Dick Howard

Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University. His most recent books are The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolutions (Columbia University Press 2010) and Aux origines de la pensée politique américaine (Hachette Pluriel 2008). He does a weekly comment... ary on US politics for Radio Canada and a monthly column on New York cultural life for Esprit. His political commentaries can be found on this website. En route to his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Dick Howard studied in Paris (with Paul Ricoeur) and Bonn (with Klaus Hartmann). He later worked with Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis and Jürgen Habermas. A participant in the civil rights and anti-war movements in the US, he was a student at Nanterre in 1968, and traveled thereafter throughout West and East Europe, becoming an early anti-totalitarian leftist. He has written frequently on current events, sociological trends, and philosophical themesas can be seen in his Curriculum Vita . Articles, essays, public lectures and radio/tv appearances try to bring together these three dimensions of political thought. He has written books in English and in French, on philosophical, historical and political themes. His more political articles and commentaries in recent years have been in French, perhaps because he has become a token francophone (although most of the French commentaries have been translated into German, a language that he reads and speaks but whose grammar he respects too much to abuse it). His most recent book is The Primacy of the Political. A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolutions (Columbia University Press, 2010). In its Introduction, and in several recent articles, he tries to explain why hea product of the New Left and the Anti-totalitarian Leftreturned to the history of political thought in order to better understand the challenges of today. That work finally completed, he retired from teaching and has ...Read More