Passing of Peter Hudson

I have just come across Raymond Suttner‘s obituary for my former teacher Peter Hudson. I had no idea he had passed away. He taught me during my Honours in Political Studies in 1981! I was the only student who took his course on Marxist theory. We used to meet at his flat which I think was in Hillbrow. It was rigorous and intense. That was the start of my journey in search of a non-reductionist social theory, which eventually led me into systems thinking and then into critical complexity theory (influenced by Paul Cilliers here at Stellenbosch). Paul and Peter are so similar in many different ways. I am saddened by this loss. Peter wove a thread into South Africa’s rich intellectual life that was significant in may different ways, but the most important was the value of theoretical rigor informed my an ethical commitment to critical thinking. Thanks Raymond for this beautifully written piece. And thanks Peter for the foundations that you laid for my subsequent intellectual journey. What a place the Politics Department was in those years: Peter Hudson, Tom Lodge and Michael Nupen. And a few doors down the corridor, David Webster in the Social Anthropology Department.