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April 22, 2025

Political theorist scholar, teacher, colleague

 28 January 1947- 2 April 2025

We regret to report that Professor Warren Magnusson passed away in Vancouver on April 2^nd.

Warren joined UVic’s Department of Political Science in 1979 and formally retired in 2016. He had previously been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he was awarded his doctorate in 1978. He was Chair of the Department from 2001 to 2003.

Warren was first and foremost a political theorist. He had an intense concern with what it has meant and might still mean to engage with “the political,” especially given the – to him unfortunate – degree to which so many political possibilities have been monopolized and significantly corrupted by the modern state. In this respect his work resonates with many forms of political analysis concerned with alternative understandings of democracy, novel strategies energising progressive social movements in diverse settings and changing modes of spatiotemporal organization both locally and globally. Like Hannah Arendt, he was disturbed by the great gulf between ideals of democracy and contemporary practices enacted in its name. He especially fought against claims about political realities affirmed through the eyes of modern technocratic states.

He is best known for his diagnoses of “the urban political experience,” which he engaged most explicitly in his In Search of Political Space (1996), Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (2011), and Local Self Government and the Right to the City (2015). Unlike almost all analysts of urban politics, he was able to identify the urban political experience well beyond city boundaries: in Clayoquot Sound, for example, as well as in the networks mapped in studies of multiple globalizations. Similarly, unlike most analysts of globalization, he always insisted on the concrete local practices of community and self-government, championing their capacities to resist world-wide structures and forces that seem to overwhelm all possibilities of democracy and self-determination. Writing against the entrenched conceits of localists, globalists and statists alike, he sustained a commitment to democratic possibilities that was both analytically incisive and productively provocative. Even while it became conventional wisdom that we need to think more creatively about relationships between localizations and globalizations (“think globally and act locally”), Warren was one of the very few thinkers anywhere willing to engage seriously with what such relationships might imply for established conceptions of what politics must involve and where it might be engaged.

Warren was also a consummate teacher, widely admired for his capacity to bring historical thinkers to life and to show how once revolutionary principles have turned into commonplace conventions that we scarcely notice let alone know how to challenge. Together with Rob Walker, and against much prevailing fashion, he established a series of undergraduate courses devoted to the entrenched canon of European thinkers who largely defined what we mean by politics and even set the terms under which alternatives might be envisaged. This involved the close reading of texts and a capacity to appreciate how and why historical thinkers came to adopt various positions before engaging in critical judgements about them. Among other things, these courses were envisaged as helpful preparation for a potential graduate program focusing on more critical, contemporary and transdisciplinary forms of theorization. This was eventually crystalized as the Graduate Program in Contemporary (now Cultural) Social and Political Thought, of which Warren was the founding Director.

Over a career at UVic spanning 36 years, Warren taught over one hundred separate lecture and seminar courses at undergraduate and graduate levels, mainly in political theory and urban politics. He often claimed that he learnt more from his students than they learnt from him. He was the primary supervisor and mentor of around forty MA and PhD students and served on the thesis committees of many others. He taught with both passion and deep integrity.  He never eschewed difficult readings in favour of easier options or compromised traditional Socratic methods with contemporary fashions in learning technologies. He was also exceptionally generous with the time and attention he devoted to individuals working at all levels. He leaves a legacy of thousands of students inspired to think critically about the contemporary world, and to conceive of different ways to engage in political action.  

As a colleague, Warren was a dedicated, thoughtful, hard-working and collegial member of the Department, the Faculty and the University. He was generous in his praise and both fair and enabling in his criticism.  As a scholar, teacher and colleague, he was always a powerful presence and a role model who significantly raised the standards, ambitions and reputation of our Department.