Abstract
Theory at its best should be a kind of friendship. Thinking is something one does on one's own; but having thought one's way to a set of theoretical positions, one exposes those intellectual commitments to the test of seeing how they stand up to friendly but challenging scrutiny. I'm grateful for the critical commentaries on my book featured in this symposium because they seem to me to have generated interesting and thoughtful responses to what I have written; but I'm no less grateful because they also nicely exemplify this spirit of dialogical friendship. In that way, they help to vindicate the enterprise of theory as I have just characterized it. These theorists are also my friends, and the friendship is constitutively grounded in a shared commitment to theory as a vocation.
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