UCLA’s Professor Kirstie McClure died of coronary disease on December 21, 2023. For those of us who knew Kirstie, personally, professionally, or both, we knew her as a formidable scholar and remember her with fond trepidation for her critical energies, her brilliance, her encyclopedic knowledge of the history of political thought, and her refusal to leave a thought unfinished. Her contributions to political theory, the history of political thought, feminist theory, and critical political theory were many, both published, institutional, and as a mentor to innumerable students and scholars currently teaching throughout the world.
McClure completed her PhD from Princeton University, after an unconventional educational trajectory marked by a gap decade between the beginning and the completion of her undergraduate studies. After Princeton, she spent a significant amount of time teaching at UC Santa Cruz and then began her tenure-track career at Arizona State University. This was quickly followed by an extended period of teaching at The Johns Hopkins University, and then at UCLA beginning in late 1990s where she remained as Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature until her passing.
Her contributions to political theory research are marked by many significant publications, but none more magisterial than, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent (1996). Here McClure takes on one of the most canonical thinkers in the history of political thought and invites her readers to return not just to his writings but to his way of writing. In doing so, she introduces to the discipline of political theory new readerly and writerly approaches to the study of historical and contemporary texts all the while alerting us to the complexities that conceptual terms, metaphors, and linguistic usages offer our efforts to puzzle our way through political ideas and practices. In this work McClure eschews either contextualist or presentist approaches to language and invites us instead to amplify our connotative range of references, or what she refers to as the semantic field of Locke’s political languages. Neither conceptual consistency nor eventmental inferences are her ambition. Instead, she will attend to Locke’s metaphor of the architecture of order and will show how that metaphor is at once a structuring conceit for Locke’s way of thinking and writing, but also crucial to the order and organization of Locke’s political vocabularies. Her way of reading Locke, as she elaborates it throughout Judging Rights, is as much a part of her way of doing political theory as are the insights and understandings she makes available.
In short, her work helped define the interdisciplinary turn in political theory and introduced many of us to critical reading practices from various fields of inquiry not available in traditional American political science research. Indeed, her scholarly achievements are acknowledged by many as culminating in her commitment to multidisciplinary and pluralist reading practices that she forcefully put on display in her engagements with the finished and unfinished works of many of us at conferences, in personal exchanges, and as editor.
On a more personal note, and as a former student and subsequent colleague of hers, I have been privileged with many exchanges we shared throughout the years, whether in the classroom, in conference centers, and in faculty meetings—not to mention various impromptu Bacchanalias. In the last year of her life, she asked to read some of my recent writings, and I shared these with her. Her critical attentions sourced the final intellectual exchanges I was able to enjoy with her. And for this, I will always be grateful.
McClure was a devoted teacher and mentor who shared her passion for political theory inquiry with her students throughout her professional career. She cared deeply that students learn the complexities of critical thinking through the development of reading and writing practices that one might carry with them beyond the completion of their degree requirements. Never a softie, she made certain that we were all taken to task for our commitments and our political arguments so that we may be sure that our convictions were as brilliant and honest as they could be.
Her contributions to the profession of political theory extend to her leadership as a member of the American Political Science Association and as Political Theory editor of the American Political Science Review. Not the least was Prof. McClure’s championing of feminist theory and scholarship at a time and in a discipline where this avenue of inquiry was relegated to a domesticated corner of political science departments. It is safe to say that Kirstie’s contributions to the study of political theory opened a Pandora’s Box, and we are all grateful for it.
