Roger Boesche

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Roger Boesche (January 24, 1948 – May 23, 2017) was an American political theorist and a professor at Occidental College. He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and earned a PhD in political science from Stanford University. From 1977 to 2017, he taught American and European political thought at Occidental and held the Arthur G. Coons Distinguished Professorship in the History of Ideas. One of his students was Barack Obama. He led the college’s faculty council from 1990 to 1992 and won several teaching and service awards. He helped guide Occidental College’s disinvestment from South Africa. He wrote several books, including three about Alexis de Tocqueville. He met his wife Mandy at a Vietnam War protest; they lived in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, and had a daughter named Kelsey, an opera singer. Boesche died in Los Angeles on May 23, 2017.