Donald C. Hodges

Donald Clark Hodges (Fort Worth 1923-Climax, Georgia 2009) was a philosophy professor at Florida State University, who wrote about revolutions and revolutionaries (especially about southern and middle America).[1]

Growing up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Hodges returned to the USA in 1941. He was a student of James Burnham, the author of "The Managerial Revolution," which argued that both in the Communist and the capitalist world the managers "rule the world." Hodges was a devoted (later disenchanted) Marxist and an organizer for the Communist Party and labor organizations as a young man.[2]

Hodges earned his Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University in 1954.[3] He was a professor at University of Missouri, University of South Florida, as well as at Florida State University, where he began teaching in 1969. He retired from Florida State after 39 years. Hodges spent time in places like Uruguay where he met people like Abraham Guillen, an anarcho-syndicalist in the style of Bakunin. He lived more than 20 years in the Miccosukee Land Co-op. In 2003, at eighty years old, he published "Deep Republicanism: Prelude to Professionalism" in which he studied Cesare Borgia, a successful ruler, and everyone who felt inspired by Machiavelli: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre, Babeuf, Filippo Buonarroti, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, George Orwell, Céline, Boris Yeltsin. Also for Hodges Il Principe is not Machiavelli's main work, but Il Discorsi.[4]

According to one of his students Hodges "would track down original sources to see for himself if they were being cited correctly or taken out of their proper context." He rarely attended social events with his contemporaries; this was because he wanted to avoid the groupthink leftism that plagues most academic circles.[2]