My thanks to Andy Scerri and Gregory P. Williams for making this symposium on Foundations and American Political Science (2022) possible. And many thanks to all the contributors for the time they have spent with my book. Their reflections not only offer an excellent composite picture of what I cover but also fan out the book’s central concerns by connecting them to a much wider array of topics than I could have done.
Since I think these contributions work as a collective summary of my book’s main themes, I have opted to introduce this symposium by retracing the twists and turns of the path I followed in writing it.
I started working on what became this book to answer questions about political theory, the field I had gone to graduate school to study. Why, I wondered, did it occupy such an odd, marginal place in the larger discipline? And for...
