Introduction

More people are working at political theory in the academic world than ever before. The field is thriving, perhaps because there is so little serious thinking and arguing about politics outside the academy. The neoconservative think tanks of the 1970s and early 1980s provide the only recent example of the unity of theory and practice. Leftist and even liberal arguments these days are largely theoretical in character: professors writing for other professors. This is true even of feminism, which one would expect to have significant resonance off-campus. Without that resonance, political theory is a kind of alienated politics, an enterprise carried on at some distance from the activities to which it refers. The result, very often, is endless refinement, esoteric jargon, romantic posturing, and fierce intramural polemic. Nonetheless, interesting work gets done, and if some of it is written in code, it is still possible to detect certain tendencies that may one day have practical impact.

These tendencies suggest some reason for hope—as I think the following brief essays will indicate. I asked each of the authors to write a “report from the field” aimed at lay readers, a report not merely descriptive but also cri...