Eight

T he head spins when one ponders what he left behind when he left this world. Edward Said gave so much on so many fronts. He has been celebrated for most of these. But one, though prominent, may well turn out to be among the most enduring. It is certainly the most apt to the present situation, still early in the 2000s, when global dierences threaten much of what he, and we, valued in the remainder of late modern culture. Because of Said, it is possible for social theory, in the broader sense of the practice, to begin the work of rethinking an idea that, in one or another form, preoccupied him from the beginning such that it came to be the dening feature of his politics after 1967, as it had been in the theme of his earliest writings.