As Kuan-Hsing Chen and I have noted elsewhere, Stuart was never interested in modes of intellectual work that, in absolutist terms, present themselves as definitively superseding all that went before. 39 His concerns were always conjunctural in nature, developing in response to emerging social and political questions. His strengths lay not in making definitive statements but in his capacity to take on new political or theoretical issues and his determination to continually try to move beyond his own previous limits. He always worked to encourage an open-ended approach to debate and the politics of discipleship or denunciation were equally anathema to him. He refused the temptation to enhance his own arguments by rubbishing those of others. His tendency was always toward a productive sort of eclecticism that looked for the best (or most useful) points which could be taken from other positions and then worked on them in a selective, syncretic mode of dialogic inclusiveness. He had no interest in the production of any exclusive orthodoxy—not least because such systems of thought, after enjoying a brief (if absolute) intellectual reign, tend then to be dethroned and discarded in favor of another. In his view, the production of a succession of temporarily fashionable theoretical paradigms offered no useful model of intellectual life. 40