‘Right in His Soul’
Tracy Burr Strong, 6 August 1943 – 11 May 2022
Tracy B. Strong, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, and Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the University of Southampton, died at his home in Chandlers Ford, Eastleigh, Hampshire, England on 11 May 2022.
Strong was the son of a Congregationalist missionary couple, Katherine (Stiven) and Robbins Strong who had been interned in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Weixian, China and Strong was born in that camp, an event of great interest for a variety of Catholic priests and nuns. Tales were told in his family that he had been surreptitiously baptized by these nuns meaning to ensure the redemption of his soul — a very missionary ambition. The family of three were repatriated on the Swedish prisoner-of-war ship, the Gripsholm. After a complex journey (according to the China Bulletin of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions #68), the ship arrived in New York on 18 December 1943: “In general, we were pleasantly surprised by the appearance of the whole group. The youngest, Tracy Burr Strong, seemed the most vigorous of all, and won all hearts (See the next issue of the Missionary Herald for his picture.).”
With such a head-start, Strong would grow up a confirmed expat.
Strong’s childhood was spent back in China after the war, and in Paris, France and Geneva, Switzerland, as his father changed jobs with the World YMCA.
He was educated at the Collège de Genève, and at Oberlin College (where he fenced and majored in government), earning a B.A. in 1963 and at Harvard University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1968. He was Henry Kissinger’s assistant and not less a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society).
Strong taught political science/political theory at Harvard, University of Pittsburgh, Amherst College, and until his retirement at the University of California at San Diego, where he also served in administration as department chair and Associate Chancellor. He taught in Barcelona and Lyon and had recently been appointed to an international research project in ethnography in Heidelberg and was still lecturing and mentoring students at the University of Southampton just a few weeks away from what would have been his second retirement.
Astoundingly erudite, Strong who lectured all over the world, was a scholar whose interests spanned political theory and philosophy, cultural and intellectual history, as well as film and art. He authored important books and numerous articles on pre-Twentieth Century figures such as Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Rousseau in addition to Carl Schmitt and other contemporary political thinkers in the case of his 2012 Politics Without Vision: Thinking Without a Banister in the Twentieth Century. His most recent book is a masterful study of the politics of citizenship in America, Learning One’s Native Tongue: Citizenship, Contestation, and Conflict in America (2019). He was editor of Political Theory (1990-2000) in addition to authoring in 1983, with Helene Keyssar, Right in Her Soul, a biography of his great-aunt, the leftist journalist and author Anna Louise Strong.
For some time, his first book has enjoyed the status of a classic: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (1974), still engaging, a watershed not only in political philosophy but Nietzsche studies. Strong’s first book justified its title and, intellectually engaged until the end, he was working on questions of good and evil — and love — in addition to the influence in life and letters of Stanley Cavell whom he first met at Harvard, Heidegger and Arendt, and he had a deep interest in Wagner and music, Beckett and Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare.
He is survived by his wife, Babette (Babich) Strong of Chandlers Ford/New York City, his son David Dædalus Strong Franke and his wife, Kristina Johnson of Los Angeles, California, and his daughter Anise K. Strong-Morse and her husband, Adam Morse, and Tracy’s grandchildren, Mclevy, Robert, and Katharine of Kalamazoo, Michigan; a sister Jeanne R. Strong of Langley, Washington, a brother John S. Strong and his wife, Sarah Strong of Auburn, Maine. Tracy is also survived by his first wife, Penelope Harger of Langley, Washington. Tracy is predeceased by his parents and his second wife, Helene Keyssar.
