Before Rawls’ shadow in left-liberal political philosophy there was Arnold S. Kaufman (1927-1971), who died when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling (recall this post). While there is no Wikipedia page devoted to him, Kaufman was rather famous during the 1960s because of his involvement with the student movement at the University of Michigan and especially by promoting ‘participatory democracy’ in the context of the Port Huron Statement (as the New York Times noted fifty years later, and The Nation a decade earlier). In fact, he had been regular contributor to Dissent during the last decade of his life. So, for example, an early version of his book (1968), The Radical Liberal: New Man in American Politics, appeared as a long essay (1966) “A call to Radicalism: Where Shall Liberals Go?” in Dissent. [HT Kevin Mattson.]
Despite his fame in his own era, Kaufman has left almost no trace in the Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy, except that once he was a participant in the debate over Black Reparations. His actual views — in favor of what he calls ‘compensatory justice’’ — are not mentioned. (One can find the argument in the July – August 1969 issue of Dissent.)
Then after he moved to UCLA, he became a key defender of his then junior colleague, Angela Davis, against, inter alia, Ronald Reagan’s (gubernatorial) administration’s repeated attempts to get her fired because of her membership in the Communist Party.* The shape and rhetoric of today’s culture wars are already visible in the debates over her appointment. The essay in her defense that Kaufman published on January 3, 1970 in The New Republic is rather significant to understand his thinking about academic freedom, especially in light of his polemic with Sydney Hook’s more restrictive understanding of it. (Some other time more on that.)