Letter from the Coeditors

• Date: 01 April 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211069594
• Published date: 01 April 2022
• Author: Nancy Luxon,Elisabeth Ellis,Joshua Foa Dienstag,Davide Panagia
• Subject Matter: Editorial

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211069594

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(2) 191 –192

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211069594

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Editorial

Letter from the

Coeditors

Issue 50.2, April 2022

As this issue of Political Theory goes to press, we are approaching the two-

year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. It lightened the hearts of the

editors and the members of the Executive Editorial Committee to read the

fantastic proposals that members of our community made in response to our

call for contributions to the journal’s fiftieth anniversary issue. In the midst of

circumstances that made our work and home lives difficult, members of our

disciplinary community were still able to propose fabulous works of imagi-

native theorizing.

The dangerous times we are all experiencing have also affected our quo-

tidian work as political theorists. Many of us are having trouble finding time

to do original research, not to mention ordinary professional services such as

refereeing our colleagues’ manuscripts. These days it is not uncommon for us

at Political Theory to make ten referee requests before securing two commit-

ments to review, and we hear from our fellow editors that other journals are

experiencing similar difficulties. The word many of us reach for to describe

our now limited capacities for this kind of work is “stretched.”

We use the word “community” in this letter’s first paragraph advisedly.

While the journal and the discipline it serves have grown over the past half

century, becoming more (if insufficiently) diverse and in many ways more

professional, political theorists themselves have cultivated a vocational ethos

and a community of practice that support our scholarly endeavors. Political

theorists are especially well placed to understand that as our discipline moves

from a small collection of people who know each other well to a larger, more

anonymous, more diverse subfield, we cannot rely exclusively on formal sys-

tems of incentives to motivate the public-goods provision that grounds our

collective endeavor.

The pandemic (of course!) has provided an illuminating natural experi-

ment for the conditions of provision of disciplinary service: while the formal

incentives have not changed, our informal networks of social and profes-

sional relationships have grown thin without the face-to-face interactions that

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