William Connolly clarifies the affinities binding together disparate theorists who have sought to comprehend the shape and prospects of modernity. He reveals how thinkers adamantly opposed to one another at one level implicitly share assumptions and demands at a more basic level; and invites Nietzsche - the thinker who disturbs modern theories by assessing them from the hypothetical perspective of a non-modern future - to expose patterns of insistence inside the theories of his predecessors.