Baumann examines the recurring efforts to establish fraternal relations in modern societies by political, and in particular, radical means. He proceeds by examining a series of related examples, beginning with a brief discussion of the metaphor for fraternity itself, and then he turns to a consideration of the historical development of the quest for fraternity.

He first examines the quest for fraternity among the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Baumann then turns to the sans-culottes before and during the period of the French Revolution. The third analysis is philosophical, rather than historical, and treats Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to understand radically and thus justify the relation of fraternity to terror. His conclusion sums up the argument about the necessary self-contradiction and failure of the pursuit of political fraternity and points to the long-discarded concept of aesthetic education developed as an alternative to the political pursuit of fraternity by the poet and philospher Friedrich Schiller.