How does one thank a writer whose understanding of one's own book runs deep, whose perspicacity is undeniable, and whose disagreements are of such consequence? Only by engaging in debate, I think. Werner Binder grasps what is at stake in Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies, and he has issued a challenge that rests on two pillars: a Hegelian political philosophy of recognition and reason in modernity, and a Durkheimian account of egalitarian (or proto-egalitarian) bonds of solidarity. Atop these two pillars Binder artfully entablatures, as both a counterpoint to and re-articulation of the theory of power I am developing, an account of impersonal egalitarianism as not simply a modern possibility, but rather modernity's essential dynamic or even telos. Binder's careful reply operates in both an analytic and a normative register, and as such articulates in its criticisms one of the central enthusiastic pretensions of Power in Modernity. Throughout the book, and especially in its last chapter, I consider a set of intellectual problems and projects that are held in common by sociological theory and political philosophy-though not without tension and ambivalence. These complexities perhaps explain why his review can be both a sympathetic reconstruction of my book-notable in its hermeneutic charity-and yet also an outline for a social and political theory that is quite different from my own. Binder accepts the theoretical terms of art developed in part I-rector, actor, other, and project. He also finds convincing my rendering of chains of power and their representation in seventeenth-and eighteenth