Robert Wolff

Robert Paul Wolff, career-long philosopher and academic, died on January 6, 2025 at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. He was 91 years old.

Professor Wolff led a wide-ranging public intellectual life as a thinker, author, teacher and advocate. Born on December 27, 1933 to Charlotte "Lotte" Ornstein Wolff and Walter Harold Wolff and raised in the Kew Gardens Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York, Bob Wolff matriculated as a freshman at Harvard University in 1950 at the age of 16 where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1953 at age 19 and completed a PhD in Philosophy in 1957 at age 23 with his dissertation The Theory of Mental Activity in The Treatise of Human Nature and The Critique of Pure Reason. He began his career in academic philosophy as an instructor at Harvard in 1958 and a junior professor at the University of Chicago in 1961 before moving to a tenured position at Columbia University in 1964 where he went on to become the youngest Full Professor of Philosophy in the history of the department. He then left the world of elite private universities in 1971 to join the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and made his home at UMass until his retirement in 2008, first as a Professor of Philosophy and then as Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the PhD program of the Department of Afro-American Studies. In 2017 he was appointed to the Society of Senior Scholars at Columbia University.

As a scholar, Wolff was equally known for his critical analysis of major figures in the European philosophical tradition and for the numerous works of original philosophy he authored. His close analysis of Immanuel Kant's writings on metaphysics and moral theory during his early career is the work on the European canon for which he has been most lauded, particularly Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (1963) and The Autonomy of Reason (1974). In the middle part of his career he developed a passion for Karl Marx's theory of labor economy in Das Kapital and wrote virtuosic treatments of that work in Understanding Marx (1984) and Moneybags Must Be So Lucky (1988).

Wolff's original works of philosophy largely focused on the Western project of liberal democracy. His best-known book, In Defense of Anarchism (1970), is a critical examination of the possibility of legitimacy in state authority. In Defense of Anarchism has found a wide global audience across many disciplines and has been translated into dozens of languages. It was an apotheosis work, building on Wolff's exploration of aspects of liberal democratic theory and institutions in The Ideal of the University (1969), The Poverty of Liberalism (1968), and A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) co-authored with Herbert Marcuse and Barrington Moore, Jr.

Professor Wolff was as brash politically as he was precocious academically, leaping into public policy arguments over nuclear disarmament in the 1950s and 60s, the war in Viet Nam in the 1960s and 70s-at Columbia he took a prominent public stand in support of students who occupied Low Library during the antiwar protests of 1968-and the racist depredations of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and 90s. It was a source of pride for Professor Wolff that he succeeded in being arrested in front of the Fogg Museum at Harvard during a protest urging the university to divest its holdings in the apartheid government of South Africa and he participated in the successful effort in 1989 to elect the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers on a pro-divestment platform.

Professor Wolff's commitment to radical thought and liberal political values led him to become an institution builder. While in his first teaching position at Harvard he became one of the "founding fathers" and first head tutor of Social Studies, a cross-disciplinary program designed to enable students to investigate politically controversial or unconventional subjects and equip them with more powerful methodological tools. Social Studies continues at Harvard as a popular undergraduate concentration. Shortly after arriving at the University of Massachusetts he founded Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC), an undergraduate program built on the model of Social Studies and dedicated to the use of critical perspectives to analyze political and social relations within communities and institutions. STPEC recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and continues to be a robust part of undergraduate life at UMass Amherst.

Wolff's involvement in the apartheid divestment movement of the 1980s led him to found a not-for-profit organization in 1990, University Scholarships for South African Students ("USSAS"), dedicated to making higher education available to Black South African students by funding them at scale to attend university within South Africa. USSAS was a one-man operation: Professor Wolff developed his own fundraising list and would use a mail-merge program to send out appeals to finance the bursaries that would enable Black South African students to attend the University of Durban-Westville and University of the Western Cape. The organization funded the education of more than 1,500 students during the two decades it was in operation. Wolff traveled to South Africa on numerous occasions to establish and strengthen the relationships necessary to make this effort successful and in 2011 he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by University of the Western Cape in recognition of the impact of his efforts. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, then Chancellor at UWC, officiated the degree ceremony.

At his home institution, Professor Wolff translated his growing commitment to racial justice into a bold career turn. Working in partnership with the faculty of the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass-a field in which Wolff had no academic training or expertise-he moved his tenured professorship out of Philosophy and into Afro-Am in order to dedicate his energy and organizational skills to helping create a PhD program, the first non-Afrocentric PhD in Afro-American Studies at any university. Professor Wolff served as the first Graduate Program Director for the fledgling PhD program, which has been producing successful graduates with distinguished careers in the Academy ever since. He remained in the Afro-Am Department until his retirement in 2008 and wrote about the importance of African-American Studies as an academic discipline and his experience finding this new professional home in a monograph with the characteristically provocative title Autobiography of an Ex-White Man (2005).

After retiring, Wolff moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his second wife and first love Susan Wolff (née Schaeffer), the high school sweetheart from Queens whom he found again and married in 1988 after the end of his first marriage in 1986 to Cynthia Griffin Wolff, the noted scholar of American literature. (Cynthia Wolff passed away in July 2024.) Bob and Susie Wolff spent much of their retirement splitting their time between Chapel Hill and Paris where they embarked upon a grand adventure with the purchase of a small apartment in the Fifth Arrondissement just off Place Maubert, visiting as often as they could until travel became too difficult.

Retirement also brought a new chapter to Wolff's life as a public intellectual when he created a popular blog, The Philosopher's Stone, that he used as a platform for offering commentary on politics and policy, discussing the existential challenges of aging, and finding a new audience for his published works. The blog community he gathered was lively, enthusiastic, sometimes raucous, and the eagerness of that community for substantive engagement inspired Wolff to record and upload videos to YouTube of his lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and other subjects of analytical philosophy. He would often remark with amazement that these videos allowed him to reach an audience for his lectures orders of magnitude greater than the number of students he taught in person during his career.

In his last years, Professor Wolff developed Parkinson's Disease which advanced quickly and imposed severe physical limitations. He adapted to his disabilities with a combination of frustration and resigned good humor and refused to suffer unnecessary constraints on his intellectual work, continuing to write actively on his blog, teaching courses on ideology and society at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina, and remote-teaching a course on volume one of Marx's Kapital to a group of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates at Harvard in the spring semester of 2024 when he was 90 years old.

The Harvard course would prove to be Wolff's valedictory as a professor. His physical disabilities led to a fall in June 2024 that produced a severe subdural hematoma. After several brushes with death he beat the odds, survived that brain injury with a full cognitive recovery, and spent late summer and fall 2024 attempting to recover his physical capacity from the ordeal while also planning to design and teach a course on the misuses of formal methods. A combination of circumstances frustrated his ability to succeed in his recovery, however, and led to additional medical crises that left him profoundly weakened. In his last days he was unable to survive an infection that led to his sudden death from septic shock on January 6, 2025, ten days after his 91st birthday.

In late November 2024, a few weeks before the start of his final decline, Wolff was still posting commentary on his blog about the coming return of a presidential administration he reviled and the incoherence of the term "tactical nuclear weapon" in public discourse on Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. He was no longer able to type and required assistance to translate his dictated blog entries into the written word. But his voice was not stilled.

In addition to his wife Sue, Professor Wolff is survived by his sister Barbara Searle, sons Patrick Gideon Wolff and Tobias Barrington Wolff, Patrick's wife Diana Schneider and their children Samuel Emerson Wolff and Athena Emily Wolff, stepsons Lawrence Gould and Jonathan Gould and their wives Suzanne Gould and Tamara Dyer.