Horst Hutter, a former beloved faculty member in the Department of Political Science, died on May 22, 2023, in Leigné-sur-Usseau, France. He was 85.
Horst grew up in Graz, Austria, and graduated from Styria’s Teacher Education Institute in 1957. He was a schoolteacher for several years and then received a Fulbright scholarship to attend Hunter College in New York, where he earned his MA. He later completed his PhD at Stanford University with a dissertation on the politics of friendship in Greek and Roman antiquity.
Horst would later revise and publish this as his first book, Politics as Friendship (1978), in which he illustrated the importance of genuine individual friendships to the very emergence of political community in ancient Greece.
In 1973, Horst was recruited to the Department of Political Science at Sir George Williams University, one of Concordia’s two founding institutions.
Soon after, on a yearly trip to Yelapa, Mexico, Horst met the poet and artist Francine Prévost, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. They married and had two sons, the filmmaker Harald Hutter and actor Florian Hutter.
Horst taught at Sir George and then Concordia for 38 years before retiring as full professor in 2011. One of the greatest scholars of Plato and Nietzsche of his time, he also published the landmark Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices in 2006. I
n honour of his career as an educator and scholar, Hutter was named distinguished professor emeritus in 2015. After his retirement, he and Francine founded the Maison Gai Saber in Leigné-surUsseau, a retreat for artists and lovers of philosophy.
In the last years of his life, Horst was a grandfather to Léon, Florian and his partner Clio’s son.