This book has taken some ten years to complete. It does not focus on a single debate in a particular field but weaves together, across personal and political change, themes in several. It is a conversational book. In 1985, at the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the founding of Social Studies (my undergraduate major) at Harvard, I realized that Democratic Individuality is my attempt, like that of others in the program, to come to terms with Marx's and Weber's politics. Here some of my debt to Stanley Hoffman, Barrington Moore, and Fritz Ringer is evident.

In April 1989, I attended the twentieth anniversary of the Harvard strike against university training of officers for the Vietnam War. Harvard ROTC is now charmingly a day-care center attended by the children of some of the strikers. This book's conception of democratic theory and institutions is a response to my experience with the promise of participatory democracy in Students for a Democratic Society and subsequently. It reaffirms the insight in SDS's founding Port Huron statement that “having one's way” is a distortion of a more human “having a way of one's own.” Our disbelief and anger at the immense cruelty of the Vietnam War and the barbarism of American racism resonate in this book's arguments on just war and democratic internationalism.