ABSTRACT
I am, by turns, honored, gratified, challenged and inspired by this rich set of essays – as I was by the conference organized by Sam Chambers and Alan Finlayson on my work at Swansea University in the Spring of 2007. Alan Finlayson’s generous and far-ranging introduction brings me back to early provocations from which my work has proceeded, as it also points to issues that call for attention now. It is true that my youth, in a factory family in Flint, Michigan, both provoked my later involvements in economic egalitarianism, civil rights, feminism, anti-war movements, gay rights, and the issue of pluralism and also “opened a wound” in my thinking as the latter movements, noble as they were, fomented resentment in white working-class families neglected by them – a wound that set into motion thinking about ontology, ethics, pluralist politics, capitalism, global machines, and a new cosmopolitanism. It is true, too, that my dissertation on political science and ideology was activated by the gap between the way several of my professors thought about politics and the experiences of constituencies I knew best. I worried soon after that about how new movements that I now embraced were helping to foment resentments that later morphed into support for the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine. But a wound is not enough, as Finlayson knows well. Productive political
thinking grows out of wounds, attachments and hopes folding into each other. Can one’s thinking rise above its early sources, address new issues and identifications, and then circle back to engage the initial sources and constituencies again in new ways? It is a challenge and privilege to be a political theorist. One aspires to link the privilege to social responsibility. The essays in this collection activate my thinking because they are so alive
and exploratory. Experience tells me, however, that when an author writes a “Reply to My Critics” it seldom does justice to the rich insights and challenges posed to him or her. Some readers, if they are like me, may even skip some of the essays to get to the “debate” at the end. And the reply tends to take on a defensive tone as it points to portions or themes in one’s work that this or that writer has “neglected”.
