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<p>This essay responds to six symposium contributions on <i>Erving Goffman and the Cold War</i> and reflects on what the project set out to do and what it has become. Though conceived as a study of texts rather than a biography, the book has been broadly received as one because situating a thinker in time and place inevitably brushes against the biographical form. The symposiasts illuminate the book’s central concerns from a wide range of national and disciplinary perspectives, and their contributions advance the project in several directions: clarifying the concept of “natural metaphor,” refining the network vocabulary through the French notion of <i>réseau</i>, and recovering the “pantographic” logic by which the book moves between individual and epoch. Against critiques that the book over-unifies Goffman’s work, I argue that its Cold War frame is heuristic rather than totalizing. It is an invitation to see overlooked dimensions of a thinker who, as Whitman put it, contains multitudes. Ultimately, situating Goffman “of and in the American Cold War” enriches our understanding by showing how the dominant moods of an era—suspicion, fragility, aggression—shape not only institutions but the very forms of theorizing that emerge within them.</p>

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Author’s Response to Commentators

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月16日

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  • Gary D. Jaworski

摘要

This essay responds to six symposium contributions on Erving Goffman and the Cold War and reflects on what the project set out to do and what it has become. Though conceived as a study of texts rather than a biography, the book has been broadly received as one because situating a thinker in time and place inevitably brushes against the biographical form. The symposiasts illuminate the book’s central concerns from a wide range of national and disciplinary perspectives, and their contributions advance the project in several directions: clarifying the concept of “natural metaphor,” refining the network vocabulary through the French notion of réseau, and recovering the “pantographic” logic by which the book moves between individual and epoch. Against critiques that the book over-unifies Goffman’s work, I argue that its Cold War frame is heuristic rather than totalizing. It is an invitation to see overlooked dimensions of a thinker who, as Whitman put it, contains multitudes. Ultimately, situating Goffman “of and in the American Cold War” enriches our understanding by showing how the dominant moods of an era—suspicion, fragility, aggression—shape not only institutions but the very forms of theorizing that emerge within them.