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This book was written as a rejoinder to critical assessments of Emma Goldman as a rather limited theorist--derivative at best, superficial and emotive at worst--whose principal contribution to anarchism lay in her activism and, for later generations of feminists especially, in the example that she set as a sexually emancipated woman. The "heavy load of faint praise" (p. 4) that Goldman carries places her in the good company of other exemplary women who reside at the edges of their respective canons, the significance of their contributions as theorists too often blurred by the greater fascination with their standing as heroic trailblazers who broke with the life patterns that had been laid down for women of their time. In this connection, Kathy Ferguson mentions Rosa Luxemburg, cited by an admiring Hannah Arendt as one of those geniuses whose contribution consists not so much in a "work" of written texts as in a "'daily lifework'" (p. 8); one also thinks of Simone de Beauvoir, or even Arendt herself, both now recognized as philosophers in their own right, but only following a work of interpretive recovery aimed at unearthing the thinker beneath the surface of the woman with which their first readers often became distracted.
Ferguson's strategy in the recovery of Goldman is different, however. Rather than defending Goldman as a theorist or claiming the superiority of practice over theory, the author sets out "to use the resources of contemporary political theory to reframe Goldman's political thinking, to apprehend her, not within the dualism of philosopher vs. activist, but within a different register of political thinking" (pp. 5-6). This is a "located register," as Ferguson describes it (p. 6), in which Goldman's virtues as a theorist shine most brilliantly when set against the backdrop of the contexts and the settings in which she lived and struggled. Ferguson claims for Goldman the particular achievement of enacting a kind of theorizing in which the very distinction between theory and practice is overcome. Located theorizing is "situated, event-based, and concrete" (p. 6); it is the theorizing that goes along with the political activism--critical and transformative and above all movement based--from which...