The fundamental requirement of a politics worth the name is that we have an account of human action that decisively marks its distance from assumptions about action as the successful assertion of will. If there is no hinterland to human acting except the contest of private and momentary desire, meaningful action is successful action, an event in which a particular will has imprinted its agenda on the ‘external’ world. Or, in plainer terms, meaning is power; Thrasymachus in the Republic was right, and any discourse of justice is illusory.2