Three Thoughts About What ‘#occupyirtheory’ Might Mean

It is a basic principle of a broadly pragmatist approach to theoretically analyzing politics of all kinds that the important innovations emerge in worldly practice before they show up in academic writings. Theory – and theorists – follow along behind overt political action, extracting and systematizing insights in such a way that they become more widely available than they would if they simply remained in their original context. In so doing, theory and theorists provide conceptual instruments—including explicit visions of alternate futures that may have been only implicit in worldly practice—that can inform future political practice, albeit in ways that belie or even contradict the abstract, idealizedpurity of the kinds of theoretically-informed explanations produced by academics.