Professor Abe Rotstein

April 28, 2015

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the passing of Professor Abe Rotstein. Please see the below note from Professor Louis Pauly, Chair of the Political Science Department:

 

Colleagues,

Our colleague, Abe Rotstein, died this morning. He had been frail lately, and it seems that his heart just gave out. May he rest in peace.

Abraham Rotstein was born in Montreal in 1929 and completed his BA at McGill in 1949. In 1967, he earned his PhD in our predecessor department, the Department of Political Economy. In between, he did graduate work at the University of Chicago and studied with Karl Polanyi at Columbia; he co-authored one of Polanyi’s last books, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy. He became a professor here, and long after the department split, he retired from the Department of Economics. He remained active as a scholar and teacher even until very recently. I was personally lucky to teach with him a couple of times in comparative and international political economy courses. I got to know him when I was a graduate student and he was a senior fellow at Massey College, where he ran the journalism fellows program. For many years, he also served as managing editor of the Canadian Forum.

Abe was a prominent contributor to the distinctive field of Canadian Political Economy. He published The Precarious Homestead, and many other books and essays in a tradition inspired not only by Polanyi but also most importantly by Harold Innis. Not coincidentally, he was a co-founder of the Committee for an Independent Canada. The attached tribute to his friend, Mel Watkins, also our colleague, will give you a sense of a significant part of our department’s history.

Abe’s funeral will be on Thursday, April 30 at 11:30AM at Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel, 2401 Steeles Avenue West. Shiva Address: 102 Admiral Road, evening services at 8PM; Shiva concludes on Monday evening, May 4. See the website of the Chapel for more details.

Lou

Louis W. Pauly

Professor and Chair

Department of Political Science

University of Toronto