My undergrad thesis advisor UC Berkeley political scientist Michael Rogin who was for me, as many others, the one person who set me on the trail of radical thought recently passed away from what appears to be hepatitis contracted in St Petersburg. In his lectures on American political theory, he brought alive the Federalist papers while he also mocked, though in the most analytical way, Ronald Reagan whose reign demonstrated how reality was now mediated through film. In studies of literature and cinema, he uncovered for us the American tradition which Louis Hartz had only dimly recognized and that dare not speak its name--counter-subversion. In the mid 1980s he had already recognized how counter-terrorism had become the means through which the American tradition of counter-subversion would be updated and reinforced. He signed off on my undergraduate thesis that defended the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky who had been his partner Prof Ann Banfield's dissertation advisor. Yet he himself refused above all else any strictly economic or reductionist analysis of authoritarian and counter-subversive political culture; he may have invented American cultural studies but was ambivalent about the apolitical directions in which the field was headed. In his brilliant lectures, American history was illuminated from the perspective at the margins--indians, debtors, radical proletarians, unruly women, swarthy immigrants, oppressed minorities, blacks above all else. I clutched on to his writings as his letter allowed me to go off to Harvard to study political theory. But he had already made of me too great of a radical to listen in silence to the likes of Samuel Huntington, so I dropped out soon thereafter. But due his influence, as well as that of Hanna Pitkin's and Paul Thomas', I loved political theory so I did not leave before writing for my master's thesis on the meaning of Plato's allowance of women into guardianship in the Republic. Meeting with him over the summer, Prof Rogin helped me develop my ideas on Vlastos, Pomeroy, Okin and many others. When I told him that I had over the years gone deeper into Marx and *Capital* in particular, he proudly reminded me of his father's work as labor organizer; his uncle Leo Rogin had been a radical historian of economic thought in the 30s. We will find in the coming months how far and wide his brilliant candle shone. For me he opened up the world of radical Freudianism and uninhibited Marxism. He gave me the confidence to beat down the barriers of race and caste while still allowing me to understand how very formative of our American culture racial anxieties and bad faith have been. More than anyone, he showed me the path to become a man of this world by seeing in the struggles of the oppressed the source of our humanity and happiness. I owe so very much to him. In sorrow, Rakesh Bhandari
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