In Memoriam

In late 2020 the Canadian left, and indeed the left around the world, suffered a terrible loss when Leo Panitch died unexpectedly and tragically from covid-19 in a Toronto hospital.It was not just the left that felt the loss; Canadian political science and academia lost a great scholar.Debates everywhere over the big questions of economy, society, and politics lost a compelling public intellectual with a distinctive voice that will be sorely missed.Leo's politics began where he grew up: in working-class Jewish Winnipeg.The Jewish left produced passionate lifelong commitments, some to social democracy, some to communism.Leo was intellectually inspired by Marx and Marxism but throughout his life remained deeply skeptical of orthodox communism with its heavy-handed anti-intellectual party discipline and its record of police-state oppression in the name of proletarian revolution.Yet he was equally skeptical of social-democratic parties that too often saw as their

Philosophy · Psychology