Author's Note
Like speaking prose, I did dialogue avant la lettre. Without realizing it, whatever I grabbed became a stage for conversations among indifferent or antagonistic parties: Simmel and Parsons; Freud and Weber; Comte and Durkheim; Parsons and McKeon; then later, Dewey and Hutchins, and Kant and Goethe. It took a Festschrift for my 70th birthday in 2001 to reveal the fact. Its two generous editors, Charles Camic and Hans Joas, imagined the title, The Dialogical Turn. That prompted me to see and say: that was indeed my lifelong Script all along.
For sure, from time to time I caught a dim sense of what I was about. It grew big when I constructed the form of Dialogical Narrative in Visions of the Sociological Tradition in 1995. It's just that the Festschrift spotted a common thread in what had seemed notably disparate, fragmenting engagements. And as I became more practiced and bolder, it seemed I was following the Way of a Warrior in those efforts. Practicing Aikido, a peaceful martial art that comprised not combat but conversation, liberated me to name what I was doing.
For sure, from time to time I caught a dim sense of what I was about. It grew big when I constructed the form of Dialogical Narrative in Visions of the Sociological Tradition in 1995. It's just that the Festschrift spotted a common thread in what had seemed notably disparate, fragmenting engagements. And as I became more practiced and bolder, it seemed I was following the Way of a Warrior in those efforts. Practicing Aikido, a peaceful martial art that comprised not combat but conversation, liberated me to name what I was doing.
By Way of Dialogue
I invite you to join one or more of these conversations: to engage the perennial questions of how to help each generation become strong, accomplished, and wise human beings and citizens; to grapple with searching ideas of the finest theorists about human nature and the social order; to engage the complexities of a two-millennial civilization and its tortuous encounters with modernity; to absorb the teachings of an Asian master who discovered in the flow of water a key to promoting harmony in human action.
And along the way, to share ideas for more effective ways to sustain these and other conversations. . . .
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Genuine conversation, and therefore every actual fulfillment of relations among humans,
means acceptance of otherness.
―Martin Buber
