For Stanley Aronowitz

I have just learned about the death of Stanley Aronowitz. He was a dear friend and inspiration to me for 40 years. I first met Stanley when he gave a lecture at Brown University in 1975. I was a high school teacher, attending lectures at Brown but most of the people I saw were dull and uninspiring. When I heard Stanley lecture I was floored. He was a working class intellectual filled with passion, brilliant, affable, funny, and capable of making connections I never imagined. Our friendship began that day. We drank together, shared stories, challenged each other, and wrote a few books together over the years. I never had a conversation with him in which I didn’t learn something. I loved his warmth and ability to both listen and to intervene in a discussion fearlessly. He took shit from no one. On a number of occasions, a manuscript would show up at my door from him on a subject I didn’t realize he knew about. He never failed to surprise me with the scope of his knowledge and the brilliance he brought to a project. He was a hard boiled romantic for whom the radical imagination was at the heart of a politics that mattered and he was one of few great intellectuals I knew who took education seriously as a political endeavour. He was an intellectual from another generation and we will not see the likes of him anymore. I will miss you Stanley. Rest in peace, my brother. Fighting the monsters continues until the last breath. I will do my best as you always suggested.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.