This book was written as a rejoinder to critical assessments of Emma Goldman as a rather limited theorist—derivative at best, superficial and emotive at worst—whose principal contribution to anarchism lay in her activism and, for later generations of feminists especially, in the example that she set as a sexually emancipated woman. The “heavy load of faint praise” (p. 4) that Goldman carries places her in the good company of other exemplary women who reside at the edges of their respective canons, the significance of their contributions as theorists too often blurred by the greater fascination with their standing as heroic trailblazers who broke with the life patterns that had been laid down for women of their time. In this connection, Kathy Ferguson mentions Rosa Luxemburg, cited by an admiring Hannah Arendt as one of those geniuses whose contribution consists not so much in a “work” of written texts as in a “‘daily lifework’” (p. 8); one also thinks of Simone de Beauvoir, or even Arendt herself, both now recognized as philosophers in their own right, but only following a work of interpretive recovery aimed at unearthing the thinker beneath the surface of the woman with which their first readers often became distracted.

Ferguson's strategy in the recovery of Goldman is different, however. Rather than defending Goldman as a theorist or claiming the superiority of practice over theory, the author sets out “to use the resources of contemporary political theory to reframe Goldman's political thinking, to apprehend her, not within the dualism of philosopher vs. activist, but within a different register of political thinking” (pp. 5–6). This is a “located register,” as Ferguson describes it (p. 6), in which Goldman's virtues as a theorist shine most brilliantly when set against the backdrop of the contexts and the settings in which she lived and struggled. Ferguson claims for Goldman the particular achievement of enacting a kind of theorizing in which the very distinction between theory and practice is overcome. Located theorizing is “situated, event-based, and concrete” (p. 6); it is the theorizing that goes along with the political activism—critical and transformative and above all movement based—from which it is forged and for which it is developed. Traditional political theory does not give much visibility or standing to located thinking, not only because it presumes the very distinction between theory and practice that located thinking overcomes but also because it tends to focus on the theorist as a heroic individual standing over and against his or her community, perpetuating the very models of political action that movement-based politics such as anarchism calls into question.

Ferguson aims to present Goldman's thinking as deeply embedded in the anarchist spaces, contexts, and symbolic systems—what Ferguson, borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, calls the anarchist habitus, designating the “embodied experiences and our often inchoate understandings of that experience” (p. 69)—that were the enabling conditions of anarchist politics and so also the enabling conditions for Goldman herself to become who she was. Individual chapters detail the dominant discourses of danger that surrounded Goldman; the political spaces in which she “did” her anarchism; the relationships in which she apprenticed herself as an anarchist; her self-understanding as a modern woman; an analysis of the limitations of located thinking in the context of her underdevelopment of the concept of race; the dense web of connections that she established with other women in the anarchist movement; and finally, in a summative chapter, an assessment of the significance of Goldman taken as an example—“Emma Goldman, E.G.”—of located thinking in which Ferguson focuses in particular on the voluminous output of letters in which Goldman composed herself as an exemplar to her immediate familiars in the anarchist movement.

The cumulative effect is beautifully evocative of Goldman's daily lifework as nothing less than the creation of the concrete and sensory possibility of an anarchist politics. For example, considering Goldman's ritual habit of marking the anniversary of Alexander Berkman's May 18, 1906, release from prison—a date that she reports in a letter to him as so “rooted in my being” that she feels its approach each month even in her sleep—Ferguson presents Goldman as the practitioner of “a kind of temporal sensorium, a way of marking the bodily hexis with the footprints of past struggles, building chains of associations linking their enduring personal loyalties to their collective political work” (p. 108).

In developing this approach, Ferguson marshals an impressive pantheon of theorists of embodied thinking—Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Rancière, among others—each contributing in various ways to the careful illumination of the practices, relationships, spaces, and symbolic associations that framed Goldman's daily lifework of embodied political thinking. There can be no question of the relevance of this prior theoretical work for Ferguson's project, but there is a point that is reached—quite early in the book, unfortunately—where the presence of this work becomes more a cumbersome burden on her argument than its enabling foundation. In part this is due to the way in which these theorists are invoked, interrupting the flow of the narrative with their quoted pronouncements, sometimes appearing one after the other in close and elliptical succession. Since there is hardly any concept for which there is not already a voluminous literature, the development of Ferguson's own interpretations is frequently attended by crowds of theorists. This makes the book hard to read at times and obscures the virtues of her own distinctive writing and thinking voice. For example, in Ferguson's account of Goldman's relationships to Johann Most and Ed Brady, we are treated to a discussion of Deleuze's views on the nature of love, although why he would be any more authoritative than anyone else on this subject is unclear: He figures more as an intruder in the narrative, a kind of conceptual gatekeeper with whose authoritative bearing the reader must contend in order to gain access to Ferguson's Goldman.

The overall impression of regarding Goldman through a dense theoretical screen is so strong sometimes that the reader cannot fail to wonder if, absent this screen, Goldman herself would be far less impressive. She seems swamped, diminished even, by the company that has been assembled around her; she is never shown to be their equal in theoretical sophistication or political sensibility. Ironically, Ferguson's approach tacitly calls into question the argument on which her interpretation of Goldman is based: In the end, traditional theory is superior to located theory insofar as the former offers the most fitting interpretive tools for understanding the latter. More importantly, Ferguson's own analysis of Goldman confirms that traditional theory succeeds precisely where located theory fails: Located theory is lacking in the conceptual resources necessary for its own self-reflection and self-criticism, even though it may very ably reflect upon and criticize the locations in which it finds itself. Goldman falls short on Ferguson's account precisely because the locations from which she theorized limited the range of her vision to what was immediately available to her, even to the point of valorizing the embodied senses in her fondness for organic metaphors of nature and generation, her flat-footed preference for romantic realism over modernism in art, and her particular dislike of the medium of film. Along with the underdevelopment of Goldman's understanding of race, Ferguson also cites in this connection her blanket repudiation of reform or interim measures, and her principled commitment to nothing short of a revolution that remains vaguely configured in her thinking (at least until her firsthand experience of the Spanish revolution).

Despite these caveats about the awkwardly heavy load of theory that Ferguson brings to bear on Goldman, this work marks a significant achievement in its scholarly range and attention to the details of Goldman's habitus, in its sensitivity to the novel challenges of recording the kind of political thinking that arises from oppositional political movements, and in its evident passion for the recovery of Goldman herself as a political thinker who becomes intelligible only when she is placed in this context above all. The final and finest two chapters in the book, “Emma Goldman's Women” and “Political Thinking in the Streets,” return the reader to the deeper roots of Ferguson's project in conjuring Goldman as a political prophet whose enormous investment of time and energy in the conduct of her relationships with others, in the public performance of anarchism in speeches, in the letters and articles that she composed for a general audience—all to the detriment of her development as a traditional theorist presiding over a formal body of work—was aimed at nothing less than bringing the anarchist movement into being. Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets vividly conveys the too often unrecognized daily lifework from which such political possibilities are born.