The notion of a ‘biography’ seems rather too grand for what is just a working life – and a work still in progress. I began to travel and explore from any early age. I’d had what is called a ‘good education,’ but not one that helped me understand how the world worked. Some of the reading I did in my teens – Koestler, Camus, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Graham Greene, George Orwell – made me aware of the many injustices of the political world; while my schooling itself had revealed the potential abuses of unbridled authority. I would like to think that all this was leavened by a sense of the absurdity of the human condition: I had originally embarked on a doctoral thesis on Lawrence Sterne, he of Tristram Shandy fame (and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey remains one of my favourite books). But I was diverted by my travels in Mexico – now more than fifty years ago; and just a year or so later I walked into Brazil’s ‘wild west’ with the idea of studying the extreme violence along its moving frontier. So it began, this working life.
There is an element of romance in the life I chose, and at some point I must have taken the largely unconscious decision to look at the political world from the viewpoint of those at the bottom, not those as the top; and this left an indelible imprint on everything I then did to study and understand popular organizations, grassroots mobilization, citizenship rights, and – always, everywhere – the theory and practice of democracy. Never forgetting – as the Brazilians have it – that ‘in practice, theory is different.’ Over the years I have approached democracy from many angles and with diverse ideas in mind, but my most recent work – my book on POLITY and my forthcoming book on OLIGARCHY IN THE AMERICAS – seeks to deliver a comprehensive account of the ‘true nature’ of our democracies, and so explain their current trials and tribulations.
My work has now begun to take me in a different direction. For some time I’ve had it in mind to inquire – always with decorum – into what might be called the ‘intimacies’ of our engagement with the human drama, in a way that would go beyond my inquiry into the social networks that sustained the popular political struggle in Spain under Franco. This sounds like a possible return to literary pursuits. But I have never been entirely convinced by the distinction drawn between scholarly work and work of artistic merit. And not merely because craft and intuition are common to both; but because art may discover the world just as scholarship may serve to create it. Happily, it is always open to the author to choose her own way forward.
