This is a part of a series of the colleccted thoughts and sayings by influential members of the Johns Hopkins community. All the following quotes were taken ver verbatim from a personal interview with Daniel Deudney.
Six feet, six inches tall, dressed in a black suit, black hat and matching black skinny tie, political science professor Daniel Deudney has become one of Hopkins' most beloved -- and mysterious -- campus figures.
Of his signature wardrobe color, which he claims he was wearing before it became fashionable, he says that black is "actually significantly utilitarian in its origin."
As for the hat, "It keeps my head warm and shielded from the sun -- and it helps me avoid banging my head into low-hanging objects. Every other month or so, I would otherwise cut or bruise my head, so the look is entirely utilitarian."
But for an expert who testified before Congress in the first hearing ever held on Star Wars -- the infamous nuclear missile defense program (SDI) -- and whose specialty is nuclear war, the militarization of space and global geopolitics, the all-black wardrobe certainly lends itself to rumor.
"Well, it provides a sort of trademark imaging," he said with a smile. "It's a branding phenomenon. But there is the utilitarian element -- I have a whole row of black pants, black jackets and white shirts. It's modular. And it's upper casual, lower formal at the same time."
With his undergraduate degree from Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude, his masters from George Washington University and his doctorate from Princeton, another Deudney phenomenon is his apparent inability to spell.
"It's not really that I can't spell," he said, "it's just that I can't talk and write and spell at the same time. It takes a lot of energy to move around and write on the blackboard and lecture."
Interesting, from a professor who attributes his public speaking abilities to his beginnings as a state debate champion back in high school, where he was valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar. It wasn't until his junior year of college that he decided to pursue a career in political theory for global governance and science and technology.
"I was an undergrad double major in philosophy and political science at Yale and I realized that we didn't really need another commentary on Hobbes or Rousseau, but that we needed to do for today what they had sought to do then," he said. "I decided to throw myself into the front lines, so I went to Washington right after college to immerse myself in issues on nuclear security, environment, outer space science and technology. Washington was like an extended field trip. I worked for 35 years on Capital Hill, which was a 60-hour-a-week job on energy and government."
Since his entrance into the academic realm, Deudney has taught at Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania, produced three books (with a couple more on the way) and perhaps most notably, coined numerous Deudneyan terms.
"Nullarchy, terrapolitan, physiopolitics, negarchy -- those are probably the main four," Deudney said. "I'm not shy about coining new words because political science is a language, and terms have so many different associations and meanings that it becomes hard to say anything without making all sorts of qualifiers and provisos. It's just cleaner to have a new term referring to a specific phenomenon."
So, once and for all -- what is a negarchy?
"I didn't coin it to throw people off, but to bring greater clarity," he said. "We didn't have a term that's abstract like anarchy and hierarchy. I coined it to help register the liberal democratic forms in a way that can be said right along the realist and statist ones."
So in other words, it's so abstract that we'll never really know.
When he's not coining new terms or lecturing on global security politics, international politics or terrorism, Deudney describes himself as "outdoorsy."
"I like nature, camping, rock climbing, et cetera," he said. "I try to go to California's high mountains as often as possible in the summertime to climb. I'm hoping to go to Mount Shasta soon. I also swim and lift weights."
Though he's familiar with Facebook, he hasn't heard of his 115-member Facebook Group, "I Love Daniel Deudney," which was founded "for those people who love Daniel Deudney: his enthralling voice, his amazing outfit and his expressive hand gestures. If there were a nuclear war, we'd want to be in your bomb shelter." The discussion board has spottings of variations on the classic trademark outfit as well as debates on the meaning of nullarchy versus negarchy.
Does he have anything to say to his fans?
"Yes," Deudney said. "Come January, they should all be sure to buy my new book, which is entitled Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polists to the Global Village, which will contain many of the figures and diagrams that they have come to know and love.
"And hate," he adds.
