Preface
The University of Chicago Press published this book. They also have published their in-house style book The Chicago Manual of Style as an industry standard since 1906. The edition my youngest aunt published this century advises that an author’s preface normally includes
“reasons for undertaking the work, method of research (if this has some bearing on readers’ understanding of the text), acknowledgements, and sometimes permissions granted for the use of previously published material.”
This study was evoked by the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy.
Not reasons. An association from events rather than a deduction from principles. My kind of guy.
And he didn’t undertake the work. William A. Galston is nowhere in that sentence. It’s science. He’s a scientist. Their subject is nature, phenomena, not action, hence the passive.
This study was evoked by the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. When? At the latest, the year of copyright, 1975. At the earliest?
This study began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago.
He defended in 1973. When did the dissertation begin? They usually do in course work leading to the master’s degree.
Chicago awarded his in 1969, 1 year before Kurt Vonnegut’s. William A. also served in the United States Marine Corps that year and in 1970, achieving sergeant. Efficient, for sure.
USMC demands efficiency and so does Chicago, one reporting directly to the White House and the other to Wall Street. But when while pulling that busy double shift was his dissertation topic evoked? Did he arrive at Chicago with his dissertation already immanent?
I must also mention Allan Bloom; now of the University of Toronto, whose vigorous teaching and deep personal concern for his students made such a profound impression on so many who studied with him at Cornell in the 1960s.
Ooo. Cornell University named William Arthur a bachelor of arts in 1967. So he had arrived at Ithaca circa 1963. Cornell, by the way, is the only purpose-built research university in the Ivy League of colleges named for capitalists and pledged since 1954 not to give sports scholarships.
We of the national elite were getting out of training an officer class instead to host foundation and government research for technocrats. Our federal government started funding Southeast Asia area studies at Cornell 4 years later, 1958.
That university was a think tank for every side of the war for Viet Nam across its whole run. Nonetheless I don’t see a trace of scholarship and science on the nations of Viet Nam or of Southeast Asia anywhere in William’s life or work.
Cornell was also the one Ivy openly receptive and supportive of Jews from its founding. 1 hundred years later there was Allan Bloom on the faculty and our William studying, engaging together in conversation that I take it led to this book.
So, this study was evoked by the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. He means 1963-1975. You know, when his father Arthur William campaigned and won against the use of Agent Orange. When it became possible for my aunt, William Arthur’s close contemporary, later to become publisher of the University of Chicago Press,
an opportunity his mother Dale Judith pioneered over those years as director of a clinic for disturbed families, in Orange, next town over from my hometown Woodbridge, which separates Orange from where Dale raised Arthur, Hamden, all surrounding New Haven. That contemporary crisis of liberal democracy.
Every family I knew there and then belonged in that clinic. Aha. William Arthur Galston is one of my people as a man as well as an anthropologist. What is his problem of history?
We have posted 1 Viet Nam letter on William A. Galston’s father Arthur W. Galston on November 9, 2023.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.
The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.