Iris Marion Young, 1949-2006: “U. of C. professor had passion for social justice”

(Courtesy of I Cite)

Iris Marion Young, 1949-2006: “U. of C. professor had passion for social justice”
University of Chicago News Office

Iris Marion Young, a leading philosopher called by a colleague “one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century,” died in her home Tuesday, Aug. 1 after a year-and-a-half long fight with cancer. She was 57.

Young, Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago since 2000, was known for her work on theories of justice, democratic theory and feminist theory.

“When Iris came to the University she had already established herself as one of the most important feminist thinkers in the world,” said Associate Professor Patchen Markell, a colleague of Young’s in the University of Chicago’s Political Science department. “She was absolutely unsurpassed in her ability to combine a very high level of philosophical analysis with relevance to contemporary political issues, and to the experiences of women and men who cared about social injustice.”

Young was born January 2, 1949 in New York City. She studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Queens College, where she graduated with honors in 1970, before she went on to earn her masters and doctorate in philosophy in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University.

Early on, Young built a reputation for her teaching and writing on global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. But it was her 1990 book Justice and the Politics of Difference that propelled her to the international stage. It was in that text, a staple in classrooms the world over, that Young critically analyzed the basic concepts underlying most theories of justice, argued for a new conception of justice and urged for the affirmation rather than the suppression of social group difference. More recently she had been working on the issue of political responsibility, and especially on the question of how to conceive of responsibility for large-scale structural injustices that can’t easily be traced back to the doings of any single person or group.

“There is no question in my mind that she is one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century,” said Cass Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago’s Law School and in Political Science. “She was unexcelled in the world in feminist and leftist political thought, and her work will have an enduring impact.”

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