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.
