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.