This post is one pass at offering an explanation of my dissertation. I've had to come up with several of these over the past two years as I moved haltingly from brainstorming to proposal to actual writing, and none of them has satisfied me. The problem only gets worse over time, as the more I revise the more I find myself arguing against previous drafts of the abstract. The single sentence abstract has remained consistent: my dissertation is about eschatological discourses in the modern liberal tradition. The current 150-word abstract looks about like this:
