Acknowledgments

SINCE I am someone who learns more from conversation than from books, my friends and interlocutors are my coauthors, however much they may wish to deny such complicity. Most of the blame can be given to Don Moon and George Shulman, who have both read most of what I have written, and tried their best to make it clearer and deeper. Wendy Brown, William Connolly, Jason Frank, Patrick Deneen, Michael Janover, Tracy Strong, Ann and Warren Lane, Dana Villa, Melissa Orlie, Gary Shiffman, and Roxanne Euben have read one or more chapters. Their insights, learning, and generous intelligence have alerted me to crucial absences, discursive liberties, and overstatement. Then there are those friends and colleagues with whom I continue to have general conversations about political theory and politics: Sheldon Wolin, Kirstie McClure, Arlene Saxonhouse, Terence Ball, Tracy Strong, George Kateb, Stephen Salkever, John Wallach, Josiah Ober, John Schaar, and Hanna Pitkin.

Since all but one of these chapters began as lectures or talks, I owe much to the people who invited me and to the people who responded with suggestions and questions. These include Andy Sabl, Robert Meister, Ronnie Lipschutz, Susan Bickford, and my new colleagues at Duke, Rom Coles, Kim Curtis, and Elizabeth Kiss. Over the years Nan Keohane has taken time from her hectic schedule to talk with me about various issues discussed in this book.

A conversation with George Kateb about my need to confront the role of loss and death in Platonic political theory brought me up short and to the themes of this book, especially those of its final chapter. That intellectual challenge became something more with the unexpected death of my sister Laura, to whom this book is dedicated, though I suspect only chapter 4 would have given her pleasure. Penultimately, I want to thank the anonymous reviewers of Princeton University Press and Ian Malcolm for his encouragement and suggestions.

Finally, it would be ungrateful not to give thanks to Zoe Sodja, Cheryl Van De Veer, and especially Betsy Wootten, who typed the manuscript for this technologically challenged academic. Their patience with my lousy typing, barely legible handwriting, and various pastings and wandering arrows is a testament to their intelligence, fortitude, and friendship.

Though all the chapters, save the introductory chapter 1, have been published elsewhere, none has simply been reprinted. In the case of chapters 5 and 6, the changes have been limited to a few revisions, additions, and cross-references. In the case of chapter 2, the last third of the essay has been rewritten; the same is true of chapter 3, which was originally limited to Arendt’s Hellenism. Chapter 4 has been less extensively revised, but here, too, I have added several pages, rewritten others, and, as elsewhere, referred to previous and subsequent chapters to make this more of a book than a collection of essays. Chapter 7 appeared in a substantially shorter version in Political Theory.

I would like to thank the University of Minnesota Press for permission to reprint chapter 4, which originally appeared in Public Space and Democracy, edited by Marcel He´naff and Tracy B. Strong (2001), and chapter 5, which first appeared in Vocations of Political Theory, edited by Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino (2000); Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint chapter 3, originally entitled “Arendt’s Hellenism,” which appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, edited by Dana Villa (2000); and Polis for permission to reprint “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Hellenic Studies for Political and Theoretical Life” as part of chapter 2. The essay appeared in vol. 15, nos. 1 and 2 (1998): 45–76.