I would like to reply to three points made by Rogers Smith in his generous review of Grounds for Difference. First, Smith characterizes as misleading my observation that categorical differences are not intrinsically linked to inequality; he writes that “different entities must be unequal on some dimensions or else they would be identical.” To my mind, this conflates difference (which in and of itself exists on a horizontal plane) with inequality (an intrinsically vertical notion, as I understand it, implying more or less of some generally valued good). Not all differences are ipso facto forms of inequality; non-identity (or difference) is a broader notion than inequality. My aim was to distinguish difference and inequality and to ask how they are related: how categorical distinctions are implicated in the production and reproduction of inequality as a matter of contingent fact, not logical necessity.

Second, Smith criticizes the absence of politics—especially of named political actors and their projects—from my argument. This is a fair point, especially as it regards the lead chapter on difference and inequality. Other chapters do include analyses of the politics of difference and the politics of belonging, but these are treated in a highly generalized fashion; specific political agents and their struggles are mentioned only fleetingly. I analyzed nationalist political struggles in some detail in two earlier books, and my new book, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities, 2016, addresses contemporary political struggles over gender and racial categories. But Grounds for Difference is not a work of political analysis; it is concerned to map out the shifting terrain on which political struggles over difference unfold, not to analyze those struggles themselves.

Third, Smith highlights my use of the term “peoplehood” in the book’s concluding pages. Here I think Smith reads too much into my use of the term and interprets these passages in too Smithian a manner. I don’t in fact use peoplehood in a way that “encompasses both nationalism and modern state citizenship, and much more” (my emphasis). That is Smith’s preferred usage, but as outlined in my review, it is not mine. Smith rightly cautions against exaggerating the break between premodern and modern politics. And I agree that certain “elements of the tasks of constructing communities” are characteristic of premodern as well as modern political undertakings. But I wanted to highlight here the global diffusion in the last two centuries of a set of organizational forms and political-cultural templates that provide the institutional and cultural materials for various distinctively modern forms of nationalism and politicized ethnicity. The linked ideas, ideals, and organizational models of nation, state, citizenship, and popular sovereignty, I suggested, form a kind of package, with an organizational component (above all the basic form of the bureaucratic territorial state) and a cultural or ideological component (the linked ideas of peoplehood, nationhood, and citizenship). This package, I submit, is distinctively modern, though it is also high flexible, adaptable, and varied.