Wolff Peace

In Memoriam: Robert Paul Wolff (1933 - 2025)

Final Episode of the Wolff Peace Series (Episode 77)

Host: Avis Kalfsbeek | Peace Is Here Podcast

Hi friends, and welcome to Peace Is Here. I’m your host, Avis Kalfsbeek.

Today marks the final episode of the Wolff Peace Series, where we paired the political thinkers in Robert Paul Wolff’s Political Man and Social Man with peace warriors from across history. 

It’s a moment of closure—but also an invitation. If you’re just discovering this series now, I hope you’ll go back to Episode 45 and listen through. Each thinker, each peace warrior, and each conversation builds on the last, bringing us to this final moment—one I didn’t know I was headed toward when I first picked up this book.

A Personal Beginning

My mother ran a free library in my small town. Many of the books came through donation, and one of them—Political Man and Social Man—had the handwritten name of someone I admire deeply from our local farming community.

I won’t share their name for privacy, but seeing it inside this book makes me smile. They’ve been a beautiful kind of anarchist—rooted in land, labor, and quiet resistance.

And so I started reading, recording, and reflecting. But in this final episode, I wanted to pause and ask:

• Who was Robert Paul Wolff when he wrote this book in 1966?

• Who was he near the end of his life, when so much of the world he studied was still unraveling—and being reimagined?

Robert Paul Wolff – Early Life & 1966 Context

• Born in 1933.

• Earned his PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1957.

• By the mid-60s, he was teaching at Columbia University, right in the heart of one of the most turbulent decades in U.S. history.

1966, the year Political Man and Social Man was published, saw:

• Escalation of the Vietnam War

• Transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into Black Power

• Student protests erupting across the U.S.

Columbia would soon become a center of rebellion against racism, militarism, and university–government ties.

The book reads like a map of unrest—essays on anarchism, revolution, alienation, suicide, social psychology, and total institutions. Wolff wasn’t just observing; he was offering a curriculum for moral and political resistance.

His Legacy & Later Years

Wolff opposed the Vietnam War, spoke out, and later co-founded the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst—an early, radical effort to place Black thought at the center of higher education.

Students remember him as brilliant, fearless, sometimes intimidating, but deeply generous. One of his students, Cornel West, described him as a man who never flinched from naming injustice, even when the academic world softened its edges or looked away.

In later years, Wolff ran a blog—The Philosopher’s Stone—where he wrote about Marx, capitalism, politics, aging, and the absurdities of life. He recorded lectures on YouTube, still sharp and humorous.

Wolff passed away in early 2025, months before I found his book and began this series.

A Closing Quote from Wolff

“Sociology poses for us the perennial problem of lost innocence. Once we understand the ways in which the integrity of personality is sustained or destroyed, we have no choice but to debate the extent and nature of the legitimate uses of that knowledge.”

The Wolff Peace Series – 33 Episodes

Over 33 episodes, we moved from Hobbes to Dostoyevsky, from power and revolution to conscience and community. 

The thinkers gave us structure.

The peace warriors gave us breath.

We explored anarchism, obedience, alienation, suicide, conscience, and healing—hearing from Malala Yousafzai, bell hooks, Jean Vanier, Etty Hillesum, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela, and more.

We asked:

• What does peace really require?

• What kind of people must we become to build it?

Final Reflection

There’s no “proper” way to acknowledge a life in a few words. But I hope these episodes lead a few—or more—to discover the work of Robert Paul Wolff.

He showed that resistance isn’t the absence of care—it’s a deeper form of care. His stubborn, searching voice shaped generations of students and thinkers, and made space for questions too often ignored.

Peace Questions to Ponder

 Big Picture:

1. What kind of world do we create when we allow conscience to guide institutions?

2. What does it mean to lose innocence—and still choose integrity? 

Day-to-Day:

1. Where are you asked to conform, and what part of you resists—quietly or strongly?

2. Who in your life still holds on to their humanity, even within inhumane systems?