In The Transformation of Political Community Andrew Linklater has given us a most impressive synthesis of critical normative thinking about international relations theory, and I might as well begin by emphasizing that I will not be able to do justice to the rich detail of its content in the space here allotted to me, and so I shall not try. I offer just an individual response to Linklater's book, addressed to its core theoretical assumptions. I shall propose a critique of it in two particulars. These relate to a central ambiguity in its underwriting of discourse ethics on the one hand, and to a certain too ready levelling, so to say, vis-à-vis modes of social oppression and exclusion on the other.

Richard Rorty has proposed the hypothesis that those who came to the rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe are more likely to have been moved to help by parochialist sorts of consideration — sympathy for a colleague, fellow national, and the like — than they are by universalist motives having to do with the proper treatment of human beings. Although inconclusive on many other points, the research on rescuer behaviour during the Holocaust embodies a consensus contrary to Rorty's hypothesis; and extensive reference to the rescuers’own testimony supports that consensus.

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