Of Death and Dominion: The Existential Foundations of Governance

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments First, to Randall, whose extensive comments on an earlier draft greatly enhanced the clarity and coherence of my own thoughts. His unsparing but caring devotion to the art of critique and engagement has been a constant source of intellectual nourishment and personal growth over the years. Gary Saul Morson’s warm support for this project has been humbling, and its appearance owes much to his unwavering faith in its merits. Thanks also go to Don Levine, whose stimulating invocation of Georg Simmel , and his kind words of encouragement and theoretical probity gave me confidence to continue and develop this project further. There are many others whose role in my intellectual and personal life while I worked concurrently on this theme and other related issues in social theory and global life has been a source of great inspiration, even though they may not have been intimately involved in its specific development. Of those, I would like to express indebtedness to Craig Calhoun, whose decent humanity and constant support over the years gave me the energy and spirit needed to focus on ideas and on life, to ignore that which was extraneous, distracting or lifeless in academic “life,” and thus ultimately to see this as well as other projects to fruition. And for their irreplaceable friendship and generosity, I would like to thank, as always and in no particular order, Khaldoun Samman, Hisham Bizri, John Michael, Sharon Willis, Tom Dipiero, Mary Layoun, Mazhar al-Zoby, Mohannad Ghawanmeh, and Mazen Halabi. A few words of genuine appreciation are warranted about the relative freedom from disciplinary bondage I found in certain academic environments, which allowed me to develop further intellectually and personally. There were places where I profited from a healthy combination of liberty and challenge, as in Macalester College, where I spent four wonderful years, enjoying the fortune of having stellar students and the freedom to mix genres and ideas in a way that would never have been tolerated in more narrowly focused institutions. I found that it is precisely in such an environment that when one writes, even about death, one may constantly be infused with the life-defining vitality of integrated discovery, so that it becomes finally possible to discover the healthy part of certain ideas that would, otherwise, remain uncanny, distant, or intolerable. vii OF DEATH AND DOMINION ...