ABSTRACT
The most profound challenges provoked by the suicidal and murderous assault on the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC have been to prevailing accounts of political judgement. The New World Order was announced, to be followed by the Coming Anarchy, the Conflict of Civilizations, the promise of Globalization and all the rest. It seemed that people were living through an era of transitions, of multiple trajectories, a world that had become much looser and differentiated than the rigid divisions of the Cold War. Modern theories of international relations usually begin with some version of the observation that the states system is fragmented and thus governed in only the most rudimentary way. The consequence is a sequence of more or less peaceful periods of accommodation and adjustment between states, hedgehogs in a bag, as the nineteenth-century thinker Arthur Schopenhauer once called them, and periods of violent change as various states became more powerful.
