Requiem for the Stranger

• Author: Lowry Pressly
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128899
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128899

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 224 –233

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128899

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Article

Requiem for the

Stranger

Lowry Pressly1

Abstract

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory.

The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a

retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were

asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century

and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be

making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they

vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent

concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people

decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the

political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms

might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published

in response to these queries.

Because we could not imagine a world without strangers, we hardly noticed

the early signs of their disappearance. Think back to the early decades of the

twenty-first century, when it became common practice to search the internet

to see what one could turn up on a new acquaintance, a first date, or the

author of an article. At the time it wasn’t obvious just how discontinuous this

was with preexisting practices like finding a phone number in the directory,

and before long, scouring the internet for information on one another became

second nature. Few worried that we had all become private detectives

1Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Lowry Pressly, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, 02138, MA.

Email: Pressly@fas.harvard.edu

1128899PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128899Political TheoryPressly

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