Obituary archive

NEWS Georges Canguilhem, 1904-1995 Georges Canguilhem, who died on 11 September 1995 at the age of ninety-one, was France’s pre-eminent historian and philosopher of the sciences. A figure of immense authority and prestige, he was regarded with great affection by his many disciples. Born into a very modest family living in the southwest, Canguilhem was […]

NEWS Guy Debord, 1931-1994 Guy Ernest Debord took his own life on the afternoon of be preceded by an address from its maker: ‘There is no film, Wednesday, 30 November 1994. He was 62 and knew that he Cinema is dead. There can be no film.’ was dying of a form of polyneuritis brought on […]

SYMPOSIUM Karl Popper, 1902-1994 Learning from negative instances n 17 September 1994, Karl Popper died at the age of 92. He was described as the official .opposition of the Vienna Circle, the philosophical club which in the interwar penod espoused the then popular doctrine of ‘logical positivism’. His relations with that club were ‘friendly-hostile’, to […]

NEWS Ralph Miliband, 1924 – 1994 The Common Sense of Socialism For anyone studying or teaching politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, the publication ofRalph Miliband’ s The State in Capitalist Society in 1969 was a watershed. The ‘pluralist’ theories which had dominated the discipline, especially in North America, somehow never quite recovered from […]

Paul Feyerabend, 1924-1994 A Personal Memoir Paul Feyerabend died on February 11, a month after his seventieth birthday. He wrote the last of his many letters to me in October 1993, and on the outside of the envelope, in typically casual fashion, he scribbled a message saying that he might soon be coming to Brighton, […]

NEWS E. P. Thompson, 1924-1993 The great bustard has winged off, removing as he went one of the prime attractions of these shores, and one of the few remaining reasons for still proclaiming intellectual allegiance to them. Thompson liked to present himself as an earth-bound English creature incapable of much soaring. But he had enough […]

problems. Nothing new or constructive was being said: criticisms of the idea [hat history has ended are attacks on an easy target. The last item on the list was the ‘world-wide power of the “phantom states” of the mafia and of the drug groups’. But Derrida was not moved to expand on the subject of […]

NEWS George Rude, 191 0-1993 George Rude belonged to that remarkable florescence of post -war British Marxist historiography which has played a major part in shaping the methodological and substantive agendas of contemporary historiography. The intellectual and political formation of that generation, whose prominent figures include Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and E. […]

NEWS Heori Lefebvre, 1901-1991 Henri Lefebvre, the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28-29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also […]

The Lonely Hour of the Last Instance LOUIS PIERRE ALTHUSSER, 1918-1990 Against what common sense, the common sense of financiers and lawyers, tell us, there are many writings that blow away, but a few words that remain. No doubt because they have been inscribed in life and history. Louis Althusser on Jean Hyppolite, 1968 The […]

NEWS SAMUEL BECKETT (1906-1989) “,,:,.,.; ~ ,•. . “‘. “‘… . W ~~ ~:’~..’ .”‘~””:.’ < ~ ,.~ The last days and months of the 1980s were a time of astonishing social and political upheaval. In the midst of these events, news came from Paris, discreetly and quietly, of the death of Samuel Beckett. No […]

tially pragmatic form. However, he does insist that normative assent is often surprisingly widespread, and that a shared belief in reciprocal service between dominant and dominated lies at the heart of symbolic consensus. It is not clear whether Godelier holds this to be true transhistorically, or whether he thinks that there must always be some […]

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) In place of our usual editorial, in this issue we publish differing responses to Simone de Beauvoir’s death from two French newspapers. Rob,ert Maggiori (from Liberation, 15 April 1986) In 1929 two young people, like many others before and after them, must have rushed across to the rue de Grenelle to […]

Sartre is Dead In place of our usual editorial, in this issue we publish differing responses to Sar.tre’s death by two members of the Editorial Collective. Sartre’s productive career was at a close some time ago. Death formally completed what had always been a career of incompleteness – unpublished works, projects announced but never undertaken, […]

NEWS & COMMENT HERBERT MARCUSE: A PIECE OF THE PAST DISLODGED Russell Jacoby Herbert Marcuse is dead. At the age of 81, he succumbed to a world he always resisted. His list of credits or crimes is long, and includes inciting the student revolts of the 1960s. For those who collect evidence that the ’60s […]

Symposium Thomas Kuhn, 1922–1996Paradigms as soft structures Kuhnʼs The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was, despite the modesty of its author, a revolutionary work. Like Darwinʼs Origin of Species (with which it shares many other likenesses), its wider cultural and political resonances far exceeded the intentions and expectations of its author – both in scope and […]

OBITUARYRaphael Samuel, 1934–1996 Raphael Samuel was born in London, to a Jewish Communist family, and died of cancer in the city of his birth, on 9 December 1996. Education at the progressive King Alfredʼs School (Hampstead Garden Suburb) and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was taught by Christopher Hill, contributed to his intellectual formation, […]

Obituary WalSuchting, 1931–1997 In March of this year, I received the sad news of the passing of Wal Suchting the previous January. I never met Wal in person. But, from a correspondence of some hundreds of pages stretching over five or six years, I felt I had come to know him and I thought of […]

Obituary Jean-François Lyotard, 1924–1998As a boy, he wanted to be a Dominican monk, a painter, or perhaps a historian. Whilst he was not afraid of poverty, chastity was not for him. He had no artistic talent, and his poor memory made him an unlikely historian. And so he became the philosopher who died of cancer […]

Obituary Systemic supertheorist of the social Niklas Luhmann, 1927–1998 Openly dreaming of eternal life, Gaston Bachelard conceived of paradise as one huge library with miles of stacks, crammed with books. For Niklas Luhmann, the great German sociologist and metaphysician who recently died at the age of 70, after a protracted period of sickness, paradise probably […]