I was pained to read of the untimely death of philosopher Michael Sugrue, most recently of Ave Maria University, but for twelve years a lecturer in political philosophy at Princeton. He was 66. 

I met Sugrue sometime in 2002 when I was living in Princeton and trying, with conspicuously little success, to make ends meet and get my dissertation done. I applied in late 2001 for an adjunct job at Princeton, and got a position as teaching assistant for Sugrue’s POL 307, “The Just Society,” a standard survey course in political philosophy–the first half devoted to classic works, the second to contemporary ones.

It was a high-enrolling course, with between 300 and 400 students, taught in the old-fashioned style: a lecture in a time-hallowed hall filled to capacity with rapt and enthusiastic undergrads, with Sugrue commanding the stage like an academic rock star. It wasn’t my preferred teaching style, but I’d seen it before (I’d taught for the famous T.V. Morris at Notre Dame), and Sugrue was extremely good at it: there was no denying the sheer intellectual excitement his lectures produced in students. He was a kind of twenty-first century incarnation of Mortimer Adler, but a lot sexier. Pedagogical purists hated the whole rock star approach to classic texts, but I had to admit to a soft spot for it: if it got people interested in philosophy, it couldn’t be that bad. 

Sugrue was a political conservative, with a traditionalist’s love for The Great Books. So “The Just Society” was really: justice in the Western political tradition. I don’t remember everything we covered in his class–it was more than twenty years ago–but I do vividly remember the challenge of having to cover Plato’s Republic in a week, and The Brothers Karamazov in two. I remember wondering with irritation if there was any point in covering such great works in such a short time, but I now see that there probably was. If I remember his covering those texts, maybe his students do, too. They were great fun to teach (both the texts and the students), and I’d like to think that the fun had salutary effects beyond fun. 

Sugrue was generous about sharing the stage with others, if only for variety’s sake, and generously non-partisan about it, as well. The guest lecturer I remember best was Br. Cornel West who, if memory serves, gave a spirited lecture on Marx—or if not Marx, then something loud and revolutionary. Actually, it belatedly occurs to me that I was one of the guest lecturers for the class (on MacIntyre’s After Virtue), but unsurprisingly, I remember West’s lectures more vividly than my own. 

Though he didn’t publish a single book, Sugrue’s legacy is all over the Internet. Drop his name into a search engine, and you’ll find his lectures–on Plato and Aristotle, on Descartes and Locke, on Hobbes, on Nietzsche, on the Stoics, Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, the Greeks, the Bible, and much else. I don’t know what effect he had on others, but in my case he inspired a deep appreciation for the breadth and diversity of the Western tradition, along with a sense of the radical incompleteness of a tradition that defines itself in quasi-geographic terms, self-consciously excluding “the Rest,” while remaining supremely confident of its claims to speak for humanity as such. I don’t know that Sugrue ever intended that reaction, but I can’t imagine that it was unfamiliar to him, and it’s a tribute to his powers as a teacher that he inspired it in others. RIP.