The Berkeley School of Political Theory as Moment and as Tradition

Abstract

“The Berkeley School of Political Theory as Moment and as Tradition” Dean Mathiowetz Politics Department, University of California, Santa Cruz dpmath@ucsc.edu Article accepted for publication and forthcoming in PS: Political Science & Politics This is the author final version. Each essay in this rich symposium 1 draws out something crucial in the material conditions, personal relationships, historical conjectures, and shadows of influence that together made political theory at UC Berkeley a highly distinctive endeavor in the 1960s and after. And because the whole is more than the sum of its parts, reading the essays together reveals a series of events, relationships, ideas, and responses to these, over many years and multiple generations of scholars, for which the term “school” seems both apt and altogether too static. What’s more, to make sense of the question of the ‘Berkeley school’—whether, when, whom—we must necessarily grapple also with the question of what exploring these questions means to us, and who we even are who ask or seek answers to them. It turns out that the 1 This essay is both a commentary on and contribution to a symposium on the Berkeley School of political theory in journal PS: Political Science and Politics. Other contributors to the symposium are John Gunnell, Terrence Ball, Tracy Strong, Emily Hauptmann, and Brian Weiner. I was the symposium guest editor, along with Emily Hauptmann.