Moishe Postone was born in Edmonton, Canada, on April 17, 1942, the oldest son of Evelyn and Rabbi Abraham Postone. He attended a residential Jewish high school in Chicago, and then enrolled at the University of Chicago. There he completed his Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, and his Master’s and preliminary PhD work in history.
As a graduate student at Chicago, Postone developed plans to study in Germany, where he could engage directly with new thinking on Marx and the Frankfurt School. In 1973, after teaching briefly at Brooklyn College and Richmond College in New York, he moved to Frankfurt am Main and enrolled at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität. There he continued his doctoral work on the Marxian critique of labor and time with Iring Fetscher. He taught classes in Frankfurt and published important contributions to public debates on antisemitism, the German Left, and the German politics of memory.
Postone completed his DPhil at Frankfurt in 1983 and returned to Chicago for a position at the Center for Psychosocial Studies. In 1987 he accepted a Harper Fellowship in the College at the University of Chicago. He was an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology before accepting a faculty position in the College with a joint appointment in the Department of History. In 2012, Postone was appointed Thomas E. Donnelley Professor in the Department of History and the College. He also was an associate of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies and a co-chair of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.
Postone’s most important work, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory, appeared in 1993. Based on his reinterpretation of Marx’s central categories, he developed a rigorous theory of the core dynamics of capitalism. He further addressed the limitations of traditional Marxisms, and demonstrated the significance of Marx’s theory for an understanding of neoliberal capitalism today. The book was awarded the Theory Prize by the American Sociological Association in 1996 and has been translated into eight languages.
Over the course of his career, Postone continued to develop a critical theory of antisemitism. He is known for grasping modern antisemitism as a fetishized form of anti-capitalism, wherein the abstract, structural domination of capital is misrecognized and attributed to a Jewish conspiracy. This work on the social theory of reactionary forms of thought has been important to both scholars and activists. Collections of Postone’s articles and essays on these topics have appeared in France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Japan, and Brazil.
Postone was a committed teacher, and both his thought and his pedagogical insights continue to influence the many undergraduate and graduate students with whom he worked. He was the chair of the undergraduate social sciences Core sequence "Self, Culture, and Society" for almost 25 years, and championed principles of general education. He served on the dissertation committees of over sixty graduate students, and won awards for excellence in undergraduate and graduate teaching.
Postone valued international collaboration, and he helped to support visiting scholars in the United States and to organize many conferences abroad. In addition to frequent engagements in Europe, in the last decades of his life he participated in forums in China, Taiwan, India, South Africa, Japan, and Brazil.
For over 25 years, Postone and William Sewell co-directed the Social Theory Workshop, a forum for discussing the work of graduate students and visiting scholars. In 2012, they collaborated with workshop participants in organizing a conference to reflect on the shared approaches developed by past and present workshop cohorts. From this conference was born the journal Critical Historical Studies, which Postone and Sewell co-founded in 2015.
In 2006, Postone was diagnosed with cancer, which he fought and survived for 12 years. He died on March 18, 2018.
