ABSTRACT
Alexander Wendt was my dissertation adviser and I was his teaching assistant during my last semester in graduate school. Naturally this connection makes it difficult for me to evaluate his work in a fully objective manner. Former students are expected to say nice things about their former teachers, especially when they still depend on them for letters of recommendation. Yet, while it may be true that the ties that bind mentees to their mentors are nothing short of feudaluniversities are medieval institutions after all!—the contemporary academic culture is not only feudal, but also thoroughly modern. As a result, any given field of scholarship will not only be characterized by various medieval residues, but also by the same paradoxes as all other features of modernity. The modern tradition, as Octavio Paz has pointed out, is fundamentally polemical and unstable since it is held together by unfaithfulness to tradition itself. To be modern is to revolt against authorities and established ways; it is not to search for ‘the truth’, but instead constantly to suggest new ways in which the world may be interpreted. ‘[M]odernity is a sort of creative self-destruction’ (Paz 1974: 3).1
