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Robert Paul Wolff (1933-2025)

Robert Paul Wolff (1933-2025)

Famous for his philosophical anarchism, he was also a champion of Black liberation and anti-war movements

~ James Birmingham ~

Philosopher and professor of Afro-American studies Robert Paul Wolff passed away at the age of 91 on January 6, 2025. Wolff was born in Queens, NYC and earned his philosophy degrees at Harvard, finishing his PhD at the young age of 23. He spent his academic career in philosophy until 1992 when he transitioned to the Afro-American studies department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst until 2008. He was a champion of Black studies and his dedication to the field of thought is expounded in 2005’s Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.

Wolff had a long and prolific career with a wide range of research interests including Kant, Rawls, Marx, critiques of liberalism, and anarchism. For most readers of Freedom the book he will be known for is 1970’s In Defense of Anarchism. I first read this text at the age of 19 and it truly helped refine and sharpen my own sense of Anarchism as a philosophy in and of itself. Most other books that are offered as introductory texts about anarchism focus on classical thinkers (Wolff’s book, arguably in error, eschews mention of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, etc.), events in Anarchist history and labour movements, and the culture of people and organisations that used the A-word. When most of us use the term anarchism we are referring to a milieu – not just thought, but practice, culture, fashion, and a sense of connection to a history of anarchists.

Wolff’s book is different – and that difference is quite useful. Reading In Defense of Anarchism armed me with ideas and arguments that proved extremely effective in discussions with professors and students who did not have classical anarchist thinkers in their repertoire. It is a sharp and incisive book that is reliant on Kant’s philosophy but ultimately makes broad arguments nigh all anarchists would agree with.

Wolff didn’t just write from and for the Ivory Tower—he was a loud and insistent voice for various social movements, from Black liberation to protests of the war in Vietnam to nuclear disarmament. His letter to the editor from the July 30, 1967 issue of the New York Times deserves to be reprinted in full:

Right to Rebel

To the Editor:
   The men who founded this nation believed that when a people were oppressed, and their pleas for justice were ignored, and they were denied all redress for their legitimate grievances, then that people had a moral right to rise up against their government and throw off its yoke. The Negro ghetto dwellers of this nation are oppressed; their pleas for justice have been ignored; the Congress of the United States mocks their misery; their peaceful demonstrations make no change in the oppression.

The conclusion is obvious and inescapable: American Negroes have as much right to rebel now as the patriots of 1776 had then.

Can anyone maintain that the British rule was more oppressive than that of the modern slum? Are Stokely Carmichaels’s speeches more inflammatory than those of Patrick Henry? The tragedy of the riots is not that they are happening, but that they will fail. For unlike the patriots of Colonial America, today’s oppressed Negroes are a minority, without a genuine chance to free themselves as the colonies once did. Until the injustice of the ghetto is eliminated, the American Government is illegitimate, and no decent man has a moral obligation to obey it.

I’ll end this obituary with thoughts on a piece titled “APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA” from Wolff’s personal blog dated June 1, 2020: “Many years ago, more than forty now, I gave a talk at Hampshire College in South Amherst. My theme was the relative unimportance in the struggle for social justice of disquisitions on the philosophical subtleties and niceties of Marxist theory. Invoking an image I had used before and would use again, I said that social change was not like brain surgery, where the slightest misstep could lead to death, but rather like a landslide, with huge boulders and uprooted trees sliding down a mountainside, accompanied by countless branches, clods of dirt, and even little pebbles. The important thing in life was not how big a boulder you were, but rather that you were tumbling down the right side of the mountain.

“During the discussion period after the talk, a student asked, ‘If that is what you believe, why do you write books about the subtleties and niceties of Marxian theory’? I replied, ‘Writing books is a quite minor contribution to the struggle, but I am good at it, and I enjoy it, which means I will keep on doing it even when there is not much excitement in the struggle. Not everyone can be a boulder, but I think my pebble is rolling down the right side of the mountain’.

“At times like these, when my world is exploding and I am sitting in my study, self-quarantined and offering my opinions to a world otherwise occupied, I remember that talk and comfort myself that at least I am bouncing down the right hillside”.

I often think about this passage when asked about what I do as an anarchist. As a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies I mostly fundraise for our grants program and facilitate the publishing of our books co-published with AK Press. I’ll be 40 in February and I simply don’t organise in the streets in ways I did in my youth. But I know I’m rolling down the correct hillside—and I know R. P. Wolff is resting now on that same side of the mountain, awaiting the landslide.


Photo: Wikipedia

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