Although I don’t think I encountered Henri Simon much after 1969—he was often in England when I was in Paris—I took his existence and activity for granted. Echanges et mouvements, while different from I.C.O., took its place as a background element of life, an ever-flowing  undogmatic source of information and ideas. So I was shocked a year ago to discover that Henri had turned 100 years old. How could that be? He seemed the same: committed, observant, thoughtful, and open to new ideas (like the perception of the spread of #MeToo as an example of a new type of international movement without formal organizational structure). I was shocked again when he died. Henri embodied a mode of radical thought and action that still seems to me at the center of any hope for the future: non-sectarian, analytically serious and based on the collection of information, not in the service of professional advancement and therefore for the most part not the product of academics or other sorts of career intellectuals, uninterested in celebrity, available freely to anyone interested. That mode, issued from the European left of the earlier twentieth century, in which people like Henri moved from the Communist Party through some variety of Trotskyism to a truly independent confrontation with social reality—the important thing not the particular trajectory but the outcome—no longer exists. In that way, Henri belongs to a particular past. History goes on; people will find different paths to meaningful opposition to the social order. Henri will belong to that present and future as well, having provided a powerful example of such a path, its essence still valuable however different circumstances have become.