[5][2] His father Rabbi Aaron Horowitz, was a prominent member of the Jewish community and a key figure in founding Camp Massad in Canada.
[2][6] He earned his Master of Arts degree from McGill University in 1959, writing his thesis on Mosca and Mills: Ruling Class and Power Elite.
[7] He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Harvard University in 1965, writing his thesis on Canadian Labor in Politics: The Trade Unions and the CCF-NDP, 1937–62,[8] with Sam Beer as his advisor.
[5] Horowitz has specialized in labour theory, and most notably coined the appellation Red Tory in his application of Louis Hartz's fragment theory to Canadian political culture and ideological development, in his essay "Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation" (in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, 32, 2 (1966): 143–71).
[10] Horowitz teaches a class at the University of Toronto entitled The Spirit of Democratic Citizenship which revolves around general semantics, a non-Aristotelian educational discipline first theorized by Polish engineer Alfred Korzybski.