This thoughtful and innovative book seeks to locate the polarities between which the Western intellectual and political traditions move in terms of a struggle within Odysseus's soul between endless departures and explorations and burstings of limits and “homeward returns” to family and polity that register his awareness of the perdurability of limits. In the end, Odysseus identifies (however ambivalently) with those limits, and his struggles and resolutions as recounted by Homer help to establish a framework in terms of which Deneen locates and evaluates the debate between Martha Nussbaum and her critics concerning the attractions and deficiencies of cosmopolitanism as both an ethical and a political program and set of values.