Robert Paul Wolff

In 1990, Wolff founded University Scholarships for South African Students, an organization devoted to promoting opportunities in higher education within South Africa for disadvantaged South African students. Since its creation, USSAS has assisted in providing funding and educational opportunities for thousands of students in South Africa.

After the renewal of interest in normative political philosophy in the Anglo-American world after the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, Wolff made pointed criticisms of this work from a roughly Marxist perspective. In 1977, Wolff published Understanding Rawls: A Critique and Reconstruction of A Theory of Justice, which takes aim at the extent to which Rawls's theory is cued to existing practice, convention and status quo social science. Insofar as A Theory of Justice forecloses critiques of capitalist social relations, private property and the market economy, Wolff concluded that Rawls's project amounted to a form of apology for the status quo, as according to Wolff, markets and capitalist social relations are founded on exploitation and injustice, and Rawls did not give arguments to defend his theory from these charges.

Wolff's 1970 book In Defense of Anarchism is widely read, and the first two editions sold more than 200,000 copies. This work argued that if we accept a robust conception of individual autonomy, then there can be no de jure legitimate state. Wolff received praise for this work, including, to his surprise, praise from many on the political right such as right-wing libertarians and anarcho-capitalists.

Wolff extended his advocacy of radical participatory democracy to university governance in The Ideal of the University (Boston: Beacon, 1969), in which he argues against rising marketization and external encroachment and that universities should be primarily governed by faculty and students.

Wolff was an instructor in Philosophy and General Education at Harvard University from 1958 to 1961, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Chicago from 1961 to 1964, Associate Professor and then Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University from 1964 to 1971, Professor of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1971 to 1992, and later Professor of Afro-American Studies from 1992 to 2008 and Professor Emeritus from 2008–present.

Robert Wolff graduated from Harvard University with a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1953, 1954, and 1957 respectively.

Robert Paul Wolff (born December 27, 1933) is an American political philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Wolff was born on December 27, 1933, in New York City, and is the son of Walter Harold and Charlotte (Ornstein) Wolff. He is married to his childhood sweetheart, Susan Gould, and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has two sons by his first wife, Professor Emerita Cynthia Griffin Wolff: Patrick Gideon Wolff, an international Chess Grandmaster, and Tobias Barrington Wolff, a gay rights legal activist and Jefferson Barnes Fordham Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania.