E. Victor Wolfenstein, 1940–2010

Victor Wolfenstein, Professor of Political Science at UCLA and psychoanalyst, was a consulting editor of this journal from its inception, but he was probably not personally, or perhaps even professionally, known to many readers. Yet he was part of the same political cohort as many of the journal's editors, and he entered into the political psychoanalytic debate at an earlier time, making a mark both in writing and in teaching across the entire spectrum of (originally) New Left concerns: Marxism, critical theory, race and racism, and feminism.

As soon as he began his professional career in political science, Victor (E. Victor, named after Eugene V. Debs) started addressing the intersections of psyche and politics. He had seemingly known forever that he would work on politics and psychoanalysis because the two could not be separated. He had known forever that he would stay true to classical theories (psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Nietzsche) while also revising and revisiting, incorporating what was brought by the 1960s and 1970s to political-intellectual life. His first book, The Revolutionary Personality, appeared in 1967 (Princeton University Press), when he was just 27. This book was followed by other groundbreaking studies in politics, race, and psychoanalysis: Personality and Politics (Dickenson Press, 1969), The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (University of California Press, 1981), Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (after Marx's Grundrisse; Free Association Books, 1993); Inside/Outside Nietzsche: Psychoanalytic Explorations (Cornell University Press, 2000); and A Gift of the Spirit: Reading The Souls of Black Folk (Cornell University Press, 2007). Since the 1990s, he also wrote articles that addressed political theory, psychoanalysis, race, and gender. During the time of his very brief illness and before his too-early death, he completed Talking Books: Toni Morrison Among the Ancestors (CreateSpace, 2010). Thus, he was a classical, old-f