J. Peter Euben (1939–2018)

DOI10.1177/0090591718814838
Published date01 February 2019
Date01 February 2019
Subject MatterEditorial
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718814838
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(1) 3 –5
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718814838
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Editorial
J. Peter Euben
(1939–2018)
Peter Euben’s California license plate read “KALON,” Greek for “the beauti-
ful.” It was a choice that captured much about Euben. On the one hand, there
was his mocking self-parody, for while Euben was many things, as a slightly
balding, slightly rotund middle-aged man of middling height he would never
have claimed the classic beauty of the Greek sculptures adorning the acropo-
lis. But a license plate emblazoned with KALON also captured Euben’s
enchantment with the ancient Greek world whose authors elegantly offered
their audiences and readers tragic insights into human potential and the limits
of human knowledge that Euben worked to communicate to his students and
to the readers of his books and articles. And the word captured a goal toward
which we might aim through our everyday interactions as democratic citizens
striving together for some sort of collective knowledge to guide us.
J. Peter Euben died May 28, 2018, at the age of 78, leaving his daughters
Donna and Roxanne and his granddaughters Lauren, Jenna, and Asha. He
was born on July 18, 1939, in Calicoon, NY, and attended Forest Hills High
School in Queens, NY, and Swarthmore College where he majored in phi-
losophy and politics. After spending time at Oxford and at the London School
of Economics, he moved to Berkeley, initially intending to study Chinese
politics. He received his PhD in 1968 in Political Science from Berkeley.
There, during the tumultuous 1960s, he studied with the founders of what has
come to be known as the “Berkeley School of Political Theory”: Hanna
Pitkin, John Schaar, and Sheldon Wolin. Euben, though, was no mere acolyte
of his renowned mentors; rather, he drew from them the inspiration to make
political theory a practice that entailed engaged citizenship, democratic com-
mitments, the art of teaching, and scholarship that was sensitive to the deep-
est human longings for connections and the capacity to live well in a world of
constant challenges.
Though Euben’s publications ranged broadly from reflections on the
nature of moral education to Arendt to post-modernism to cosmopolitanism,
his most profound commitment was to the challenges posed in the works that
survived from ancient Greece, notably introducing the ancient tragedies and
comedies (often matched with contemporary novels) into a political theory
world that had largely focused on Plato and Aristotle. Euben’s books taught
814838PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718814838Political TheoryEditorial
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