thinks that the theory enterprise is advanced by rendering this level of debate
more explicit.
There is certainly one area where theory has retreated by comparison to its
predecessors in the 1960 s and 1970 s. Concern about extensive economic
inequality within capitalist states, and between regions of the world, has not
found as active an expression in recent political theory. There are notable
exceptions (Benhabib 2002 ; Brown 1995 ; Frazer 1997 ; Held 2004 ), although it is
fair to say that few match the desire for egalitarianism with institutional
analyses showing how to promote it. Some theorists who engage this question
identify a deep tension between reducing economic inequality and expanding
cultural diversity. Another view is that the very institutional ethos needed to
sustain pluralism would also carry within it a promising basis from which to
build a majority assemblage to reduce inequality in the domains of income,
job security, educational opportunity, and retirement prospects (Connolly
1995 , 1999 ). If pluralism and egalitarianism do set conditions of possibility for
each other, the political paradox may be that to make progress on either front
it is also necessary to have already made some progress on the other. Theorists
committed to both egalitarianism and multidimensional pluralism today
must come to terms with the distinctive conditions in which contemporary
states operate, constrained on one side by the global reach of capital,
on another by domestic corporate interests, and on another by evangelical
groups prepared to subordinate their own economic grievances to a theocratic
agenda. The current hegemony of neoliberal economic theory over
left-Keynesianism translates this triangle into a square, as Mark Blyth ( 2002 )
has shown so eVectively. At the very least, new versions of the issues that
Habermas placed high on the agenda in 1974 have moved front and
center again.
In taking this romp through the last four and a half decades, I have not only
ignored several highways and byways, I have so far bypassed intersections
between the debates of each decade and orientations to the history of political
thought. However, each time a new movement in contemporary theory
emerges, the established canon of historical texts shifts as well; and each
time the canon shifts, new issues emerge in need of engagement. In my
graduate school, courses in modern political thought were typically Anglo-
centered. Hobbes, Locke, Burke, and Mill were on the list. Plato, Aristotle,
Rousseau, and Tocqueville were thrown in for good measure. Marx, Kant,
and Hegel hovered in the wings. And Lucretius, Spinoza, Diderot, and
Nietzsche were outside the canon altogether. All of these latterWgures have
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