Walker Connor

Abstract

I met Walker Connor in 1972 at the Glazer and Moynihan conference on ethnicity held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Glazer and Moynihan 1975). We thought we would be intimidated by the company at the conference: Talcott Parsons, Daniel Bell, Andy Greeley, Orlando Patterson, Bill Petersen, and Lucian Pye – a good sample of the elders of social theory. By then Walker had published three articles in World Politics in five years – perhaps a record – including one containing his splendid deconstruction of the theories of Karl Deutsch. But I think we acquitted ourselves well enough – especially Walker did. He was the star of the show, with numerous observations on boiling or incipient conflicts across the globe that many of the elders did not know about (or did not know existed). Unfortunately, he did not submit an essay for the volume that came out of the conference (Glazer and Moynihan 1975).