Howard Richards: Ecumenical Peace Activist and Philosopher of Social Science
Howard Richards (1938 - 2024) was a distinguished ecumenical peace activist and public intellectual whose life's work bridges philosophy, education, law, and community development across multiple continents. As a philosopher of social science, Richards is recognized for developing a transformative praxis rooted in intercultural dialogue, critical pedagogy, and economic alternatives to neoliberal orthodoxy. Throughout his career, he has engaged with diverse traditions—religious, philosophical, and political—toward the construction of just and sustainable societies.
Richards began his intellectual and activist journey at Stanford University, where he studied law (1958–61) and became deeply involved in the peace movement, co-founding the Peninsula Peace Center and participating in farm labor advocacy alongside César Chávez and Dolores Huerta as the first volunteer attorney for the Farm Workers Association. He found that as the union made headway, the growers turned more and more to mechanization, undercutting the union’s power. He soon joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions under Robert Hutchins, contributing to its Center Magazine and publishing on utopian thought and democratic renewal.
In 1965, Richards and his wife Caroline moved to Chile, where he served as Dean of Studies at Santiago College and became an educational advisor under President Eduardo Frei’s reform agenda. Influenced by Paulo Freire, Richards contributed to secondary curriculum development and later founded the Programa Padres e Hijos (Parents and Children Program, PPH) at CIDE, blending community development with adult education. After pursuing further studies at Oxford, with a a thesis on Piaget, he returned to Chile in 1972 under Allende's government, continuing his work with CIDE.
Forced into exile after the 1973 coup, Richards helped colleagues flee repression before returning to the United States. There, he completed his PhD in Philosophy at UC Santa Barbara and began teaching at Earlham College, Indiana, where he and his wife Caroline Higgins founded the Peace and Global Studies program. She also authored the 1979 novel Sweet Country set in Chile during the military takeover of 1973.
From 1981 to 1985, he also pursued doctoral studies in education at OISE, University of Toronto, writing a second dissertation on the PPH program.
Richards’ intellectual legacy includes several foundational texts. The Evaluation of Cultural Action (1984) analyzes Freirean pedagogy through illuminative evaluation; Letters from Quebec (1994) weaves Western rationality's genealogy with a philosophy of peace and justice. Understanding the Global Economy (2004) and The Dilemmas of Social Democracies (2008, with Joanna Swanger) critique modernity's constitutive economic rules, while Gandhi and the Future of Economics (2011) reconsiders economics through Gandhian values. With Catherine Hoppers, he co-authored Rethinking Thinking (2012), contrasting modern market rationality with African communal values, and Unbounded Organizing in Community (2015, with Gavin Andersson) offers a practical philosophy of community empowerment.
Richards’ later work centers on “unbounded organization,” a theory and praxis of inclusive, post-bureaucratic social action. He has taught globally—at UNISA and the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and through short courses in Latin America and elsewhere—while advising networks like Repensar la Economía in Chile and HumanDHS internationally.
A prolific bilingual author, Richards integrates ethics, economics, and epistemology in a dialogical, cross-cultural effort to nurture a just world. His life and work exemplify a commitment to intellectual humility, intercultural solidarity, and peace through justice.