Quote: Politicization

Political and ethical formations are idiosyncratic as well as social. One can explain and describe at length the milieu in which an individual lives and works and has being. One can account for the historical, socio-economic, political and moral dimensions of that milieu and delineate their tendencies which, in retrospect, are particularly meaningful. One can do all this and still be faced with a mystery: how is it that this person and not that one, in 1964, became a radical? Even when the differences of class, sex, region, ethnicity are accounted for, it is the person himself or herself who in the end becomes conscious. In other words, it is perfectly dialectical: biography and society interpenetrate and the radical is made. Timing is all.

-- Myrna Kostash