aristotelianism stands “at odds with itself, thinking politics an integral part of human life yet positing its [modern] disappearance” (p. 203). However, while constituting an interesting choice, the substantive conceptual payoff of the discussion of MacIntyre for theorizing modernity and modern politics remains limited.

Breen wants to advance a theory of modern politics beyond both Weber's monism, which reduces modernity to the logic of depersonalizing, hierarchical instrumentalism, and the bifurcation of political space and social reality. Conceiving the social as intimately political, he argues that the state and the economy, as prime institutions of modern politics, need to be the primary focus of normative theorizing—rather than civil society or local communities. And he suggests that, rather than relegating politics to an idealized sphere of mutual understanding or being-with-others, political theory needs to conceptually recognize the inherently conflictual character of modern political life, indeed the “interwovenness of the strategic and communicative without … the ascription of a single foundational logic to the ‘authentically’ political” (p. 222). In contrast to advocates of uninhibited Machtpolitik and dualistic spatial conceptions, Breen appeals for “investing the strategic attitude itself with a sense of accountability” (p. 225). Breen thus hints at a mediating course that realizes that legitimate political action at times entails affirming strategic politics and renouncing full agreement. Political action may entail moments in which coercion can have a world-enhancing role (for instance, in fighting discrimination or oppression). Such a possible recourse to strategy and coercion, Breen argues, is not always necessary, and limits need to be set to avoid dehumanizing or objectifying opponents. But what would ensure ethics that keep strategic action accountable if not intersubjectively grounded, democratic procedures and political agreements among plural actors? What mechanisms prevent Breen's “sense of accountability” from falling back into Weberian “ethics of responsibility”? Breen ultimately offers too little to develop his project beyond diagnosing potential problems in Arendt, Habermas, and MacIntyre.

Still, these qualifications notwithstanding, Breen offers an overall intriguing and thought provoking set of arguments. His for the most part well-argued and often illuminating reading of Habermas, Arendt, and MacIntyre helps broaden our understanding of these three distinct thinkers' varying critiques of and responses to Weber and the challenge of political modernity—as well as their possible limitations. In so doing, Breen also opens spaces to rethink the conditions and paradoxes of political subjectivity and action in a, for better or worse, partially globalized and persistently modern world.