The death of James Petras – the American sociologist whose writings influenced generations of critical thinkers across continents –passed through the world almost like a whisper. A scholar who spent his life exposing the violence of power, the inequalities of global capitalism, and the illusions of empire left this world with little noise beyond small circles of readers and comrades. In a time when intellectual eminence is often measured by luminosity, the silence around his passing speaks volumes about the place reserved for dissenting voices in contemporary public life. Petras died in Seattle on January 17, 2026 on his 89th birthday. His passing came only days before the death of Michael Parenti, another prominent radical voice in American political thought. However, while Parenti’s name circulated widely, Petras’s departure travelled almost unnoticed through academic and media circles. Born in 1937 into a working-class immigrant family in Massachusetts, Petras carried into his scholarship a profound sensitivity to labour struggles and social injustice. After studying at Boston University and the University of California, Berkeley, he spent most of his career at Binghamton University, where he taught sociology and mentored students who later became scholars, activists, and public intellectuals. Over more than five decades he produced an extraordinary body of work – over 60 books, hundreds of academic articles, and thousands of essays in newspapers and journals across the world. Few scholars of his generation wrote with such persistence or with such wide global reach. One wonders if Binghamton University, at least, paid homage to him, amid fears of reprisals from the Trump administration. My own association with Petras stretched over nearly a quarter century. His articles appeared in three journals I edited – the South Asian Journal of Diplomacy, the Indian Journal of Politics and International Relations, and the Journal of Political Economy and Fiscal Federalism. He also served on the international advisory boards of two of these journals. Our exchanges were always warm yet intellectually rigorous. He kept sending mails until April 2020, often asking about developments in the Global South and offering reflections on current politics. In his last mail he asked me to send the volume I had planned to edit, which included his essay on post-Marxism. After that came silence. When the belated news of his death reached me, it felt less like the passing of an intimate scholar and more like the sudden closure of an ongoing conversation.Petras’s life was a rare mix of scholarship and engagement. He never treated academic work as an isolated profession, and collaborated with social movements, participated in international tribunals examining repression in Latin America, and wrote for both scholarly journals and mass newspapers. He believed that intellectual work carried a responsibility toward society, and he practised that belief throughout his career. In an period when universities increasingly reward technical specialisation and safe conclusions, Petras stood as different with a message that scholarship can still speak to urgent political realities.Method, power, and the question of EmpirePetras’s intellectual world kept reminding that global inequality must be studied through class relations, state power, and concrete political struggles. Many theorists of globalisation described a world impacted by markets, networks, and transnational institutions. Petras saw something different. He argued that powerful states continued to organise global capitalism, enforce financial rules, and deploy military force to protect corporate interests. In his reading, imperialism had not dissolved into abstraction. Rather, it had adapted to new economic forms while retaining its political foundations.This perspective placed him in dialogue with world-systems thinkers such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin. While they examined long historical cycles and structural hierarchies between core and periphery, Petras shifted attention toward the social relations inside each society. Exploitation, he argued, begins at the site of production and is determined by domestic ruling classes that use the state to extend power internationally. The nation-state therefore remained central, not obsolete. This emphasis on agency and class conflict gave Petras’s work a more perceptive political immediacy than many structural theories.Latin America served as his principal laboratory of analysis. Petras wrote extensively on neoliberal reforms, trade agreements, and financial dependence, showing how these processes transferred wealth upward while weakening labour movements and national sovereignty. He maintained close relationships with figures such as Salvador Allende, Hugo Chávez, and Andreas Papandreou, observing from within how reformist governments struggled against global constraints. His support for popular movements never prevented him from criticising compromises or authoritarian tendencies. That balance of solidarity and scepticism became one of the hallmarks of his method.His critique of contemporary theory also reflected this orientation. In his writings on post-Marxism, Petras argued that the retreat from class politics reflected political defeats rather than intellectual progress. Identity-based struggles, he believed, could achieve transformation only when connected to questions of ownership, labour, and economic control. Similarly, his critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire rejected the idea that power had dispersed into borderless networks. For Petras, multinational corporations still relied on strong states, and military alliances remained decisive instruments of domination.He also warned against the fragmentation of the social sciences into isolated disciplines. Genuine interdisciplinary work, he argued, must reconnect political economy, sociology, and history in order to understand the forces impacting modern societies. Scholarship, in his view, should explain how power operates rather than merely describe social trends. That conviction guided his analyses of US foreign policy, Israeli strategy in West Asia, and the rise of nationalist economic policies during the early Trump years. Even when discussing domestic politics, Petras traced the link between internal inequality and global power projection.Legacy of intellectual courageJames Petras has to his credit a vast body of writing that spans continents and decades. Books such as Unmasking Globalization, System in Crisis, Beyond Neoliberalism, and Imperialism and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century deal with the evolution of global capitalism and the resistance it provokes. His studies of Latin America, written often with Henry Veltmeyer, remain essential references for scholars of development and social movements. At the same time, his columns in international newspapers and journals ensured that his ideas reached audiences far beyond academia.What distinguishes Petras’s legacy is the consistency of his intellectual commitment. He never accepted the claim that class conflict had faded from history or that imperial politics had given way to neutral globalisation. He also insisted that intellectuals bear responsibility for examining the actions of their own governments. In his writings on Cuba, West Asia, and global trade, he urged scholars in powerful countries to scrutinise their own states rather than judging weaker nations from a distance. This insistence on intellectual accountability defined his public voice.His career was not free of controversy. Some of his later writings provoked strong criticism, especially where his analyses touched on sensitive political questions. But these debates reveal the very tensions he sought to expose—the uneasy relationship between academic freedom, political power, and public discourse. Petras never aimed for comfortable consensus. He valued argument as the lifeblood of intellectual life and accepted that dissent often invites isolation.Across five decades, he demonstrated that scholarship can remain grounded in social struggle without losing analytical rigour. From advising Papandreou in Greece to engaging with movements in Latin America, Petras maintained an extraordinary continuity between thought and action. He believed that intellectual work should elucidate structures of power while remaining open to the voices of those resisting them.The subdued response to Petras’s death reveals what gets underway in the intellectual world. It clearly exposes the slow narrowing of intellectual space in our time. Universities celebrate innovation while discouraging dissent, journals reward technical precision while turning away from structural critique, and public debate often prefers polite commentary over uncomfortable truths. In such an atmosphere, voices like Petras’s are remembered by those who still search for explanations of inequality, empire, and exploitation. His writings continue to travel across classrooms, movements, and informal networks precisely because they refuse to offer safe conclusions. They insist that theory must face lived realities, and that scholarship loses its purpose when it retreats into technical language and professional caution.James Petras certainly belonged to a generation that treated ideas as instruments of historical change rather than adornments of academic reputation. If the world received news of his passing with little noise, the questions he raised have hardly faded. K.M. Seethi is director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension and academic advisor to the International Centre for Polar Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) in Kerala. He also served as ICSSR senior fellow, senior professor of international relations and dean of social sciences at MGU.