William Pietz (born 1951) is an intellectual historian and political activist.
Pietz completed an interdisciplinary Masters in Philosophy and Political Theory from the New School for Social Research,[1] and his PhD in the History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1988.
It was the subject of his dissertation[2] as well as a series of articles for the journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, entitled "The Problem of the Fetish.
"[4][5][6] A collection of Pietz's fetishism essays, including previously unavailable material, was published under that title by University of Chicago Press in 2022.
[9] Referring to his trilogy, David Graeber has characterised Pietz as "one of those rarest of people – an independent scholar whose ideas have had a profound effect on the academy".