Ronald Aronson

                                                 Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

                                                            5700 Cass Ave. #2426

                                                            Wayne State University

                                                                Detroit MI, 48202

                                                            Phone: (313) 577-0828

                                                          email: ac7159@wayne.edu

BIOGRAPHY

Ronald Aronson is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wayne State University.  He  grew up in Detroit and was educated at Wayne State, U.C.L.A., the University of Michigan, and Brandeis University, where he received a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas.  He studied with William Barrett, Page Smith, and Herbert Marcuse.  Swept up in the political activism of the 1960s, he became a community organizer in the African American neighborhood of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and an editor of the most prominent New Left journal, Studies on the Left.  In spring, 1968, as he was completing a doctoral dissertation on "Art and Freedom in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre," he participated in the “Freedom School” organized in the aftermath of the student strike at Columbia University  He has taught at Wayne State University since 1968, first at Monteith College, and since 1978 in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, a degree program for working adults.

Author or editor of eight books, he is an internationally recognized authority on Jean-Paul Sartre, and has been Chair of the Sartre Society of North America and founding editor of the journal Sartre Studies International.  With support by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1980 he published Jean-Paul Sartre - Philosophy in the World (Verso); the American Council of Learned Societies supported research for his Sartre’s Second Critique (University of Chicago Press, 1987).  In 1983-4 he was Research Associate at University College London and in 1987 and again in 1990 he was guest lecturer at the University of Natal and other South African universities.  The story of his first experience in South Africa, at the height of the struggle to end apartheid, is told in Stay Out of Politics: A Philosopher Views South Africa (Chicago, 1990).  In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Natal.  

Winner of several scholarly and teaching awards at Wayne State, in 2001-2002 he was President of its Academy of Scholars.  In winter, 2004, he was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago.   His most recent works are After Marxism (Guilford, 1995), and Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It.  Aronson has produced national political debates on democratic values and affirmative action (participants have included Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich, Abigail Thernstrom, David Frum, and Dinesh D’Souza) and has published articles in Dissent, The Nation, The Yale Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The International Herald-Tribune, The (London) Times Literary Supplement and The Times Higher Education Supplement. 

Since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, he has been active in the Huntington Woods (MI) Peace, Citizenship, and Education Project. One of his lifelong concerns has been to study and write about the nature of political commitment.