I am grateful to Don Herzog for his careful and generous reading of my book, and I am delighted to have the opportunity to acknowledge, address, and/or clarify my aims in response to his concerns. His biggest issue with the book seems to be its “unhappily abstract or ahistorical” use of Ancient Greek mourning practices as a lens through which to view contemporary responses to loss. Herzog balks, for example, at my use of the term “nationalistic” to describe the Periclean funeral oration. I fully understand his concern and offer a discussion of this specific issue, citing various sources who share my view that while not without important differences, the term is nevertheless of value in engaging with the Greeks and, moreover, no less ahistorical than the use of the term “city–state” to describe Athens (p. 29). Indeed, I seek to employ the Greeks in a way that—without wishing to elevate myself or to drag them down to my level—Bonnie Honig and Peter Euben, among others, do: as offering illuminating heuristics for thinking about the contemporary. Moreover, there is, perhaps, also something decidedly Greek about employing necessarily imperfect historical parallels for dialectical, didactic, and/or theoretical purposes.

Such are the intricacies of Herzog’s reading that my response to his first concern highlights another: my inveterate name-dropping. What Herzog is too polite to say is that this could be an attempt to bolster problematic claims with the authority of much better scholars, or worse still, perhaps, to seek—out of intellectual insecurity—to display a false erudition. Both are perfectly possible. I would, however, suggest that this is just a reflection of how I think, that writing for me is a form of bricolage driven by my enthusiasm for, and thus my desire to acknowledge, the work of others. I could, nevertheless, be wrong.

Herzog identifies many other areas of concern—most notably his suggestion of a Rousseauean paradox in my work to which, by way of response, I offer a Du Boisean hope—but I would like to close by saying something about the “mortalist humanism” that he references in his review. Herzog is right to note that I see some such humanism as a precursor to a productive form of democratic politics; nevertheless, I am aware that my argument is not as clear as it could have been in this regard, in part, perhaps, because I attempted to retrofit an existing language in a way that caused confusion. Rather than espousing a commitment to the mortalist humanist view that in death human beings achieve a form of equality as moral and political agents, mine is an argument for “a form of mortalist humanism” (p. 58), but one that is made and not found. Thus, I argue, America should have mourned Osama bin Laden because it was in its interests to do so, and that seeing this required seeing him as a human being with need and goals, rather than the embodiment of a metaphysical evil with no motives beyond its own expression.