Loneliness as a Way of Life PDF
Preview Loneliness as a Way of Life
Loneliness as a Way of Life Loneliness as a Way of Life T HO M A S DU M M HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, Eng land 2008 Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dumm, Thomas L. Loneliness as a way of life / Thomas Dumm. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-03113-5 (alk. paper) 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Loneliness. 3. Grief. I. Title. JA66.D84 2008 320.01—dc22 2008006567 To William E. Connolly Contents Preface ix Prologue: Cordelia’s Calculus 1 Chapter I. Being 21 Chapter II. Having 51 Chapter III. Loving 91 Chapter IV. Grieving 127 Epilogue: Writing 171 Notes 181 Index 187 Preface Why would someone who has devoted so much of his adult life to the study of politics write a book about loneliness? I sn’t it a radical departure from the concerns of polity to focus on a subject that on the face of it has nothing to do with our political condition? Does it even matter for our politics whether we are lonely? I believe that it matters profoundly. Loneliness as a Way of Life is the result of a lengthy and sometimes convoluted intellectual and emotional journey, but the core intuition that has persistently in- formed the thinking and the writing of this book is that many of our most important understandings about the shape of our present communal existence—the division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the es- tranged and isolating forms that our relationships with our most intimate acquaintances sometimes assume, the weakness of our at- tachments to each other and hence to our lives in common—are all manifestations of the loneliness that has permeated the modern world. We are the inheritors of a legacy of loneliness. But loneliness is not something that can easily be described through the usual ways of doing political theory. As I worked on this book, it gradually be- came clear to me that the subject of loneliness, because of its iso- lating qualities—what I call “the experience of the pathos of disappearance”—is resistant to understanding by means of the or- dinary tools of description, critique, and analysis. Instead, I realized that I would need to supplement those tools in order to explore and
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