Excerpt of Jean Bethke Elshtain

Jean Bethke Elshtain Politics, Ethics, and Society

Edited by

Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier

U niv e rsit y o f N ot re Da m e Pr es s N ot re Dame , I nd i a n a

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2018 by University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America For the print edition: “Atlantis,” copyright © 1945 and renewed 1973

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by W. H. Auden; from W. H. Auden Collected Poems, by W. H. Auden.

Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Erickson, Debra, editor. | Le Chevallier, Michael Thomas, 1984– editor.

Title: Jean Bethke Elshtain : politics, ethics, and society / edited by Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier.

Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017055859 (print) | LCCN 2018000915 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780268103071 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268103088 (epub) | ISBN 9780268103057 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268103054 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 1941–2013. | Ethics. | Political science— Philosophy. | Social philosophy.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Life and Work

Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier

ix xi 1

P a r t I . The Political Question Introduction

Robin W. Lovin

31

1 Becoming Jean Elshtain: Exploring the Intersections of Social Feminism and Civic Life

William A. Galston

37

2 The Context and Texts of Public Man, Private Woman:

Jean Bethke Elshtain in the World of Ideas and Action

Arlene W. Saxonhouse

52

3 Elshtain’s “Reflective” Ethics of Feminism and Family: An Appreciation and Critique

Don Browning

70

4 Striking the Balance: Blending Liberty, Tradition, and Reform 84

Peter Berkowitz

vi Contents

5 Democracy, Depression, and Disability: Jean Elshtain on Democracy, Despair, and Hope

Nancy J. Hirschmann

104

P a r t II . Cities of God and Man Introduction

Michael Kessler

125

6 Sovereign No More? Selves, States, and God in Our

Bewildering Global Environment

Lisa Sowle Cahill

131

7 Staggering Onward, Rejoicing: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustinian Realist

Nigel Biggar

150

8 Engaging the Mind of Elshtain on Sovereignty

Gilbert Meilaender

162

9 Taking Love Seriously: Elshtain’s Augustinian Voice and Modern Politics

Eric Gregory

177

10 Supremacy at Stake: Religion and the Sovereign State in

the Work of Jean Elshtain

Daniel Philpott

191

P a r t III . Nations and Citizens at Peace and War Introduction

Marc LiVecche

205

11 Two Sovereigns? Violence and the Ambiguities of Jean

Bethke Elshtain’s Christian Realism

Nicholas Rengger

213

Contents vii

12 The Education of a Just War Thinker: Politics and

Patriotism through the Lens of Gender

John D. Carlson

230

13 A New, but Still a Just War against Terror

Chris Brown

265

14 Just War and Religion: Reflections on the Work of

Jean Elshtain

Michael Walzer

285

15 The Effect of Perspectives on Thinking about Sovereignty: A Dialogue with Jean Bethke Elshtain

James Turner Johnson

298

P a r t IV. The End(s) of Political Life Introduction

Erik Owens

313

16 Civil Society and Political Society

Francis Fukuyama

317

17 Religion and Democracy: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations

Carl Gershman

332

18 Defending the Indefensible: The Tragedy of Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Defense of the Liberal Consensus

Patrick J. Deneen

350

19 The Limits of Politics and the Inevitability of Ethics

Robin W. Lovin

367

List of Contributors

380

Index

382

Introduction Jean Bethke Elshtain, Life and Work D e b ra E r i c k s o n a n d M i c h a e l L e C h e v a l l i e r

A Democratic Life Who is Jean Bethke Elshtain to the work she leaves behind? For certain ethical thinkers, their biography is interesting, but incidental to their work: Peter Lombard, John Calvin, or, at an extreme, Thomas Aquinas, whose anonymity as an author is heralded as a virtue. For others, their biography and their writings are inseparable: Augustine and Luther, Bonhoeffer and Havel. Elshtain never published a memoir, but she often peppered her essays and books with small anecdotes and stories. These are not stories of her travels or her many famous friends and acquaintances, including a pope, a cardinal, and a president; they are much more quotidian. As her grandson Bobby recounted at her funeral, he had shared late nights with her when she would discuss drinking vodka in the Soviet Union, but she also explained “why it was that she didn’t dilate on such stories at the dinner table, since not everyone might have the chance she had to travel the world, and she did not want to trumpet her own opportunities.�1 The same principle seems to undergird the anecdotes found in her writing. Instead, she relates rather ordinary 1

2 Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier

stories: a childhood experience of going to a Home Economics class with her mother, a lecture she heard as an undergraduate, or her daughter’s response to a book Elshtain had given her.

To what end did she include these stories? Amplifying the dedication to her “noisy children,” Elshtain writes in the acknowledgments of her first book, “I owe to Sheri, Heidi, Jenny, and Eric, precisely because they were never hustled out of sight, earshot, or mind as I struggled with this text (they wouldn’t have stood for interdictions of silence anyway), whatever deep, enriching connection Public Man, Private Woman retains to what people call real life in all its untidy concrete particularity” (PMPW, xviii). Through this appeal to her own life, Elshtain maintained a connection in her political and ethical writings to ordinary life and its mundane concerns. These stories are not added as mere rhetorical window dressing, but as a matter of principle. She writes in an essay entitled “My Mother, the Expert”: “When we don’t attend to local knowledge and lived experience, our politics grows eerily abstract and impositional.

We begin to assume that because we have arrived at this position or that as a result of oh-­so-­careful argument, our views must in some sense come closer to the ‘truth’ than positions not similarly thought out or tested through argument.”2 Elshtain draws out the untidy particularity through her biography, giving voice and attention to the ordinary, model­ing a challenge to the public/private distinction across her career.

Jean Paulette Bethke was born on January 6, 1941, to Paul Bethke and Hellen Lind, in the town of Windsor, in “the irrigated farm country of northern Colorado.” Her grandfather had a piece of farm land there that he had acquired through “unrelenting effort on his part and the part of his family, and stern self-­reliance, and just a bit of luck.”3 Her “Grandpa in the country,” as they called him, had come over from “the Old Country,” and often spoke out of his “deep-­rooted ambivalence” for America, airing “his cynicism about the way power and money controlled things in his adopted homeland” and “to acknowledge his bitterness at having spent his first Christmas Eve in America shoveling a mountain of soggy, half-­frozen manure for one of the big shots.”4 Although his wife would shush him by reminding him of what would have waited for them (Volga Germans) back in Russia, his reticence lasted only while his wife was in earshot. Elshtain later pieced together

Introduction 3

what she diagnosed as the source of his “dis-­ease”: a certain awareness of what “America did to families and communities,” recalling “an earlier time of human solidarity when farm families gathered for picnics and polka dances, for baptisms and confirmations, for marriages and funerals.”5 Elshtain inherited from both her grandmother and her grandfather an appreciation of the virtues of America and a keen sense of its vices, along with a generous sympathy that did not temper her critique.

Elshtain grew up in the small settlement of Timnath, Colorado (population 185), a village by any standards. The appeal of the village runs through Elshtain’s writings. In a 2011 public dialogue between Elshtain and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Wolterstorff drew a connection between his hometown (“a small farming village in Minnesota”), her village, and the type of community created at Hull-­House, the settlement house in Chicago cofounded in 1889 by Jane Addams, the subject of Elshtain’s 2002 biography. He described it as “a village in the city,” saying that “the neighborliness of a small village was what characterized Hull-­House,” where you may not be friends with everybody, but you are neighbors with everybody.6 Indeed, Elshtain’s preface to Augustine and the Limits of Politics opens with such a village, but “a village of the mind” (ALP, xiii). Elshtain is not naïve about the dangers of small towns, where indeed everybody knows everybody and is in everybody’s business. She is even more aware of the dangers of a blinding and “self-­indulgent nostalgia” for a simpler, seemingly more wholesome past (PMPW, 347). Nevertheless, Elshtain points constantly towards the dignity of these ordinary small-­town lives, where there are authentic examples of citizenship.

In an essay responding to literary authors writing about the weighti­ ness and narrowness of small towns, Elshtain writes, I appreciate the attacks on the small-­mindedness of small places, but I am determined to lift up that which is good about small towns. For these were, and are, places where people are compelled to engage and cannot easily repudiate and spurn and ignore their neighbors.

That ordinary people in our culture continue to pine for the idea of the small town means they are searching for a landscape that is not necessarily always warm and friendly, but rather, one that

4 Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier

is recognizably human­—­that has discernible form and scale and invites us to inhabit and engage it. (Real Politics, 320) Elshtain is not concerned with the perfect city, Plato’s “city of words,” but with a “human landscape” (ALP, xiii). In this appeal to the everyday, the small city where people are neighbors and they talk to each other, Elshtain finds the real stuff of political life.

It was also in Timnath’s public school, small enough that grades one to twelve were all held in one building, where Elshtain’s “democratic dreams” were nurtured. Students there were required to memorize the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. In her combined seventh-­and eighth-­grade class, their teacher, Miss McCarthy, would signal the students to hum “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as she recited the Gettysburg Address. The melodrama of it all left the “hummers in stitches.” “But,” Elshtain writes, “I never forgot the Gettys­burg Address and its promise of democratic equality” (Democracy on Trial, 84).

There also, Jean Bethke became a budding feminist and a lover of pop culture, especially film. She recounts going alone at age eight to the movie theater to see Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc. She was so taken by Bergman’s Joan that she marched directly afterward to the town’s combined barber shop/beauty parlor and had her hair chopped to resemble Joan’s by telling them it was her mother’s wish that it should be cut short enough to be out of the way for doing her chores. Elshtain comments in Women and War that she cannot remember her mother’s response, so bad it was. She writes, While I cannot conjure up any details of the family furor, I can recapture­—­as in an exemplary tale with me as dauntless heroine­ —­my new sense of freedom, even though I had been quite vain about my hair. I did not care what the boys or the girls or the teachers said. One day I would be a leader of men, too. Maybe a warrior. Maybe a martyr­—­though there didn’t seem to be much call for martyrs anymore. I could worry about that later. In the meantime, I dreamed of action, of Joan, of myself in male battle attire, fighting for morally worthy ends. Oh yes.7 (WW, 17)

Introduction 5

One wonders, is it mere coincidence that she shared a name with this childhood hero?

At ten, Elshtain experienced “the watershed event of her childhood”: a polio diagnosis (WW, 19). When she returned home from the hospital, she was bedridden, unable to stand or walk. She recounts knowing the prognosis was bad. As she gained strength, her two childhood heroes, Joan of Arc and Abraham Lincoln, existed side by side as dreams in her head, “one of the warrior-­soldier, a woman; the other of the war-­hating, compassionate leader, a man” (WW, 19). These stood as two figures who did not give up, but carried forward in their lives with determination despite opposition and hardship. They helped her not to give up. Yet she also was a realist, and she was known to say throughout her life, “We must play the hand we are dealt.”8 Elshtain recounts, “After polio, Joan faded away. Warriors must be strong, able to run and leap and tear about. As I could no longer run, and was moreover soon caught up in the changes of adolescence, the story of Joan became a memory of childish romance and revolt; but that of Lincoln resonated through high school, into college, never deserting me, rekindled as I moved into adulthood and continued to struggle with what it means to be an American” (WW, 19).

Her hopes of becoming a warrior dashed, a new dream took hold.

Reading Life magazine, Elshtain’s attention was caught by the images of Marguerite Higgins, the female war correspondent. She decided that she too wanted to become a war correspondent. This dream led her to discover the writings of World War II journalist Ernie Pyle, who died at the end of the war. She checked out every volume of his collected reportage from the Bookmobile, Timnath’s mobile library. Pyle’s stories did not glorify war. Instead, he was a “chronicler of Everyman at War” (WW, 20). He demystified war, pointing once more to the human and mundane, even in the midst of something that can hardly be called quotidian. Elshtain writes, “War enlisted men in a common cause. Pyle brings such idealizations down to earth. And after a while, the ordinariness of everyday army life, dominated by boredom, sleeplessness, and fear took on an aura all their own, a kind of populist dignity very different from that evoked by George Washington rearing stiffly, all brocaded and bewigged, atop a monumental white stallion” (WW, 21).

6 Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier

For Elshtain, Pyle’s writing invoked and involved his readers, reminding them that in a democracy, it was their war.

Despite what she was told by the doctor, Elshtain would relearn to walk. She pushed her body to its limits, an intransigent aspect of her character recognizable to all who knew her. From this time, she also pushed deeper into the life of the mind, and in the process exhausted the wares of the Bookmobile, exploring well beyond the limits of her now-­disabled body and the small village of Timnath.

Elshtain attended public schools in Colorado and graduated from Colorado State University (AB, 1963). Like many women at the time, the questions raised by Public Man, Private Woman were not external and abstract, but real and intimate. Already married and a mother as a college student in the 1960s, she felt poignantly the split between the public and academic domain, where she was “taught the ways of the political world as the ‘realist’ . . . understood it,” and the private realm, where she was the “the private dreamer, mother, novel reader, and Beatles buff” (WW, 31). It was a world split between “official, public discourse” and “unsystematic, private understanding” that she sometimes managed to reconcile in her own journal writing (a practice she picked up at age fourteen and kept up throughout her life).

Elshtain transgressed that boundary between private and public in practice long before she did in writing. She would later recount how she sometimes attended class with her children in tow, a practice no more routine then than it is today. In her late years of teaching, she designated Wednesdays as her day with her youngest granddaughter, Christie, whether they went to the Lincoln Park Zoo or to lectures and meetings at the University of Chicago. This arrangement was not due to a lack of childcare options (as in her student days), but from a commitment to family that pervaded her life and career. “I want to be sure that she remembers her grandma,” Elshtain explained.9 In her scholarship and in her life, Elshtain did not shy away from making the private world visible in the public realm.

After her first marriage to Norman Shaw ended in divorce, Jean married Errol Elshtain on September 3, 1965, and he would be her companion until her death. By this point, she had also earned a master’s degree as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow from the University of Wisconsin.

Introduction 7

Inspired by John F. Kennedy’s call to public service, she received her PhD in 1973 from Brandeis University in politics with a focus on political theory. In a time when data-­driven political science was ascendant, her dissertation was entitled (somewhat ironically, given her enduring emphasis on the concrete reality of everyday life) Women and Politics: A Theoretical Analysis.

This period marked another shift in Elshtain’s life, as her intellectual and personal interests turned towards religion. Following the revision of her dissertation, published as Public Man, Private Woman in 1981, Elshtain received some unexpected critiques. She was suspected of being “covertly religious,” accused (tenuously) of being “a believer,”10 and of harboring “religious convictions.”11 These comments were surprising to Elshtain, because at the time she did not consider herself very religious, and certainly not a “believer” who wore her religious identity on her sleeve. Raised Lutheran, Elshtain remarked in an essay that she was a deist for two whole weeks in college before becoming an agnostic and then an “anguished agnostic.”12 Needless to say, she did not remain an agnostic. She returned first to the Lutheran faith of her youth and at the very end of her life, after a long engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition, was received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church on November 2, 2011, in the chapel of the archbishop of Chicago’s residence by her intellectual and spiritual friend, Francis Cardinal George, then archbishop of Chicago.

Elshtain identified a few reasons that brought her to the question of religion: first, an engagement with the Western political canon in graduate school, where religion played an undeniable (though often excised) role in figures like Hobbes and Locke. We can see this influence in ­Public Man, Private Woman, where she drew upon classic religious figures of the Western tradition. Second, ever the contrarian, she felt compelled to offer a sympathetic defense on behalf of “all those unnamed men and women who were trying to live decent lives, to do right by their families and their communities, to live with some dignity, and who were sustained in that by their faith”13 against a full frontal academic attack by a “radical separatist wing that engaged in vicious attacks on religious traditions and on people who had religious views.”14 Finally, those same reviews of Public Man, Private Woman pushed her to reconsider religion.

8 Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier

Indeed, though still a nontheological text, she retrospectively identifies the final chapter, which addresses the “search for an ethical polity,” as the beginning of a moral quest that trails through all of her work (Who Are We, xvi). On that journey, she found intellectual kinship with Augustine, Luther, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Paul II, among other religious and theological thinkers.

Elshtain’s teaching career began at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she taught from 1973 to 1988. Elshtain then joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University as the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the history of that institution. As her reputation grew, she became widely sought after as a lecturer and speaker, keeping a grueling schedule of travel that spanned the globe. In 1995, she was appointed the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and was jointly appointed in the Department of Political Science and the Committee on International Relations. Additionally, Elshtain held visiting professorships at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University; the Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University; and was the Visiting Distinguished Professor of Religion and Public Life at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion.

In the midst of her teaching career, Elshtain’s research moved in multiple directions, unconstrained by tradition or disciplinary boundaries. Subsequent sections of this introduction will address the major themes in her work: feminism and the family; democracy and civil society; religion, theology, and politics; and international relations and just war. Yet even these broad themes do not completely cover Elshtain’s career as an academic and as a public intellectual, which included forays into bioethics, political commentary, and pop culture.

For Elshtain, pop culture was another window into “what’s going on,” for good or ill. She loved movies, seeing most new releases in the theater. She used films like Seven, Saving Private Ryan, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in her ethics courses and also wrote numerous movie reviews. She devoured mystery novels­—­“the last moral fiction,” she called them. Literature also had a place in her classroom, once assigning P. D. James’s Children of Men to a course on religion in public

Introduction 9

life. Elshtain was also a constant commenter on culture. She wrote a five-­part series for First Things entitled the “Newtape Files,” extending C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters for a new generation. In the persona of a demon trying to mislead the faithful, she commented on Madonna, Woody Allen, rap lyrics, and even misinterpretations of Freud, of whom she was a fan.

Although her life was marked by a prolonged engagement with the written word, Elshtain was also influenced by contemporary political events on both the national and global scales. She was both teased and criticized for an exhausting travel schedule that brought her face-­to-­face with some of the most significant political movements of her lifetime.

In 1982, shortly after the publication of her first book, Elshtain was in Argentina at the invitation of a center for the study of women in culture and society. While wandering the streets of Buenos Aires, during a morning free from her sessions, she came across the Plaza de Mayo.

She recounts, There, walking in a silent circle around a statue/monument in the heart of the Plaza, were hundreds of women wearing white scarves, some well-­dressed and middle-­class, others in rougher more rustic attire, their dark Indian faces a bold contrast to the whiteness of their covered heads. I noticed embroidered names and dates on the backs of the scarves and visible around the necks of these women were photographs of young men or women, some couples, some children. Beneath the photos were printed names and dates.

Necklaces of despair: wearing grief as others might wear pearls or brooches.15 These were the “Mothers of the Disappeared,” women whose children and grandchildren were abducted by the Junta during the military dictatorships starting in 1976, with no active confirmation of their death or survival. At the end of her brief stay, Elshtain was unsatisfied with what little she could find in writing about the Mothers.

Returning to Argentina in 1986 at the invitation of a former student and another woman who had served as a translator during that first trip, Elshtain requested the chance to meet with some of the Mothers.

10 Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier

Elshtain recounts the difficulty of doing justice to the Mothers on her return: “I had no desire to turn the Mothers into data. I was bearing witness. This, apparently, is an activity that has no home in our institutions of higher learning.”16 The success of Public Man, Private Woman may have led people to expect her to follow it with another book of theory, but Elshtain was drawn to the story of the Mothers and their struggle for truth and justice.

Although she would never complete the book she hoped to write on their struggle, the Mothers’ voices and example remained with her and recurred in her writing on democracy. Driven by their private losses, these women found a collective voice and formed a public “we” despite the state terror that sought to erase protest and rend social relations.

Elshtain writes, “By fusing a language of grief with a language of human rights, they not only kept alive the particular realities and identities of individuals, their sons and daughters, tormented and lost to state terror, but issued a call to nonviolent arms to their fellow Argentines and to the wider world: Protect mothers and families, but embrace and protect a democratic constitution as well” (DT, 130). Elshtain’s attention to the Mothers highlights not only her care for the ideals they espoused, but also a methodological interest in the appeal to actual people­—­ people who were in many ways ordinary but for the courage they had to demand accountability from their leaders. In her attention to the power of ordinary citizens, she recalls the lessons of her childhood.

During this same period, Elshtain’s attention was also drawn to Eastern Europe, where the stirrings of a similar political dissent caught her eye. Elshtain first encountered Václav Havel, then a political dissident and premier playwright, and later the first president of Czechoslovakia (and after, the Czech Republic), through his writings from prison. In the face of totalitarian rule, Havel encouraged people to “live in truth,” that is to say, to live as if they had a freedom they did not yet have, knowing that the consequences might be great, but that they would leave behind a powerful example for others. Indeed, Havel became an exemplar for her through her life. If Augustine was Elshtain’s intellectual hero, Havel was her political hero. In her office at the University of Chicago, a political poster of him hung prominently on the wall, paired with a picture

Introduction 11

of them at a roundtable event together. They were the only such photos from a life filled with notable encounters.

Havel elicited Elshtain’s admiration for the prospect of democracy abroad, and she ranked him with Reinhold Niebuhr and Jane Addams as a public intellectual for today.17 In his writings, she found a kindred spirit, one who embodied a philosophy not unlike her own: he spoke out against the relativization of morals, identifying the need for political society to be founded on a transcendent anchor; he wrote of the need for a civil society robust enough to awaken citizens to their responsibility; and he identified politics not as the achievement of an election cycle but, as he would say in October 1992 to her and a group of others regarding Europe post-­1989, as “the long tunnel at the end of the light,”18 that is to say, the constant work of the everyday politics of a people.

The list of commendations that Elshtain received is long. Among many honors and awards, she was selected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She was a member of the boards of the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for Democracy, and a member of the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2006, she gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures, resulting in her final book Sovereignty: God, State, and Self. Adding to her lifelong influence on friends, peers, and dialogue partners, she mentored two generations of scholars.

Towards the end of her life, her health began to deteriorate due to postpolio complications, making it impossible to maintain the same vigorous schedule of lectures and teaching on top of her weekly commute between her home in Nashville, her teaching in Chicago, and whichever college or public institution had invited her to speak, lecture, or receive an award. On June 14, 2013, Elshtain was scheduled to give the Milton K. Wong Lecture in Vancouver, Canada. Given her health, flying was not a possibility. That same indomitable spirit that propelled her all her life took her on a 3,500-­mile train journey from Nashville to Vancouver. It was to be her last speaking engagement. Returning by train, she suffered a heart attack in Minot, North Dakota. She died August 11, 2013, and was buried in Fort Collins, Colorado.

12 Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier

Jean Bethke Elshtain left behind her beloved family: her husband, Errol; her four children, Sheri, Heidi, Jenny, and Eric; and her four grandchildren, JoAnn, Bobby, Christopher, and Christie.

Seeking the Ethical Polity Elshtain also left behind a body of work rivaled by few of her peers.

She brought 19 books to publication and wrote more than 600 essays for scholarly journals and journals of civic opinion, many of which later appeared in collected volumes. In addition to Public Man, Private Woman, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, and Sovereignty, her major books include Women and War (1987), an exploration of the traditional portrayal of women as noncombatants; Democracy on Trial (1995); and Just War against Terror (2003), a vigorous and widely debated moral argument for U.S. military engagement abroad.

As a scholar, she has been a controversial figure. As her University of Chicago colleague Susan Schreiner noted, following her death a trove of adjectives have been attributed to her: “controversial,” “hard-­nosed,” “uncompromising,” “a woman who stood her ground,” “tough-­minded,” and, Schreiner’s personal favorite, “against the grain.” Schreiner adds her own adjective, perhaps one that is most fitting, because it captures how Elshtain might have seen herself. Calling to mind the Pauline exhortation to “be urgent in season and out of season,” Schreiner writes that Elshtain was “intellectually out of season­—­and in a very real sense that was her calling, her vocation, her ministry.”19 This description alludes to a characteristically “Elshtainian” theme: she warned against the “rigidified categories” of the Left and the Right, liberal and conservative, which simply urged us to put on uniforms and to boo or cheer accordingly. She saw the terms as defunct, writing that “perhaps such recognitions [of unhelpful categories] will enable us to get off our increasingly unstable soapboxes and to ‘put on our thinking caps,’ as my first grade teacher, Mrs. Griffith, used to pipe cheerily each schoolday morning all those years ago.”20 This description of an “off-­season” thinker captures more than Elshtain’s disdain for useless labels that prevent real thinking and