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This chapter summarizes the book's main points, covering game theory, the commonality of beliefs, the limits of rationality, social norms as correlated equilibria, and how reason is bounded by sociality, not irrationality. Among the conclusions are that game theory is an indispensable tool in modeling human behavior. Behavioral disciplines that reject or peripheralize game theory are theoretically handicapped. The Nash equilibrium is not the appropriate equilibrium concept for social theory. The correlated equilibrium is the appropriate equilibrium concept for a set of rational individuals having common priors. Social norms are correlated equilibria. The behavioral disciplines today have four incompatible models of human behavior. The behavioral sciences must develop a unified model of choice that eliminates these incompatibilities and that can be specialized in different ways to meet the heterogeneous needs of the various disciplines.

This chapter focuses on Jewish wartime sensibilities. As Jews began to serve in substantial numbers in the armies of Europe and North America, their patriotic inclinations clashed with their transnational attachments to Jews in the lands against which their country was fighting. This problem first emerged during the revolutions of 1848, when Jews fought both as rebels and as soldiers in the Habsburg armies, and it was the object of considerable discussion in the European-Jewish press. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was far more traumatic as it sundered the French- and German-Jewish communities, which had long known close business and familial ties. Rabbinic sermons, fiction, and Jewish apologetic literature displayed a powerful transnationalist sensibility, a feeling of Jewish commonality even in times of war. As such, the willingness of Jews to fight each other was heralded as the ultimate proof of worthiness for equal rights.

This chapter offers a critical engagement with Derrida's interpretation of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. Derrida's work is positioned initially in relation to Heidegger. By focusing on the topics of hospitality, law, and justice the chapter argues that Derrida has misconstrued the way in which the state of being ‘outside the law’ or ‘lawless’ (‘anomos’) works in Sophocles' play. By extension this necessitates returning to the way in which the figure of the ‘stranger’ works within the play and therefore with those philosophical positions—such as Deconstruction—in which concepts such as ‘alterity’ are fundamental. This will allow not just for a critique of Derrida but for the subsequent development of the ways in which place and commonality figure within the play and equally within the larger philosophical project delimited by a concern with justice.

This chapter defends a version of the indexical contextualist form of moderate relativism: the attempt to endorse appearances of faultless disagreement within the framework in which a sentence at a context at the index of the context determines its appropriate truth-value. Many object that any such an indexical proposal would fail to account for intuitions of (genuine) disagreement as revealed in ordinary disputes in the domain. The defence from this objection exploits presuppositions of commonality to the effect that the addressee is relevantly like the speaker of the context.

Reading Milton's prose chronologically, there is no way to prepare for the differences between the last antiprelatical tract (April 1642) and the first divorce tract (July 1643) — or, for most readers, between Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Yale edition of Milton's prose. The earlier, antiprelatical treatises are marked by a Pauline absolutism that will not compound with human weakness as an inevitable condition lying within the bounds of divine forgiveness. But beginning with the first divorce tract and extending through the Areopagitica, Milton confronts with compassion a life of mistake and the inseparability of good and evil in this imperfect world. This transformation can be understood in part by a shift in sources: Whereas the antiprelatical tracts apotheosize the spiritual aristocrats of the Reformation who emphasize difference, the divorce tracts draw on natural law theorists such as Hugo Grotius and John Selden, who emphasize commonality.

This chapter examines how friendships operate and are maintained. Men were asked how they were helped by their friends. Being supported, being listened to, receiving advice, and providing companionship were the four most frequently mentioned methods. Men were asked what they did with their friends, and sports, mentioned by 80% of the respondents, was the most common activity. Communicating was second. Finally, men were asked how they made friends with other guys. Finding commonalities, making friends through work, and reaching out and being friendly were the most common approaches. How men lose friends is also discussed.

This chapter poses the same question posed to the men to 120 women. Differences do exist between how men and women view friendships though there are also many commonalities. For example, women shop with their friends; men don't. Women do not watch sports with their friends; men do. Women are more apt to say they have enough friends and to put a higher value on friendships than men. They are also more apt to be supportive and encouraging, and put a higher value on frequent contact with their friends. Women believed their mothers had more friends than the men believed their fathers had. Finally, the fear of appearing homosexual was not discussed as an impediment to same-sex friendships as it was for men.

The chapter will construct a different narrative on white working class politics related to multiculturalism and change. Commonalities exist with minority communities in terms of class, values and space as well as personal interactions such as relationships and marriage, in the context of work or school. White working class communities have also been at the forefront of collective bargaining actions through trade unions and have played a critical role in demonstrating a desire for anti-racism in popular movements such as 2tone. This suggests that white working class communities can be viewed as being inclusive and progressive on multiculturalism. But it must be remembered that polling on immigration has revealed that most social classes in Britain favour of greater restrictions on immigration. The message that needs to be emphasised is that white working class communities should be regarded as being as diverse as any other group in society in response to issues of immigration. There is a need for institutions to reconnect and promote coalitions of interest between different groups at a grassroots level.

Sympathy is built upon the imagination, which is cultivated by education. This chapter looks at what Smith means by education, giving particular attention to the passive cultural elements that inform self-identity and awareness of others. The chapter first looks at the rational process by which a moral spectator enters into the persona of another, particularly those with whom he or she does not share cultural or political commonalities.

This chapter analyzes the evolution of Jewish–Muslim relations in the modern and contemporary periods, the main literature in the field, and the components of the divergent roads taken by Jews and Muslims, which reflect the differences and tensions that dominate their relationship. The authors go beyond an emphasis on ties within the Arabo-Muslim world and the effect of the Arab–Israeli conflict to discuss the cohabitation of Muslim and Jewish groups in the new geographies of the European Union, Australia, and Central Asia. In addition to announcing the socioeconomic, political, and cultural context in which the book's essays are located, the chapter summarizes the contributing scholars' theoretical/methodological approaches and briefly presents the essays that comprise each of the fifteen chapters.

This chapter elaborates upon Judeo-Muslim interdependence and a sense of common destiny. During the late nineteenth century, Jews constituted the single largest ethno-religious group in Salonica and a smaller but active minority in Izmir. The chapter discusses Ottoman patriotism and loyalty, explaining the motives behind Jewish support for Ottoman Muslims in the context of the empire's war with Greece in 1897, and suggests that many Jews, as an expression of their commitment to the empire, went so far as to identify with Islam itself during this period. This pattern of Jewish allegiance to multilingual and multireligious empires can be found elsewhere and is perhaps most notable in the Hapsburg context. Under the late Ottoman state as well, Jews sometimes even surpassed Muslims in their exuberance for imperial causes.

This chapter emphasizes commonalities among Muslims and Jews, but adopts a macro approach and crosses from modern to contemporary history, covering central Balkan states such as Edirne and Salonica in the heyday of Ottoman rule, and subsequently treating Romania and parts of Yugoslavia before and after its disintegration in the 1990s. It is sombre—a picture of Christian persecution of Jews and their rescue by Muslims. In post-Ottoman attacks by Christian nationalists on both Muslims and Jews, their common fate is significant. The consequences of the Serbian nationalist tides in the final decade of the twentieth century—the killing of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and the departure of Jews from Sarajevo to other lands—are cases in point.

This study of the former Ottoman Empire and the Balkans accentuates commonalities, shared destinies, and the necessity of interdependence. The Judeo-Muslim connection in Germany—a member-state of the European Union—centers on the large Turkish-Muslim community that seeks to emulate German Jewry of the past and present. Turkish-Muslim immigrants in the new geography familiarize themselves with the German-Jewish narrative of historic sufferings and associate their own concerns over racism with the ostracizing of Jews under the Third Reich. Muslim communal leaders compare the Holocaust with the fire-bombing of Turkish homes by German rightist extremists; they use today's Jewish community organizations as examples of how to organize as a minority; and Turkish immigrant associations claim minority rights from the authorities identical to those of German Jews. Simultaneously, Muslim leaders evince solidarity with their Jewish compatriots, notably in Berlin, where attempts have been made to forge an alliance against discrimination. The situation in Germany is different from in France, where Muslim–Jewish tensions in the past ran high and even resulted in violence. Anti-Muslim activity following 9/11 and attributed to racist elements reinforced fears—real or imaginary—that the fate of the country's Turkish-Muslim minority in the twenty-first century might duplicate the Jewish tragedies of the previous century.

This chapter introduces the problematic of the book via a reading of Western media responses to the Arab Spring. On the one hand, commentators read the protests in terms of commonality: either as evidence that protestors shared a common goal, or as evidence that they lacked the cohesion to sustain democratic institutions. On the other hand, commentators read the protests in terms of political freedom: as expressions of the human capacity to shape the world we share together. These interpretations of the Arab Spring correspond to two different ways of seeing democracy. The first view presumes that democracy requires that the people share something in common. While democratic theorists are predominantly oriented towards commonality, this book will argue instead for emphasizing political freedom. On this latter view, democracy emerges through the interactions between plural persons who do not know whether or what they have in common. The protests in Tahrir Square in 2011 are, therefore, paradigmatic of democracy: the protestors acted together without knowing whether others would join with them, without knowing whether they could agree about their aims, and without knowing whether they would succeed. Yet they acted anyhow, and so expressed their political freedom.

This chapter reveals and interrogates the dominant tendency in contemporary democratic theory to presume that some kind of commonality is required in democracy. This claim may at first seem counterintuitive: many theorists are quite critical of specific sources of commonality – such as ethnicity and culture. Yet, instead of rejecting commonality as such, they modify the kind of commonality that they believe is essential to democracy. What could explain the persistent allure of commonality to democratic theorists? The chapter argues that theorists continue to insist that democracies need commonality because they believe it is necessary in order to meet three democratic requirements: for a shared identity, affective ties between citizens, and collective agency. Commonality can only work to secure identity, affect, and agency if a number of other corollary assumptions hold true: assumptions about meaning, language, psychology, and politics. In order to shift away from commonality and towards political freedom, these corollaries must be critically examined as well.