This item will include brief biographies of the main Critical Theorists who have been influential in the field since its inception in the 1930s. Their backgrounds and interests are diverse, but the one thing they share in common is a belief that human nature is not "inherent" but is shaped by the social, political and economic forces at work in society, and that a better world is possible through the transformation of these structural systems. They also share a loose relationship to Marxist revisionism - an attempt to recontextualise Marx in the Post-Stalin, post Soviet Union world. All are philosophers in the broadest sense, although their primary focus may not be the narrow disciplinary field of academicism. They are all social activists, seeking to transform the world, as Marx himself said, rather than to simply describe it. They attempt to do this in their own ways through their own disciplines - philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, education, media studies, cultural studies and linguistics. All of them have been instrumental in shaping my own theorising and praxis.

I have used Wikipedia but, bearing in mind its relative insecurity, I have cross-referenced its entries with others - notably the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philiosophy and other institutional and personal websites and material from my library. I  have also contextualised these references into my own work and theorising where possible. The list is not complete but it is entirely personal. It is also a work in progress - being extended as time and parenting allows. I have left out some theorists because I find their writings too self-indulgent or impenetrable or, more pointedly, to internally inconsistent. I have therefore tended to favour those who live up to my own highest value - an ability to walk their talk, to practice what they preach, to integrate theory and practice in their lives. I have, for instance, left out Baudrillard whom I find too self-centred and smug in his own opinions - a legend in his own mind, as they say. For similar reasons I have left out Tariq Ali. Lyotard's theoretical insights are too powerful to be omitted, and though almost impenetrable, I have decided to include Derrida for the same reason. Some of those included are notable in their own specialist fields (Michael Apple, Henry Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz in Education, bell hooks in Feminism and African American Studies etc.) You will notice that Critical Education theorists like Apple, Aronowitz, Giroux, McLaren, Shor  etc., have more extensive biographies than others. This is because they have featured majorly in my own researrch and writings. As an educational theorist and practitioner their ideas have been most meaningful and are therefore more fully articulated. Also, you will notice that there appears to be a dearth of women in the list. This is because men have tended to dominate the disciplines until the last few years. For this reason, I have linked to an excellent feminist philosophy blogroll which contains a comprehensive list of women philosophers. To view this click here .

Those that are included in my list are there because their own theories and writings extend beyond the disciplinary boundaries of their subject areas and have a much broader cultural and political influence (like hegemony and the relationship between The State and Civil Society). I have otherwise tended to avoid Urban Theorists (Like Manuel Castells, David Harvey and Mike Davis), literary theorists (like Terry Eagleton), feminist theorists and critical education theorists.

For those readers wanting a broader and more inclusive list of critical theorists, I recommend Telos, a quarterly critical journal that has hosted articles by some of the most prominent critical theorists of the late 20th Century.

Finally, if anyone would like to augment, change or make suggestions about the biographies please feel free to contact me

This item: Critical Theorists Part 1 is alpabetically arranged from A to G.

Its partner: Critical Theorists Part 2 is alphabetically arranged hrom H to Z 

To view Part 2 click here  

Here, then, is my own list from A-G.

• Theodor Adorno
• Louis Althusser
• Michael W. Apple
• Stanley Aronowitz
• Seyla Benhabib
• Walter Benjamin
• Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann
• Ernst Bloch
• Murray Bookchin .
  
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Noam Chomsky
• Ward Churchill
• Jacques Derrida
• Franz Fanon
• Michel Foucault
• Paulo Freire
• Erich Fromm
• Henry Giroux
• Andre Gorz
  
• Antonio Gramsci

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)

Biography

Adorno was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist, and essayist, member of the "Frankfurt School," a group of intellectuals working at the Institute for Social Research, loosely associated to the University of Frankfurt. He studied music (piano) and composition from his early years and both his mother and aunt were professional singers.

He received his doctorate in Philosophy in 1924. For three years he studied music, and worked informally at the University's Institute for Social Research (The so-called Frankfurt School) from 1928, before accepting a position at the University in 1931. He published a thesis on Kierkegard's Aesthetiic in 1933. His main colleague and collaborator was there was Max Horkheimer , (the eventual Director of the Institute) whom he had met previously in 1922 and with whom his friendship lasted for decades.

During the Third Reich, the Frankfurt School moved to New York City, where it continued to develop a critical theory of society. Adorno initially moved to Oxford where he studied the writings of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, before moving to New York in 1938 to join the other exiled members of the Institute at the New School for Social Research at Columbia University. The school's cultural criticism and eclectic theories of mass society deeply influenced  the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s. The Frankfurt School never produced a unitary social theory, but its members shared a critical view of modern capitalism, and rejected Soviet Communism and orthodox Marxism.

He returned to Frankfurt in 1949 and became the Director of the Institute in 1959, after Horkheimer relinquished the position. He remained there until 1969, during which time he met and taught Jurgen Habermas.He died in August of that year in a heart attack. 

Work

Adorno based his own theories on the writings of Hegel, Marx, and Freud, and was particularly influenced by Hegel's concept of the dialectic. However, Adorno did not believe that all contradictions can be solved and in Negative Dialektik (1966) he not only rejected the idea of a realisable utopia (as the possibility outcome of total reconciliation) but all notions of permamence. 

His major work is The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) which he co-authored with Horkheimer. There, they analysed the development of the Enlightenment project and saw it descending once again into barbarism - evidenced by the antisemitism of Nazi Germany. They saw that reason had become the instrument of Totalitarianism.

In  The Dialectic of Enlightenment we also see the first glimmerings of his interest in what was to become known later as "The Culture Induustry". He and Horkheimer noted how the technological development of media had now rendered the totalitarian control of populations easier to accomplish, as audiences became increasingly passive and receptive of socially constructed information systems amenable to minority capitalist control. Adorno returned to the theme in his essay 'Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture' (1954), in which he viewed pessimistically individuals possibility to resist the ubiquity of modern mass culture. This understanding led inexorably to the realisation, published later in Aesthetic Theory (publshed posthumously1970) that the manipulation of public awareness had rendered Art meaningless as a vehicle for social commentary and transformation. He suggested that "popular culture" was now nothing more than the manipulated will of the capitalist economy. His later years were clouded in controversy when he called in the police to evict students who had occupied the Institute in 1969.

In 1950, Adorno worked for a while at the University of California, Berkeley where, along with Nevitt Sanford he researched the social/psychological development of anti-Semitism and developed the concept of the Authoritarian Personality which was then published as a book. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) is an influential book by Adorno and and several other researchers during WWII and the period shortly thereafter. The book, which became a classic text in psychology, traced the links between children’s upbringing and their prejudice in adulthood. While it focused on anti-Semitism, the book also showed that people who were prejudiced against one ethnic, racial, or religious group tended to be prejudiced against others. The lead author was really R. Nevitt Sanford but when a dispute arose about the sequence of secondary authors' names Sanford suggested they simply list the names alphabetically. The authors postulated the existence of an "Authoritarian Personality" that was receptive to Authoritarianism. The researchers created a psychometric instrument for measuring 'fascism' (the F-scale) and developed a Freudian theory of the development of this personality type. The Authoritarian Personality inspired a huge amount of sociology and political science research during the later 1950s and early 1960s on the role of personality traits and in the adoption of political points of view. However, the concept of authoritarianism still stimulates much research even today. More influential, however, was the work that Adorno and his colleagues did not in the field of psychology, but in the field of cultural studies.

The Frankfurt critiques of centralized Soviet socialism, coupled with their analyses of the production of culture under capitalism established the basis for new conceptions of culture as a major factor in the social process.  While they apparently refused to conduct their analysis of culture within the frame of reference of the old marxist base-superstructure model, Horkheimer and Adorno were themselves paradoxically unable to abandon their own beliefs in either the ultimate influence of the economic base nor in the primacy of their own cultural baggage in their theories of culture.

They established the importance of culture as an instrument of social and political reproduction, but not as a vehicle for social and political production. They saw it as a mechanism of oppression, not of liberation. Real culture, for them, was high culture. Popular culture, on the other hand was seen as a social manipulation carried out by the productive forces for the purpose of consumerism and social reproduction - making sure the peasants stayed in their place, lulled into soporific passivity by alienating forms of popular cultural production. In this belief, they missed the essential importance of the "youth culture" of the 1960's, and its capacity as an instrument of social change.

Aware that social and cultural conditions had changed dramatically since the time of Marx (through the greater concentration of capital, more advanced technology and sophisticated modes of administration, and so on) the members of the Frankfurt School realised that the scope of domination had extended well beyond the work-place into the domain of cultural and social life itself. “Culture” for the members of the Institute was not viewed dialectically - that is to say that they did not recognise their own view of the social category of “culture” as itself being culturally determined. In other words they stood outside the sphere of their own analysis. This is nowhere more clear that in the work of Theodor Adorno and in his joint work with Max Horkheimer into what they called the “culture industry”.  They distinguished, for instance, between "authentic art" (meaning "high culture art forms") and popular culture which they saw as diametrically opposed, the former seen as potentially liberating, the latter as stultifying.  As Douglas Kellner has astutely remarked:

This is clearly a serious oversight, for even a cursory glance over the historical record indicates that oppressed peoples and liberation movements have almost invariably coalesced around popular forms of culture - from Blues, through folk music to protest songs. Furthermore, recent events in Bosnia and elsewhere have indicated the amazing ability of popular cultural forms to survive intact after decades of the most apparently determining institutionalised cultural superimpositions. It is particularly sad that those members of the Institute who held this view of culture and aesthetics also missed the radical potential that their other theories and writings precipitated in the youth of the 1960's. They did not seem able to draw a distinction, for instance, between those aspects of popular culture which grew organically from the fertile ground of oppression itself, and those which were created and administered from above. It was, paradoxically, in the 1960s that the Frankfurt theorists would have their greatest impact - upon the youth culture which they had disparaged as culturally alienated and conditioned.

One of the main functions of education, for instance operates through what Raymond Williams calls a process of "selective tradition", - that is through the selection and organisation of particular forms of knowledge, which are then imbued them with a Truth value and passed off as the only way of perceiving reality. Within this structuring, hierarchies of knowledge are established and legitimated, such that the hierarchies themselves become normative structuring devices for further cultural production. Certain texts become canonised as having a particularly close relationship to Truth, and therefore as being possessed of superior qualities over other texts etc. and in this way the whole corpus of formalised knowledge becomes a structured medium for the continued reproduction, celebration and  legitimation of particular works and are reciprocally legitimated by them. In addition, focusing on culture as a medium of social stratification allows us to understand how power and culture intersect. We are able to recognise whose values have the greatest value within society, and to interrogate what precisely is the relationship between cultural production and material production. We recognise, for instance how some subject groups are pushed to the margins of normative cultural values while others are validated and supported. We are able to interrogate how the cultural productions themselves correspond to the collective values of these groups and to understand in more insightful ways the relationship between particular forms of production and domination. What emerges is a sense of culture as a site of struggle between competing interest groups which are differentiated by intersecting vectors of race, gender, class, etc. and which correspond to the broad and generalised designations of high-culture and common-culture.  These dynamic and shifting polarities operate at every level of cultural production. This characteristic of culture as a field of struggle emerged in the social dynamics of the 1960s, in what became known as the "youth" culture, after Horkheimer and Adorno had completed their own analysis.

The 1960s in many ways forms an important cultural turning-point, exemplified by the emergence of a youth culture celebrating its own cultural forms and origins, and developing counter-hegemonic themes and instrumentalities which would find their way into the political theorising and activism of the New Left. In particular, this process began in England, most specifically in the development of an authentic Northern England cultural dominance in what had previously been the most suppressed and marginalised element of a classed British society. It was the developing identity of the "Liverpool sound" which gave substance to a whole coalescing culture of disaffected working class children in the slums of the North of England, and which did indeed provide a disaffected and socially and economically oppressed group with a symbolic culture of resistance.

Although the British 1944 Education Act allowed the streaming of “intellectually gifted” children to Grammar School (effectively ensuring that only small numbers of working class children could slip through the net and that the proportions in the numbers of intellectual and manual  laborers remained unchanged), nevertheless some educated working class children (including this author) still gained access to tertiary education. Their numbers were augmented by numerous returned servicemen demanding access to professional education. The result was an unprecedented cultural shift in British society, in which working-class culture began to be seen by the working class themselves as a valuable culture in its own right, challenging the received (and classed) meaning of Culture as an exclusive mark of social distinction and upper class status. This shift was evidenced in  numerous literary, stage and film productions of that time, all of which celebrated, rather than apologized for, working class culture.  The anti-heroes of these works provided powerful role models for the emergent youth, many of whom carried the cultural shift into new areas, particularly the music industry. As the American sociologist Stanley Aronowitz rightly notes:

Culture was now firmly bracketed in the plural. Society was no longer made up of the cultured and the uncultured. There were cultures, often opposed to each other - giving rise to what Theodor Roszak would call the youth counter-culture.  It will be noted that this oppositional model of culture is very different to that to which Adorno and Horkheimer tenaciously clung. The myriad pop groups who came to prominence at that time controlled their own material - a material which invariable grew out of a rich and fertile regional musical tradition. At the same time, the famous expansion of the clothing industry in Soho's Carnaby Street in "Swinging London" developed not from established rag-trade manufacturers, but from a burgeoning hippie cottage industry transported from the Portobello Road and Kings Road in Chelsea. These aspects of popular culture were missed by Adorno and Horkheimer simply because they had decided a priori that all popular culture was the expression of a regime of exploitation and domination. Not only did the Frankfurt theorists fail  to recognise the radical potential of popular cultural forms, but their continued reliance upon a determining economic base also failed to adequately theorize the ultimate failure of the traditional marxist model. In spite of their best intentions, they remained tied to an essentially pessimistic view of the world.

Having said all of this, it is important to note that the range of Adorno's achievement, and the depth of his insights is remarkable. His work on literary, artistic, and musical forms, his devastating indictment of modern industrial society, and his profound grasp of Western culture have made him one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth-century. As one of the main philosophers of the Frankfurt School, his influence on literary theory, cultural studies, political theory, art criticism, and musicology and philosophical aesthetics has been profound.

For access to a good eBook on Adorno click here. 

For a comprehensive though brief online summary of Adorno click here.  

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Louis Althusser (1918-1990)

Biography

Louis Althusser was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was a contemporary of the Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre with whom he publicly disagreed, and had many students who later became famous including Nikos Poulantzas , Regis Debray and Michel Foucault . Althusser continually suffered from mental breakdowns and had reeceived ECT on several occasions. In 1980 he stangled his wife but wass never brought to trial, being assessed as suffering from "diminished responsibility".

He was a committed Marxist who favoured orthodoxy and who argued at length against the introduction of Marxist Humanism. He is credited with a re-reading of Marx which draws a sharp distinction between the latter's early works and the more mature works such as Capital. His analysis of Marx led him to review the means by which social reproduction takes place and paralleled the work of Gramsci in hegemony. His work also presaged the notion of habitus as theorised by Pierre Bourdieu. Arguably his most influential theoretical work is the essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation. There, he interrogates the State's use of force and compares it with its more subtle ideological methods of ensuring social and cultural control. He draws a sharp distinction between what he calls the Repressive State Aparatuses (army, police, the courts etc) and Ideological State Apparatuses  (the media, the education system) through which the State controls the meaning of public life.

Work

Althusser's earliest important work was the publication of  Reading Capital (1965). It is widely considered an important contribution to Marxist philosophy and also marks a moment in the history of post-structuralism. Among its tasks the book seeks to clarify differences between Marx's and Hegel's dialectics, and to more thoroughly demarcate the "break" which Althusser saw between Marx's later writings (Marxism proper) and his early, Hegelian work. And, furthermore, the book sought to re-establish Marxism as a viable position within philosophy, albeit in a manner influenced by structuralism, against its years of dilution from not only critiques (humanist and Sartrean ones, particularly) but also from the supposedly socialist philosophy of popular liberal-socialist democratic writing and politics.

Althusser's essay On the Young Marx  suggests a great "epistemological break" between Marx's early, "Hegelian and Feuerbachian" writings and his later, properly Marxist texts. His essay Marxism and Humanism is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and "species-being," which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity." His essay Contradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Gramsci' s concept of hegemony).

Like Gramsci, he saw the State as playing a crucial role in the reproduction of social relations. The State's role in the control of meaning was conceived by Louis Althusser as one of the key elements in the process of social reproduction. Althusser constructed his theories in direct opposition to the Existentialism of Sartre, whose notion of freedom, according to Althusser, left no theoretical base for social transformation. He believed that the continued reproduction of the existing system rested upon the creation of twin systems of ideological persuasion and physical repression. Moving beyond simplistic conceptions of the economic base - cultural superstructure polarity he argued that the relationship between the forces of economic and material production cannot be seen as a simple cause and effect determination of cultural forms. Instead, he recognised that social reproduction required the separate but related creation of a set of commonly accepted social values which support the productive process. The use of both force and ideology was required as a means of social control and compliance for the production of knowledge and skills required to maintain the productive capacity. He maintained that these functions are carried out not directly by the dominant class, but indirectly on their behalf by the State, under the operation of his twin Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs).

When persuasion and organisational restructuring fail to forestall the demands for real social change, or to delegitimate competing social and political realities, the State invariably resorts to more overtly violent means of repression. In addition to the territorialisation and politicisation of space as noted by Engels, the State also exercises its power through what Althusser referred to as its Repressive Apparatus - through physical intimidation and repression. Historically speaking, the operation of Althusser's RSA has been documented throughout the capitalist as well as the communist world

The record is replete with documented accounts of State complicity and involvement in murder, torture, intimidation and imprisonment of political rivals who would challenge the structural distribution of resources. In addition to noting the State's own involvement in internal repression, it is worth noting that private interests are often implicated along with the State in such acts, although these are usually carried out "behind the scenes". Such connections reinforce the notion that the State is really the arm of capital. More often, private interests are revealed to have been implicated in the suppression of dissent overseas. What is at stake in each case are investments by corporate nationals (under capitalism) or State agencies (under communism) within these countries. Hence, the intervention of Britain and France into Egypt was specifically to preserve their economic interests in the Suez Canal, recently nationalised by President Nasser to finance the high Aswan Dam, while the furor in Panama more recently was staged to protect American interests in the Panama Canal. There are also Western oil interests in the Persian Gulf which are key to the ongoing source of conflict in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and so on. Nor are these "interventions" carried out by the State’s executed in isolation from industrial pressures and influences. In his epic investigation of the American conglomerate company ITT, Anthony Sampson has detailed its direct involvement in the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile as well as its extensive involvement in the political regimes elsewhere overseas.

These examples of psychological intimidation and physical repression not only convey the dark side of capitalism, but also graphically illustrate the dual and ambiguous nature of the State as an instrument of social reproduction. They illustrate the efficacy of the distinction drawn by Althusser between ideological State influence and Repressive State influence, and to mark the ways in which they are related. In addition to both the overt and covert mechanisms of repression involving physical violence, the State in co-operation with its multi-national corporate partners also has at its disposal enormously powerful economic forces which it can employ in the defense of its socially-constructed reality.  The rapidly accelerated global mobility of capital in the last twenty years has significantly augmented this power, allowing States to threaten economic isolation to those foreign countries (even powerful communist countries like China) who refuse to accept the capitalist doctrine. These functions fall somewhere between the RSAs and the ISAs, in that their intimidatory potential is very great, yet they do not necessarily require and indeed are designed to prevent more overt armed intervention

In addition to physical repression, economic sanctions and territorial manipulation, the State also engages extensive mechanisms of ideological propaganda (Althusser's ISAs). These ISAs operate at many different levels - from the control of the news media to the control of State education. What is important to remember from all of this, is that the ideological function is not a completely separate function of State power from its repressive function. Structuralist and social theorist Nicos Poulantzas has suggested, for instance, that the capitalist State develops a monopoly on legitimate physical violence, accumulating the means of corporal control hand in hand with its function of law and order."  Martin Carnoy notes:

Althusser believed that the Repressive State Apparatuses include the army, the police and penal system, and the Ideological State Apparatuses are made up of agencies such as the nuclear family, the mass media, the church, and the function of public education. He noted that while the former were invariably under the control of the State, the latter are often under private control, or are in a continual state of movement between public and private control or some combination of both. Of all of the agencies of ideological reproduction, Althusser considered the educational function of the State as undoubtedly its most important and effective instrument, arguing that schools teach both the skills and knowledge for future production, but that they also inculcate into their pupils a set of values, beliefs and attitudes upon which this reproduction will eventually depend for its legitimacy.

He died of a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 72.

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Michael W. Apple (1942-)

Biography

Michael W. Apple was born in 1942 into a working class but quite politically active family in Paterson, New Jersey, the home of some of the most radical workers' movements in the US. Because there was no money for him to go full-time to a university he went to 2 small state teachers colleges at night for his BA, while working as a printer during the day. Then he went into the army – which turned him into a teacher, teaching compass reading and first aid. Leaving the army in 1962 at the age of 19 he taught as a relief teacher in inner city Paterson, New Jersey. This was a time - the early-mid 1960s - when teachers could be hired without a degree because of the severe teacher shortage. Having already been active in the desegregation movement, he was almost always assigned to poor schools with large “coloured” populations. In Paterson he was a founder-member of the Congress for racial Equality (CORE). Although not yet fully qualified as a teacher, much of his political activism was connected with education – protesting the closure of black schools and at bureaucratic attempts to avoid desegregation.

Teaching in Paterson – a very poor town with 80% of the population on some form of assistance, he became increasingly aware of the disparities between what he was being expected to teach and what his students needed to learn. This early exposure to the politics of knowledge was to inform much of his later work. It also impacted upon jhis teaching – having to accommodate to significantly different cultural expectations and learning styles – fostering an early interest in critical pedagogy. Aware of the social and economic difficulties and pressures facing teachers in “minority” schools he became very active in the teachers union – for a time becoming president of one of the local unions. However, he became disheartened by the broken promises and apparent disinterest of the party-political machine that operated the unions and their inability or unwillingness to improve the conditions of the poor inner city schools or to address teacher difficulties. Thus, like  Stanley Aronowitz, he began his early professional career as a union organiser and political activist. He was politically involved in the early anti-racist and anti-segregation struggles in the south and the north and was president of a teachers’ union.

He began his early professional career as a union organiser and political activist.

Like Aronowitz, also for Michael, the personal is most truly political. One of his strongest characteristics is his capacity for reflection on his own experience, his ability to situate this in the social, political and economic circumstances of everyday life and to apply the insights thus derived to his theorising on education, culture and power. As he noted in Official Knowledge:

From those early experiences, his academic and political life has been committed unswervingly to the goals of greater emancipation and justice both within and through education. And despite the obvious conservatism, sexism and racism of some of the teaching community, he has never failed to empathise with their position, but to see it as a response to the social, political and economic situations in which they are immersed.

He has continued his political involvement nationally and internationally - including an arrest in South Korea for speaking out publicly against the military government there and for supporting the formation of an independent teachers union.  He is also still deeply involved with teachers unions and other teachers, community activists, and progressive and radical educators in the United States and abroad in establishing and defending socially critical educational practices. He has continued his work on the development of more critically democratic educational policies and practices in a number of countries throughout the world.  This predictably has gotten him in some trouble with dominant groups in the US and elsewhere.

He is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is also World Scholar and Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of London Institute of Education.  A former elementary and secondary school teacher and past-president of a teachers union, he has worked with educational systems, governments, universities, and activist and dissident groups throughout the world to democratise educational research, policy, and practice.

His books and articles have won numerous awards and have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Italian, Thai, German, Korean, Russian, and many other languages. His latest work deals with the effects of neo-liberal and neo-conservative policies in education and the larger society and with creating alternatives to these policies and practices. He is also the editor of an international series of books published by Routledge, Critical Social Thought. He has recently been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Educational Research Association. He also was awarded the UCLA Medal for "Outstanding Academic Achievement", as well as a number of honorary doctorates by universities throughout the world.

He has been selected as one of the fifty most important educational scholars in the 20th Century.  His books Ideology and Curriculum and Official Knowledge were also selected as two of the most significant books on education in the 20th Century.

Work

Michael W. Apple has written extensively on the politics of educational reform and on the relationship between culture and power. Although his many books and articles are too numerous to mention, among them are

• Educational Evaluation: Analysis and Responsibility, (ed.) (1974.)
  
• Schooling and the Rights of Children (1975)
• Ideology and Curriculum (1979)
• Education and Power (1982)
• Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education (ed.) (1982)
• Ideology and Practice in Schooling (1983)
  
• Teachers and Texts (1986)
• The Curriculum, Problems, Politics, and Possibilities (with Landon E. Beyer 1988),
• Ideology and Curriculum (2nd Edit.1990)
• The Politics of the Textbook (1991)
  
• Official Knowledge (1993)
• Education and Power 2nd Edit.(1995)
• Democratic Schools (with James A, Beane 1995)
• Cultural Politics and Education (1996)
• Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy (1998)
• Education/Technology/Power (1998)
• Power, Meaning, and Identity (1999)
• The Curriculum, Problems, Politics, and Possibilities (2nd Edit. 1998),

His three most recent books are:

• Official Knowledge (2nd Edit. 2000)
• Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (2001)
• The State and the Politics of Knowledge (2003)
• Ideology and Curriculum (25th Anniversary Ed.2004)
• Globalizing Education (2005)
  
• The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles. (with Kristen Buras, 2006)
• Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (2nd Edit. 2006)

• who sets the curriculum
• what counts as official knowledge
• the relationship of the curriculum to political and economic structures
• the relationship of ideology to curriculum
• the form and technology of knowledge transmission
• the relationship of curriculum to the prior life experiences of learners
• the relationship of curriculum to issues of equity and justice. 

"Teachers, for example, blamed themselves as individuals (or their pupils) for the failures of students, just as I did. It more and more, however, seemed to me not to be a question of the amount of effort teachers and curriculum workers, put in. Indeed, few groups of people work harder and in more uncertain, difficult, and complex circumstances than teachers and administrators. Rather, it became clearer that the institution itself and the connections it had to other powerful social agencies generated the dominant rules and practices of educators' lives. Blaming teachers, castigating individuals, was less than helpful."

It looks, for instance at challenges and contestations to conservative attempts at curriculum formation. It reviews the roll of technology, and its influence on the commodification and legitimation of particular knowledge forms, and contrasts these with the possibilities opened up for creative learning. In particular, Apple looks at the ways in which commodified technologies and pedagogies are used to marginalise large groups of students who then become available for “remedial” teaching.

There are references here to earlier interrogations of “deficit theorising” pinpointed in Ideology and Curriculum which still pervade most school systems, not least in “post-colonial” societies like New Zealand.

Apple then goes on to focus more minutely and once again on the hidden curriculum as a mechanism of social and cultural reproduction , showing how management models of schooling impact upon classroom relations and pedagogies. Taking examples from industry, he suggests that the hegemony of the classroom is not complete and that acts of resistance are not only possible but (if not common then) prevalent. In the end (and again somewhat akin to Aronowitz) Michael Apple exhorts the introduction of democracy into schools - into curriculum formation, into management systems and into pedagogical forms. The examples taken previously from industrial settings while in themselves inspiring once again fail to completely map the precise strategies necessary to bring about the aims that the book so passionately espouses. This is not to minimise the difficulty in prescribing educational activism in circumstances that vary widely from context to context. Like his fellow unionist, Aronowitz, Michael Apple’ solutions tend towards collective organisation of teachers and their work. But he is ever-mindful of the complexities involved in attempting to unify members of the teaching profession whose lives and personal values are as diverse (and often as blindly patriotic sexist and racist) as those to be found in the wider society.

His concern to understand to lived experiences of teachers and the social, political and economic pressures which circumscribe their beliefs, expectations and actions becomes more fully apparent in his book Official Knowledge (1993 – reprinted 2000). This book may be seen as the maturation of the understandings that have been evolving since the publication of Ideology and Curriculum and Teachers and Texts and it can rightfully be viewed as the third part of this trilogy. However, unlike its predecessors, it embraces the complexities of educational politics much more fully and concretely, refusing to accept easy or simplistic branding of the forces of conservatism or of the cultural complexities of the differing forms of resistance. 

Here, he attempts to more fully understand the nature of what he has called the Conservative Restoration, seeing it as made up of four separate groups of individuals:

Although their aims may be varied, the New Right has been largely able to weld these groups into a shifting alliance around conservative issues and to render the logic of their shared ideologies commonsensical. The thrust of his argument is that the Right has been able to create an acceptable commonsense understanding in the wider community that what is public is bad and what is private is good. In the domain of education this has had a dramatic and traumatising effect. It has led to a reduction in public funding that mostly affects the poorer schools. This has created deficits and resource space into which the private areas of the economy have aggressively moved – Apple spends a whole chapter analysing the introduction and operation of Channel 1 (private TV news reporting and advertising) into schools. In addition, the reduction in the resource base has gone hand in hand with a greater insistence upon testing and national standards which has so intensified teacher’s work that they have now no time for reflective or creative teaching activities which might allow for the formation of understandings and resistances to their circumstances. Alongside this has been an increasing prescription of teaching activities, and so on and so on.

Apple takes all of these instances and carefully unpacks their processes, agendas and implications. He does this, like Aronowitz, with a keen eye on the historical context in which these patterns have emerged, yet all the time relating his text back to direct experiences and examples. The clarity of his analysis is remarkable even though the complexity of his subject is enormous. He looks, for instance at the possibilities for and examples of resistance that have and are emerging within the school system, as teachers make space for resistance in what would seem to be hopeless circumstances. He shows communities of resistance themselves are diverse and conflicted, noting how the Right’s strategies of compartmentalisation, fragmentation and individualism has resulted in the formation of complex layered identities that mitigate against collective resistance.

In this regard, he delves into the changes that have taken place over time in the theorising of cultural factors in education. He looks back at his own history – his early involvement with Marxism, with Althusser and Structuralism, and his gradual move towards the works and theories of Gramsci. He notes how cultural factors now play a much more significant part in critical understandings than they used to and that although they have not displaced issues of class he cites important point that it is impossible to think about the work of teachers without recognising the interweaving of class and sexism in the roles played by women teachers – roles that are simply an extension of the unpaid labour of the “housewife”. The race, gender, class disjunctions that are part of the social world of late capitalism make it difficult to organise unifying themes around which communities of resistance can be built.

In addition, he shows how the new right coalition has been able to command unprecedented power to shape what counts as legitimate knowledge in schools – largely by focussing their attention on the Southern and Western States – particularly Texas and California where the political economy of textbook approvals has a disproportionate effect upon the national system. He delves deeply, in fact, into the political economy of the textbook, drawing out in fine detail the circumstances that shape the actions of publishers, School Boards, parent groups and the Federal government. In each instance he demonstrates how the reframing and integration of legitimate community concerns into new and conservative ideological understandings that privilege business and industrial needs over and above concerns for the common good. Yet he points out (again) that although the Right has been able to dictate public discourse around issues of race, class and gender, its outcomes are still in many ways contradictory and leave space for creative challenges and transformations. He shows, for instance, how teachers at the chalk face create opportunities within the ever-growing dictates of the system to creatively transform the situation to their own ends. He details two examples from his own experience in curriculum development and in his Friday Seminar at Madison to illustrate the need for struggle and the opportunities for creative resistance. In all of this he inevitably moves back – again like Aronowitz – to an understanding that success is not to be had by isolated acts of isolated and creative teachers, but only through the organisation of collective and widespread resistance. Typically, he uses his own teaching experiences as a laboratory for searching out the subtleties and complexities involved in attempting to establish and maintain what he calls a “decentered unity” among individuals who share the common goal of promoting radical change in education and in life. Also typically, he reflects, yet again on his own internal consistency in his relations with others in the pursuit of this vision.

Out of this, and attuned as he is to the complexities of shifting perceptions and goals among the diverse communities of interest he proposes not a monolithic or standardised form of organisation or resistance but suggests, instead that different forms must be developed for different circumstances and situations. On the other hand, the insights gleaned from these experiences offer concrete guidelines to the processes and issues involved.

There is no doubt that Michael Apple hits the nail on the head when he suggests that the Right has been extremely successful. One of the prime reasons, I believe, is that they have done so by translating complex ideological issues not just into commonsensical understandings, but that they have done so in an understandable language. (This is something I have written about in detail, To download PDF click here).

The Left could take a leaf out of their book here. Like Noam Chomsky's own critique, Apple rightfully asserts that much Critical Theorising is aimed at other theorists and is couched in terms that are incomprehensible to the “average person” in the street. He calls for a reframing of the discourse to more comprehensible levels. He might also have noted that much theorising is about theorising about theorising in a conceptual hall of mirrors that leaves even most theorists disoriented. This seems to coincide with the remarkable explosion of critical theory as an element of university courses and programmes. A cursory search of “Critical Theory” sites on Google reveals much traffic in not a little drivel. Course outlines in Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy proliferate and blogs on the same topic are common. (I have Google Alerts out for both topics for my website). Content of all of these media rarely, if ever engages with practice. Yet as Henry Giroux has pointedly noted, critical theory is (merely) an empty masturbatory activity unless it subjects itself to a reciprocal involvement with practice (praxis) in ways which both test and inform the theoretical base of a premise. (click here to download PDF on The Relationship Between Theory and Practice). It is one of Michael Apple’s strongest points that he continually grounds his theories in the real world of teachers’ work and of the classroom. It is for this reason that his theories have more substance and are more readily accessible to educators and political activists. Similarly, it is significant that his works also attempt to provide concrete examples that not only make the relationship between theory and practice clear, but that also offer hope in a time when the Left seems to be in such disarray.

This point is taken up yet again in even more detail in  Democratic Schools (1995) in which Apple and his co-editor James Beane pull together a series of concrete examples from the field of democratic classrooms-in-action in a diverse range of cultural settings ( Wisconsin, Chicago, New York and California).  The book was intended to demonstrate how to create schools and classrooms with democratic values in mind. When first published it was hailed for its assessment of the important role schools continue to play in promoting democracy, its traditions, and its thinking. It showed how educators can make a lasting difference by combining authentic, important lessons and a consistent, building or system-wide focus on a critical and democratic education. It was extremely successful selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and was reprinted and updated again in 2007 – indicating that it touched a nerve amongst educators and parents alike. As the authors noted in their second edition:

The message here is not just one of hope, but also one of achievement in the face of apparently overwhelming political and economic pressure. The stories in the book tell of teachers teaching dialogically, involving their students in the social, economic and political problems of the real world – of their real world, and of the multi-layered learnings that have been gained from this and from co-operative learning pedagogies.

Apple’s next book (partially co-authored with Anita Oliver and Christopher Zenk) - Cultural Politics and Education (1996) continues the theme of his previous works, linking the attempts by the New Right to shape and control the curriculum and environment of learning with old-fashioned classed, raced and gendered politics, and at the same time bringing to light the achievements of communities of resistance to these social, political and economic pressures. He and Zenk interrogate the relationships between the politics of cultural identity, poverty, under-achievement and unemployment and link these to political structures, processes and policies that marginalise and exclude – policies founded upon an ideology of market economics and increased corporatisation of public life. They argue that the issues behind these identities are ignored and instead, the State focuses upon the  “failures”, “drop-outs” and youth-at-risk – developing remedial policies and systems that further centralise control over curriculum and pedagogy and impose even more draconian and alienating programmes upon the already-alienated. Gone is any awareness of “failure” might be a willful act of resistance against an already-oppressive and culturally insensitive system that is designed to further marginalise, label, treat, dominate and control.

Michael Apple himself points out the need to take seriously the intentions and strategies of the Right in education. He sees it not only as one of the most dangerous and anti-democratic movements in two centuries, but also as one of the most powerful and persuasive ideologies ever promulgated. Following this logic, he and Anita Oliver reveal the process of the formation of a conservative agenda in one particular school district, showing how the formation is not the result of a conspiracy (as popularly suggested), but as a response to real and often arbitrary issues that pit well-meaning school administrations against disaffected and disenfranchised groups who coalesce around conservative proposals in the name of “democracy”. It is to the authors’ credit that they clarify the real issue to be centred not around specific instances of disagreement over curriculum content, but rather about the meaning of democracy and its place in education as a seedbed of public life.

This line of reasoning leads back inexorably to one of Michael Apple’s oft-repeated argumentations – the role of conflict (and its acceptance rather than exclusion) in the educational process. He gees back to John Dewey’s notion of Democracy and Education and suggests how progressive change can be accomplished by small but significant steps taken in the classroom which link learning to the struggles and conflicts of everyday life In the process, he points out the danger of empty left-leaning rhetoric which fails to engage either with the concrete circumstances that exist in the classroom or with the circumstances ion the wider world outside.

This message is continued yet again in Apple’s Power, Meaning, and Identity (1999). Here, in a collection of essays – some of which have been published previously. In chapters with titles like:

•    The Personal and the Political in Critical Educational Studies       
•    The Politics of Official Knowledge in the United States   
•    Social Evaluation of Curriculum           
•    How the Conservative Restoration Is Justified           
•    Education, Culture, and Class Power           
•    Power, Meaning, and Identity       
•    Freire, Neoliberalism, and Education       
•    Between Neo and Post in Critical Educational Studies

The collection brings together essays on curriculum, evaluation, and critical education and cultural theory. In characteristic plain language, they explore more thoroughly the ways in which the political economy of education is shaped by wider social structures and how political educational policies and practices actually are. Beginning once again with a historical perspective, the Apple explores the realities of class, race, and gender in education. As well as going over previous conceptual terrain. (to be continued)

Following this, in Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality (2001), Michael Apple, continues the critical analyses of the New Right’s successful hegemony in education that has been the hallmark of previous books. The first two chapters deal with the Right’s ability to attach its own meanings to key commonsense concepts and the constitution of the Right’s loose alliance of four separate social groups - all described first in Official Knowledge. He then reasserts the need for a “decentered unity” – as loose alliance of counter-hegemonic groups to interrupt the agenda of the Right.

Moving on from previous analyses, this is followed in the first edition by a new analysis of the specific agenda of what he calls the “authoritarian populists – with particular reference to the struggle over creationism in a national curriculum. He extends this analysis to show how political figures as well as conservative evangelical Christians have been major political and ideological forces in influencing educational policies at the local, state, and national levels around issues such as the insistence on Christian prayers in public schools. Noting how the Right maintains its alliance by co-opting the fears of parents and by locating these fears within an overarching ideological framework, he argues that what the Right sees as the secularisation of schools has led many parents to withdraw their children and instead to embrace home-schooling.

He devotes considerable time to an analysis of the home-schooling movement. Noting that while not all home-schooling parents have conservative religious views many have traditional conceptions of the family, gender and what is “legitimate knowledge." Noting that home-schooling now accounts for at least 2% of the child-education population (and growing rapidly) he suggests that home-schooling is leading to the "suburbanization of everyday life" and the "segmentation of American society" that is evidenced in the proliferating race, class, and gender divisions in society. He also questions educational policies that allow the use of public to teach religious viewpoints otherwise violating the separation of church and state as laid out in the Constitution.

Conservative white, evangelical Christian home-schoolers justify the removal of their children from school by claiming they are the new oppressed – marginalised by educational policies and curricula that denigrate or deny their belief systems. Apple suggests that these claims to subaltern status do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Their real motivations, he suggests, stem from a fear of contamination by the “Other”, and a parallel fear of the influence that secularization is schools may have upon the spiritual beliefs of their children. Since the “free” time required to home-school is most readily available to the already-affluent, it may be that such policy loopholes offer an added privilege over the poor and already disadvantaged. In December 2006, he followed up this critique of home-schooling with a more conciliatory attitude to the growing population of black home-schoolers in The Complexities of Black Home Schooling published in the Teachers College Record. (More of this later.) He notes there that the movement by groups who reqally ARE disadvantaged (African Americans, Hispanics, native Americans etc) to embrace home-scvhooling is a dangerous trend that frragments and works against the coalition-building necessary to form social movements that might thwart the conservative Right and its hegemony.

Faced with this hegemony of the Right on so many fronts, what is to be done? Apple has suggested many times that the only chance of achieving hegemony is through the building of a social movement involving the need to develop “progressive alliances” from existing counterhegemonic groups such as anti-globalisation activists, peace organizers, environmentalists, feminists, the working class, and gays and lesbians. He also suggests the possibility of tactical alliances with some elements of the Right who share some areas of agreement around issues such as national testing, the introduction of Channel One in schools etc.

The second edition of the book, published in 2000, also contains new chapters on No Child Left Behind, and gender realities. In this edition, his chapter “Who ‘No Child Left Behind’ Leaves Behind” offers an important and insightful critique of the federal legislation which he notes has led to a loss of local control in education. He questions what counts as legitimate knowledge, literacy, success and failure, and good teaching under the Act, noting the incursion of business interests into education (Channel 1) and suggesting that profit rather than public service has become the predominant ethic. He refers to the introduced compulsory testing as “audit cultures” and suggests that it is the implicit racism of education policies that lies at the root of educational disparities and achievements which needs to be addressed, rather than the imposition of auditing systems which are grounded in deficit thinking. He also notes that the No Child left Behind opens the way for mote intense privatization of the educational environment. Not surprisingly, notes Apple, the very structure of the Act maps very precisely the demands of the four key conservative groups which make up the conservative alliance as well as the ideology of the Republican administration. As the Introduction to the Department of Education’s description of the Act notes, it:

Translated into action, Apple argues that these policies directly respond to and benefit the conservative groups who make up the Right, and he cites examples from Britain, New Zealand and elsewhere where similar policies have already been implemented to make his case.

Against these examples, he contrasts the work going on at Porto Alegre in Brazil, the examples given in his own Democratic Schools and of the new and increasingly influential Journal Rethinking Schools as examples of successful counter-hegemonic practice.

Besides covering and extending theoretical work mapped out in previous works, Apple here once again builds his and our understanding of the current situation in education, but also in the area of theorising itself. Drawing upon key concepts in the works of Lucáks and Rawls he makes it clear yet again that success for the left is not to be had by merely modifying classroom pedagogies to make them more critical and relevant, but by linking these small changes to broad social movements that make common sense to parents, teachers and school administrators.

Having delved intensively into the political economics and cultural politics of American schooling, Apple next turns his attention to examples from elsewhere. In The State and the Politics of Knowledge (2003) he edits a collection of essays by and with a number of his overseas PhD students and in so doing casts his critical eye over educational politics in the Pacific Rim countries of United States, South Korea, Singapore, Polynesia, Sweden, Norway and Brazil, looking at conservative state “reforms” and how these have affected curricula and pedagogy in ways which have sparked resistance in the respective communities. He begins by charting (with Anita Oliver) the case study of a diverse semi-rural American community of parents who objected to the readings in a language arts series. Despite their philosophical diversity, they were forced into a more conservative and militant approach by the unwitting persistence of the school board in characterising the issue as one of censorship and the parents as uniformly religious fundamentalists.

This is followed by Hannah Tavares with an analysis of the persistence of colonial representations of Polynesia in sexist and racist tones in both historical and contemporary Western cultures. The suggestion here is that these persistent characterisations and stereotypes (“primitive”, exotic”, “promiscuous” and “childlike”) are deeply inscribed in the production of knowledge that continues to influence modern perceptions of Polynesian peoples to their academic and economic detriment. (This is something that here, in New Zealand, has been particularly pertinent in the teaching of Maori and Pacific Island children. For reference click here) Apple then teams up with Ting-Hong Wong to examine state formation of schooling in Singapore between 1945 and 1965, detailing the curricular reforms to unify the diverse cultural groups of the Peninsula in the transition from British colonial rule.  The study follows the impact of these reforms after the establishment of national independence.

Examples from Scandinavia are contributed by Petter Aasen from the Norwegian Institute for Studies in Research and Education who analyses educational restructuring in Scandinavian education in the latter decades of the twentieth century. He describes the imposition of conservative policies (identical to those in Britain and the US) of standardised testing, the establishment of core curricula and the establishment of regimes of teacher accountability and efficiency management.

There are two studies from South Korea. Misook Kim Cho and Youl-Kwan Sung (both on the staff of Korean Educational Development) write separately with Apple. Misook Kim Cho examines the rise of career education as a Ministry of Education initiated programme in the early 1990s. In anticipation of a labour shortage in manual trades, the government required a programme of occupational choice and career decision-making in secondary schools to dissuade students from choosing high-end career paths that would prolong their education. Both principals and students resisted the imposed changes. Youl-Kwan Sung and Apple then write about how Korean social studies teachers fought the reactionary Ministry of Education attempts to impose a national curriculum by developing a web-based, on-line discussion group. Yet their attempts to introduce critical (dialogical) pedagogies into their classrooms were thwarted by repressive Ministry requirements and directives.

Apple then returns (with Luís Gandin), to the example given earlier in Educating the Right Way - of the Citizen School Project in Porto Alegre, Brazil and the attempt there to develop a democratic educational system in co-operation with the local community. They engage in the very thorough and well-documented description of Porto Alegre, explaining how the leftist city administration attempts to improve the lives of people in the neighborhoods, especially in favelas (shantytowns). They also describe citizen initiatives to shape classroom age-grouping away from traditional model, and analyse the community’s attempts at curriculum development based upon community needs.

Overall, the attempt to provide a wider cultural perspective on educational reform and resistance is laudable if somewhat patchy. It does make the important point that what Apple calls the “conservative restoration” in education is a global phenomenon. Similarly, it is encouraging to see that teachers, students and parent communities are actively engaged in creative and progressive resistance wherever the ideology of the Right is manifest. There is hope here, which is, I believe, the point that Apple tries to make.

In his latest book, in 2006, Apple again produced a collaborative work – this time edited with Kristen Buras. Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles.

In 1988 the Indian critical theorist and feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak contributed a chapter to an edited series of essays - Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture in which she asked the question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak is a renowned critical theorist whose writings are said to be foundational texts in postcolonial studies. She takes us back to Gramsci’s term for the economically dispossessed. The question asked by Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” asks if it is possible for the economically dispossessed to have a voice. Putting it simply, in her analysis, she concludes that the subaltern are unable to speak to the dominant culture until such a time as they have acquired the linguistic codes and cultural capital of the oppressor (in Spivak’s case of the coloniser) By which time, they are so removed from their cultures of origin that they are themselves no longer to clearly articulate their demands. Her essay was addressed to academics who attempt to engage in dialogue with subaltern groups, and asks the more pointed question of whether the field of postcolonial studies in fact contributes to and extend the ethic of colonialism.

This book by Michael Apple and Kristen Buras is an attempt to respond to that question in an educational context. The authors suggest that indeed, the subaltern can and do speak, and their argumentation is organised in three sections:

• The Subaltern Speak: In Whose Voices

This section looks at the relationship between subaltern groups and educational reform.

• The Subaltern Speak: National Contexts

Here, the authors highlight the responses and resistances to educational reforms by various subaltern groups within the United States

• The Subaltern Speak: International Contexts.

Finally, they highlight the voices and resistances by a number of different subaltern groups overseas.

Their analysis begins with an introduction that recalls the roots of American colonialism with the story of Sagoyewatha, a Seneca chief who challenged the dominance of Christian missionaries. They use this story as a means of introducing and reminding us of the historical exclusion, dispossession and silencing of the subaltern. They also note that in the modern context, subaltern identity is more than a simple economic matter, but is rather a complex interplay of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, spirituality, age, health – and so on, and that it is not restricted to traditional conceptions of “the colonised” but is rather a local, regional, national and international phenomenon.

In the opening chapter, Kristen Buras looks at what makes E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Movement so appealing to so many subaltern groups. Hirsch’s movement seeks toi return school curricula to traditional “core knowledge” – oblivious to the fact that this knowledge is socially, culturally and politically compromised and compromising for people outside the dominant culture.

In the second chapter, Apple returns once again to a problematic that he began to analyse in the second edition of Educating the Right Way - the Home-Schooling movement. He begins his analytic by recognising that the home-schooling movement is not homogeneous, and that it covers groups from both the Left as well as the Right. What unites them is:

Having said this, he notes that the vast majority of home-schooling parents are evangelical Christians and that, ironically, they are embracing home-schooling as an alternative to state education under a claim of subalternate identity. He delves further into the issue, looking at who is actually doing the schooling in the home, at the political economy of the families – at who can afford the “free” labour to home-school their children and at the roles of the (largely) women/mother teachers within the families. He makes the perceptive point that their claim to subaltern status is based upon their traditional identities as women in a gendered society while in fact, they largely come from upper middle class white families of the dominant culture. He perceptively identifies the emerging subjectivities of home-schooling mothers when he points out that:

He goes into some very convincing detail that their ability to use both state legislation (of the Charter School movement for instance) as well as global internet technologies, to build a powerful and persuasive movement based upon the principles of Christian fundamentalism. In this regard, they are massively supported by powerful forces of evangelical Christianity and the publishing industries both in available teaching/learning texts as well as in organizational and child-management advice and strategies and teaching aids (based upon the Bible and Christian precepts). They also have extremely powerful allies in the White House.

Schools too have not been slow to see the economic advantages of working with these Christian home-schoolers through the Charter Schools – often being able to boost their flagging enrolments and economies by as much as 300%. For Michael Apple, all of this boils down to a serious erosion of the legitimacy of the public secular school system with its precepts of American democracy have been foundational for two hundred years.

He recognises that the claims made by home-schooling parents about the education system are founded upon real experience and sound analysis - issues of unsupervised peer interaction and so on. For these groups, home-schooling provides,

Yet while they desire a “return” to more steadfast values and pedagogies while at the same time offering a significant increase in control over their childrens’ welfare, this movement which is based upon the perception of the need for subaltern groups to have choice and to have a voice diminishes the possibility of public discourse and in its place establishes a social norm which is largely unchallengeable and unaccountable.

His primary concern is that while purporting to be protecting their children from an alien and secular public school environment and value system (and using public funds to do so) their actions and the social consequences thereof for their children remain largely at odds. The contradictions of the situation become apparent, for Apple:

Although he is sensitive and compassionate to the needs of home-schooling parents, Michael Apple ends up lamenting the potential loss of legitimacy that it causes for state education, and the potential for cultures to consolidate into largely separatist cultural enclaves with little meaningful communication across the spectrum of society through which differences might be “worked out” or reconciled.

In December 2006, Apple followed up this critique of home-schooling with a more conciliatory attitude to the growing population of black home-schoolers in The Complexities of Black Home Schooling published in the Teachers College Record. There, he extends his sympathies to the plight of African American parents whose children are abused and marginalised within the state school system and who, as a form of resistance are withdrawing their children and resorting to home-schooling. In the end, however, his sympathies fall short of complete endorsement as he wonders about the long-term impact upon the black community. In this separate article he concludes by noting that:

These sentiments are echoed to some extent in the next chapter on Education Vouchers, by Thomas Pedroni – “Can the Subaltern Act? African American Involvement in Educational Voucher Plans”. The study looks specifically at the African American community in Milwaukee, and at why the voucher plans appeal unexpectedly to such groups. Building on Apple’s previous work with Oliver in Cultural Politics and Education where they looked at the formation of conservative identities in a parental resistance to a School Board’s imposition of a textbook, Pedroni extends our understanding of the development of identity politics in the African American perceptions of school choice through educational vouchers. Based on conceptual and empirical findings, he puts forward compelling theories about the appeal of pro-voucher sentiments to Black politicians, community leaders, and poor and working class families. He sees them as representative of a subaltern ‘third force’ in conservative formation. He argues that their fleeting conservative alliances and subject positions, are likely to play an increasingly significant role in educational and social reform both in the United States and elsewhere. He suggests that liberal-Left theorists are failing to recognise this movement and consequently remain critically unaware of the direction that conservative modernization is likely to take among poor and disenfranchised communities.

In the next section of the book which deals with the resistance of subaltern groups within the United States, Glenabah Martinez begins with an analysis centered on Native American youths in the education system. “In My History Classes They Always Turn Things Around, the Opposite Way”: Indigenous Youth Opposition to Cultural Domination in an Urban High School,” takes up the stories about how indigenous youth in the United States have resisted educational practices that devalue or erase their culture. (Readers will note that Martinez’s findings parallel those in other indigenous communities throughout the world. See, for instance High School Confidential on this website.) Her account includes many first-hand student comments which offer powerful testimony to their experiences. Not unlike Russell Bishop’s Culture Speaks in a New Zealand context, it points to a system of institutionalised racism within the system that extends beyond the conceptual limits that Martinez suggests in her references to “cultural difference”. There are interesting parallels here with my own analysis of the relationship between espoused school policies of cultural pluralism and the policies-in-action of exclusion (to borrow terms from Donald Schön). See, for instance my own paper Cultural Pluralism, Education and Misplaced Patriotism .

Next, Dolores Delgado Bernal undertakes a gender analysis of the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts. In her Rethinking Grassroots Activism: Chicana Resistance in the 1968 East Lost Angeles School Blowouts she tells the stories of eight Latina women involved. and in so doing offers a deeper understanding of the important role that women played in the resistance movement.

Kevin Kumashiro follows this with an essay Detraction, Fear, and Assimilation: Race, Sexuality, and Education Reform Post-9/11 which suggests the “wilfull partiality” of anti-oppressive education. He argues that through detraction, fear, and assimilation, our way of thinking about anti-oppressive education can become contradictory.

Stanley Aronowitz then contributes a chapter Subaltern in Paradise: Knowledge Production in the Corporate Academy – an extension of his 2001 book The Knowledge Factory in which he explores the erosion of academic freedom in universities as knowledge becomes more commodified, corporate interests influence the awarding of research grants and contracts, and tenure becomes more elusive. He challenges us to review our preconceptions about the political immunity, the role, status and identity of the academic, and to consider the contexts in which we live and work. He challenges us further to reflexively interrogate our taken for-granted assumptions about democracy and the extent to which we are willing to fight for freedom.  Aronowitz’s chapter concludes the examples taken from an American context.

The final section, includes chapters from a variety of international contexts. It begins with Jyh-Jia Chen’s Struggling for Recognition: The State, Oppositional Movements, and Curricular Change. The essay explores opposition of Taiwanese people to the imposition of Chinese language and culture and to the standardization of the curriculum to fit Chinese perceptions and hegemony. Again, in the broader context is reflects the wider plight and struggle of indigenous peoples throughout the world in their attempts to sustain their language and culture and to resist the forces of colonisation.

This is followed by yet a further exposition of the example of Porto Alegre Citizen School in Brazil.  We will remember that the example also featured in Educating the Right Way. This time, Luis Armando Gandin’s, Creating Real Alternatives to Neoliberal Policies in Education: The Citizen School Project chronicles the emergence of the Citizen School Project in response to a market driven one-size-fits-all model in education.

In what for me is one of the more pertinent and provocative essays in the collection, Kristen Buras and Paulino Motter, next challenge our preconceptions about superficial policies of multiculturalism in education. Their essay, Toward a Subaltern Cosmopolitan Multiculturalism, argues that “multiculturalism cannot deliver what it promises unless it embraces the emancipation struggles of subaltern groups and cultures". This essay questions the (majority-based) democratic processes, and the legitimacy of democracies themselves. The chapter concludes with a challenge that we search for ways to develop programmes and curricula that support and nurture subalternity.

Finally, the book ends with a concluding chapter by Michael Apple and Kristen Buras - Speaking Back to Official Knowledge. Here, they issue a challenge for us to continually reflect upon the issue of subalternity and to work for ways to support moments of resistance by subaltern groups in their struggles for emancipation and voice and for a meaningful education for their children.

Reviewing the entirety of these chapters it appears to me that Spivak’s initial question "Can the subaltern speak?" might be accompanied now by another: “Can the dominant culture hear?” But of course, as Michael Apple has already indicated, the dominant culture is not a simple one-celled organism, but a complex and shifting arrangement of interests, identities and intentions. We must ask is it realistic, therefore, to continue to use the term “dominant culture” as a shorthand for the forces behind oppression? Or in refusing to do so do we abandon any leverage for understanding the logics and processes of oppression itself. And do we also then throw out the baby of oppression with the dominant culture bathwater. Is oppression, then, simply a deafness - an inability to hear the lived experiences of those whom our own lives condemn to poverty and hardship – those on whom we rely for our own positions of privilege, like Michael Apple’s miners who work the coalface so that he might sit at his computer and write learned  books? And them the more pressing and enduring question: Is this inability to hear willful, and if so, what does it say of our desire to effect a transformation?

When we look over the writing career of Michael W. Apple it becomes clear that his theorising has developed systematically over a thirty year period. Starting with his earliest writings he has consistently worked to clarify the cultural politics and the political economy of education in all of its manifest forms. It is also clear that Michael believes in public education – holding dear the dream of democratic schools promoted by Dewey almost a century ago.  Like his colleague Stanley Aronowitz, Apple also believes that the coalition of conservative groups has been successful in achieving significant changes in the education system – changes that he believes run counter to the American ideology of a peoples’ democracy that has animated American life since the Revolution. His work represents an enormous attempt to resist and turn back this tide of conservatism. Like Aronowitz, he does not believe that this can be accomplished by individual acts of resistance, but only by the creation of a broad social movement of the disparate groups of the Left. Not only does Michael Apple believe in education; he also believes in teachers whom he sees as fighting a heroic rearguard action against the twin forces of the state and global capitalism. His roots in the labour movement as a Union representative and a labour activist have never been far below the surface of his theorising. This, I believe, is one of the reasons why he reacts so strongly to the rapidly developing home-schooling movement despite the fact that it has evidently become attractive to groups who have generally been the most regular and significant victims of a racist, classed and gendered school system.

To his great credit, he has succeeded in demystifying the cultural politics of education – both in its conservative and counter-hegemonic forms – by a close reading of the politics of identity that are involved in the complex layering of cultures overlaid with experiences of class, gender, race. Like Aronowitz, too, he is clear that in our fractured world class can no longer simply be defined by income or material wealth.

Apple ranks alongside Dewey and Freire in the importance of his theorising. His output is phenomenal, his struggle to understand and communicate tireless. He is, perhaps, the last of the great critical education theorists. This is not to sound a note of doom – rather, it is a plea to all those for whom Apple’s words resonate – a plea to perhaps review again the place of the state in education, and to think of how the technologies that the Right have harvested so well might work against them in the long term. Apple believes that the educational system can be repaired, that with sufficient struggle it can be made to work in the interests of all – not as an end in itself, but as a democratic process.
 
I applaud his tenacity and dedication and I admire his compassion and selfless dedication to the task. But I am not as certain of the path that ought to be taken. Those readers that have read my own downloadable High School Confidential on this site will be aware that I am not as ready as Michael Apple to forgive those racist and gendered teachers who populate our schools (in probably the same proportions that they are represented in the wider community). Nor do I believe that it is ultimately possible to change them – to make them more sensitive to the cultural, spiritual and identity needs of their students. And even were this possible, one has to ask how many young minds and hearts would be ruined before the task was accomplished?

And what an enormous task! Think for a moment of all that has been written about the hidden curriculum. Think of the control and imposition of experiences of time, space, voice, choice, culture, identity – that are all, as Philip Corrigan has reminded us, impressed upon the bodies of the young at the deepest and least accessible levels of consciousness. Think of the extent to which state education has as a function of its role in society been responsible for the creation of a culture of quiescence, passivity and acceptance of the power status quo. Look at its history in the repression and dispossession of indigenous peoples and ask yourself if this is not a system designed to dispossess the Other?

And those who have been fortunate enough to struggle through this repressive educational world with some of their drive, resistance and identity still intact – like Apple, Mclaren, Aronowitz and myself. Ask what our cultural origins are – and how small in number we are. We are the mostly male, mostly white, mostly privileged (despite our class origins in a racist, sexist world) that have been allowed to feed at the trough of capitalisms left-overs.

Think about these things and then ask once again, is the state education system worth saving in its present form? Or should we start from the ground up by disassembling the whole repressive edifice and taking direct control of it ourselves, rebuilding a new and very different decentered communicative structure using the technologies that are available. Because those same technologies that have been harvested by the Right are just as available to those who seek progressive change?

Perhaps the battle now is not in the classroom, but for and around the media. Consider this item titled "School's Out Forever.":

Just as the music and entertainment industries are struggling to contain their copyright and royalty regimes, so also are the institutions of education (and their associated systems like libraries, museums etc) struggling to maintain their own monopoly.

You will notice that one portion of this review is incomplete – the review of Apple’s 1996 book Power, Meaning and Identity. Since I do not possess a copy, and it is not available in my local library, I have had recourse to looking through Google to find references, reviews and related papers. In writing this review, I have discovered one available copy of Apple’s previously published paper “Power, Meaning and Identity” (upon which I believe the book was grounded). That article, (in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 17, No. 2, International Perspectives on the Sociology of Education (1996), pp. 125-144) is only available through JSTOR – a Scholarly Journal Archive.

As one old friend once commented in 1984, “Socialism isn’t dead, Tony, it’s merely napping!”
 

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Stanley Aronowitz (1933-)

Biography

Stanley Aronowitz was born in 1933 and grew up in the Bronx, New York City. He attended Brooklyn College until he was suspended for leading a sit-in in the Dean’s office to protest the suppression of the radical student newspaper. After leaving school he became a steelworker and then a union organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (now UNITE) and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers.

Aronowitz received his B.A. from the New School in 1968. Following this he became associate director of the anti-poverty organization Mobilization for Youth, where he was also a community organiser. In the early `70s he founded Park East High School in East Harlem, the first post-war experimental public high school in New York City, and taught community studies at the College of Staten Island. He has since taught at the University of California Irvine, the Center for Worker Education at City College of the City University of New York, where he teaches in the Graduate Center and is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education.

Aronowitz was a New Left activist during the `60s, organising the New York New Left movement. He was the chief New York organiser for the Independent Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an editor of the influential journal Studies on the Left, and taught at the radical Free University of New York. He is presently an elected officer of the CUNY faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress. Like Michael Apple, Aronowitz has been a Union organiser and activist all of his professional life.

He was deeply influenced by Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation and One-Dimensional Man and in 1972-3 he met Marcuse who had responded to the manuscript for his first book, the acclaimed False Promises: The Shaping of American Working-Class Consciousness. Marcuse invited him to present a series of lectures at San Diego in 1974 and they remained friends until Marcuse died in '79. He has written 23 books in all. Among the more recent are From the Ashes of the Old (1998) - an analysis of the state of the labour movement, The Last Good Job in America, (2001)- essays on culture and politics and The Knowledge Factory (2001) - a critique of the corporatisation of higher education; Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century (2002);Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered (2002); and Debating Empire (New Left Review Debates) (2003); How Class Works (2003); Just around the Corner: The Paradox of the Jobless Recovery (2005) and Left Turn (2006). Each of his books has advanced his and our understandings of the state of the Left in contemporary life - the success of the Right, and the inability of progressive social movements to coalesce in the formation of a broad coalition for change.

He has also written about science and technology, philosophy and culture and has edited four volumes (a collection of 90 plus articles) on C. Wright Mills in their Great Sociologists series by Sage Publications.(2004).  With Fredric Jameson and John Brenkman, he is a founding editor of Duke University's Social Text, a journal that is subtitled "Theory, Culture, Ideology." He has written that with this publication their "objective was to interrogate Marxists' habitual separation of political economy and culture and to make a contribution to their articulation, even reunification."

His analysis of the failure of the New Left to capture the public imagination, the co-optation of middle class black America by the Democratic Party and its failure to contest the ideologies of the New Right have been very influential in Left political theorising. In 2003 he ran for Governor of New York under the Green Party and was endorsed by Ralph Nader. He led the fight to maintain the official ballot status of the Green Party and ran a grass roots campaign based on a radical democratic program that combined opposition to corporate power and plutocratic government with commitment to a sustainable environment, racial equality, feminism, gay liberation and individual freedom. His campaign was a model for leftists running for public office: radical, honest, grounded in the issues, inclusive and accessible. Aronowitz's reflections on the campaign, written just weeks after the polls closed, gives readers a sense of the opportunities and challenges of independent political campaigns in a time when most progressives still cling to the Democratic Party, but when the total inability of the Democrats to offer a real alternative to the Republicans becomes clearer with every passing day.

He is a proponent of a reduced work week and works actively with the Basic Income Earth Network based upon the philosophies of André Gorz

He lives in Manhattan. He was married to the writer Ellen Willis, with whom he had a teenage daughter. He also has four older children. Helen died in 2006.

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Work

Stanley Aronowitz's thought extends over a considerable number of topics, initiating, engaging and continuing a public debate on class, culture and identity, consequently reflecting deeply on major issues in cultural studies,  postmodernism, identity politics, education, literature, intellectuals and his own life.

He started his professional academic career from the foundation of solid worker experience coupled with a profound commitment to labour activism and organisation. His theoretical meanderings have, since that time, led him on a search for meaning to the social and political struggles of our time, grounded in a Marxist frame of reference. He has spent his professional working life critically engaging with four separate but related aspects of culture and public life:

• The history and development of emancipatory ideologies and practices
• The history and role of the labour movement in public life
• The role of Education as an instrumenmt of resistance to capitalist hegemony
• The relationship between ideology and epistemology - in particular the episteme of science as it has penetrated spheres of public perception and understanding

“...the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks cannot be understood simply as a further development of tendencies internal to Rock as it took shape during the late fifties and early sixties. Rather...these particular expressions of individual creativity by artists such as Jagger, Lennon or Davies are only comprehensible in relation to the expressions of social creativity unleashed in England at that time by “the deep, spontaneous revolt of working class youth against British bourgeois society which it articulated” and which, while economically rooted, took predominantly cultural, even sexual forms....English rock during this period directly assaulted the linguistic hegemony of standard “U” English with such striking success that one may even find impeccably educated, upper-class English youth affecting a Liverpool accent.”

We see here that he has already moved beyond both the inabilities of Adorno and Horkheimer to recognise the potency of popular culture on the one hand, and the strict adherence to the orthodox base-superstructure marxist model on the other. He clearly recognises that culture can and does indeed play a significant part in the process of social change. As he rightly points out, Culture is now firmly bracketed in the plural, in the form of a confrontation between dominant and subordsnate groups. Society is no longer seen as made up of the cultured and the uncultured. There are cultures, often opposed to each other - giving rise to what Roszak would call the youth counter-culture.  It will be noted that this oppositional model of culture is very different to that to which Adorno and Horkheimer tenaciously clung. The myriad pop groups who came to prominence at that time controlled their own material - a material which invariable grew out of a rich and fertile regional musical tradition. At the same time, the famous expansion of the clothing industry in Soho's Carnaby Street in "Swinging London" developed not from established rag-trade manufacturers, but from a burgeoning hippie cottage industry transported from the Portobello Road and Kings Road in Chelsea.

These aspects of popular culture were missed by Adorno and Horkheimer simply because they had decided a priori that all popular culture was the expression of a regime of exploitation and domination. Not only did the Frankfurt theorists fail to recognise the radical potential of popular cultural forms, but their continued reliance upon a determining economic base also failed to adequately theorize the ultimate failure of the traditional marxist model. In spite of their best intentions, they remained tied to an essentially pessimistic view of the world. By abandoning class as an important social category, and simultaneously decrying the very cultural productions which point to an oppositional tendency of resistance arising from class stratifications, they created for themselves a theory infused with despair - and this was their unfortunate legacy to an upcoming generation of social theorists like Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida.

What these theorists missed had been unravelled by the British sociologist Paul Willis, working at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies with Stuart Hall. Willis studied 12 working class boys in a Midlands school - these were known as 'the lads'. These 'lads' knew how to achieve in school, they knew what to do to get qualifications but they chose to reject school and form their own 'Counter School Culture' as an act of resistance to imposed values and classed perceptions. Unlike Bowles and Gintis (whose Correspondence Theory suggested that schools and curricula are designed to reproduce a ppopulation of graduates that corresponds to the needs of capitalist production), Willis argued that these 'lads' were not forced, but rather chose to resist this imposition and in so doing unwittingly contributed to the classed limitations of their life chances. Aronowitz cuncurred:

Here we see Aronowits beginning to challenge the role of normative State education as a means of social liberation. This theme is developed further in an article: "Technocratic Rationality and the Politics of Schooling", in: Social Practice, (1980). From this, Education becomes for Aronowitz a part of a larger discourse around the issue of technical rationality itself and its ability to colonise the entire field of epistemology. He tilts first at its impact upon science in another article: "Science and Ideology", in: Current Perspectives in Social Theory, (1980). It is a theme he will pick up and develop more fully eight years later in his book:  Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (1988).

A year later, in 1981, Aronowitz returned to the theme of Marxism's failure to ignite the workers and of the Left'sinability to exert its influence over Marxist orthodoxy. In his book: The Crisis in Historical Materialism, (1981), he begins by paying tribute to the black Marxist historian W. E. B. Dubois before moving on to to a historical analysis of the works of more recent American New Left theorists (like Frederick Jameson, Susan Buck Morse, Martin Jay, Russell Jacoby etc.) who brought recent new material to light through the European-American journal Telos. He reviews the works of Lukács, Korsch, Benjamin and Gramsci before attemting a comprehensive analysis as a means of unpacking the contradictions of the base-superstructure debate that has bedevilled Marxist theorising and which in his opinion has stymied the growth and development of a radical alternative Marxism. He notes that the failure of Marxism was seeded in the original struggle for dominance within the movement from its very beginnings:

"Trotsky's argument, reflecting the majority of the Bolshevik central committee, was that full cultural emancipation must await the victory of the world socialist revolution, or at least the securing of Soviet power within Russia. In his view, cultural revolution was antipathetic to the project of the consolidation of state power because it would divert the energies of the masses from the revolutionary tasks of defeating the enemies of the regime, and from reviving the productive apparatus that had been destroyed during the war.

"None of what Aronowitz has to say is without plausibility; indeed much of it is compelling, but it is an analysis that gives this reader the distinct impression that its subject matter is receding. The world, so aptly described by Aronowitz, is disappearing, leaving Aronowitz as a reviver of fading concepts, pumping energy into these concepts that have become "dark bodies" of absorption."

To download an excellent critical revew of Aronowitz’ cultural theorising click here.

To download a critique of The Politics of Identity, Roll over Beethoven, and Dead artists: Live theories, click here

To download a KPFA MP3 interview with Stanley Aronowitz about the future of the Left (Left Turn) click here

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Seyla Benhabib (1950- )

Biography

Seyla Benhabib was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1950. Her family were Sefardic Jews who migrated from Spain in the Inquisition in 1492. Her fathrer was a rabbi and businessman. Her mother was well educated and the family was multilingual, speaking Turkish, French, English and Italian at home. She received her BA in Humanities there at the American College for Girls. She then traveled to the United States, where she received her BA in Philosophy at Brandeis University and her MA and PhD in Philosophy at Yale University. Since 1993 Benhabib has been Professor of Government, Department of Government, and Senior Research Fellow, at the Center for European Studies, at Harvard University. In 1996 she was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institut fuer die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Vienna, Austria.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Biography

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. (Wikipedia)

He was born in Berlin in 1892 to a wealthy Jewish banking family. As a child his health was poor which may have contributed to his early interest in books and literature. At the age of 20 he studied  at the University in Freiburg but soon returned to Berlin to study philosophy, where he became president of the Student Association. During this time he also travelled to Paris and Italy before returning to Berlin. He returned again to Freiburg, then in 1915, during the First World War between France and Germany he significantly began to translate the works of Baudelaire into German. He moved to Munich to continue his studies where he met and befriended Rainer Maria Rilke (one of Germany's greatest 20th Century poets) and Gershom Scholem, the German Jewish philosopher and mystic. Scholem was to become Benjamin's lifelong friend. In 1917 he married and moved to Berne where he met Ernst Bloch . He received his PhD in 1919,  but found it difficult to find remunerrative work that matched his interests and abilities. As a result, he and his wife moved back to Berlin to live with his parents. Wnen they separated in 1921 he moved to Heidelburg to teach at the University. By 1923, following Germany's defeat in war, the German economy was failing and Benjamin's father was unable to continue his financial support. During all of this time he had been supporting himself with literary criticism and the publication of essays on the works of modernist poets. At this time he mat Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács whose 1920 Theory of the Novel made a big impression on Benjamin.

At the end of 1923, Scholem had moved to the fledgling state of Israel in Palestine and tried to persuade Benjamin to join him, but he declined and the following year he moved with Bloch to the Italian island of Capri where he settled down to write is Habilitation on The Origin of German Tragic Drama. While there met Asja Lacis, a Bolshevik actress living in Moscow who remained an important and lasting intellectual and erotic influence on him throughout the rest of his short life. In 1927 he began work on his massive Arcades Project - an analysis of the Paris of Boudelaire which integrated the developing modernist project in the context of the evolving cafe society of the French capital. This work would occupy him for the remainder of his life and would remain unfinished. He submitted the Habilitation in 1928, but it was rejected by his examiners at the University of Frankfurt, making it difficult for him to attain high academic positions. He therefore turned back to writing for journals and publishing literary and theatre reviews and essays and writing translations of important modernist works.

During this time he met and befriended a number of other prominent left-wing writers, including Bertolt Brecht. He divorced in 1930 and for the next three years moved around, seeking refuge from the increasingly threatening and ominous Nazis. He stayed in Ibiza, Nice and in Svenborg with Brecht and Sanremo where his ex-wife lived. He fled to Paris in 1933 when the Nazis gained power in Germany. His years in Paris were enormously productive and it was here that he wrote much of his most influential work - much of it written for the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. While in Paris, he met other German intellectual and artist refugees and became friends with Hannah Arendt, Hermann Hesse and Kurt Weill. In 1936 his most influential work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was first published in French by Max Horkheimer, in the Institute for Social Research Journal.

By that time, the Frankfurt School had moved into exile in New York, and it was from there that Adorno, Horkheimer and others attempted to support Benjamin and to assist him to emigrate to the USA. He visited Brecht for the last time in Denmark in 1938, and then was incarcerated for three months after Hitler revoked the German citizenship of Jews. In 1940, with the Nazis advancing on Paris, he fled with his sister to Lourdes, and in August,of that year, attained a visa to the USA organised by Max Horkheimer. He attempted to reach Portugal (a neutral country) to embark to the US but was intercepted by the gestapo at Portbou on the Midi border between France and Spain and committed suicide by taking an overdose of morphine.

Work 

Despite his brief life, Benjamin's influence has been extensive. His colleagues at the Instuitute succeeded in promoting his works and they have, since the 1960s been increasingly influential. His collection of essays Illuinations (1968) edited by Hanna Arendt, has been particularly powerful, His The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, predated and preempted the works of other cultural and media theorists like Marshall McLuhan. A brief biography shows that the range of his influence is extensive. He has had a lasting impact in the fields of literature, philosophy, communications and technology, cultural studies, post-colonial theories, feminism, and historical studies, as well as theories in the contemporary arts:

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is arguably the most influential of Benjamin's essays, in which he locates a shift in the status of traditional art as technical means of reproduction such as photography and film begin to dominate the imagination of a mass public. Benjamin defines the characteristic of manual production of the traditional artwork as a historical process unique to the original object, manifest in the object as its "aura." The subsequent proliferations of technical reproductions of a traditional artwork bear only an imagistic similitude to the original, lacking the "aura" and therefore any relation to the actual historical dimension thereof. The gradual preference of technical media by the mass public signifies for Benjamin both a radical shift in the arts to the political in the Marxist sense, although this shift in the status of art to the political also allows aesthetic contemplation to become dissociated from the properly lived experience of the autonomous individual. The viewer of art, from the detached position of the technical media itself, becomes a disinterested critic, evaluating the reproduced object merely in terms of its presentability; that it takes place. Hence, Benjamin notes the various attempts by political parties, namely the Fascists whom Benjamin feared and despised, to aestheticize politics, or as he put it: "All efforts to render politics aesthetic leads to one thing: war." There are many varied readings of this text, ranging from the democratic and revolutionary Marxist assertions, to the more complex analysis of the specular and spectacular, as well as the totalizing nature of media mass culture by figures such as Adorno and Horkheimer, Debord, McLuhan, and more recently, Agamben. Indicative of such conflicting debates is the recent translation of the actual title of the work, which has been read, "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction." 

His unfinished Arcades Project was only published as recently as 1999.

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Peter Berger (1929- )	Thomas Luckmann (1927- )

 Biographies

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann are included here together not because they have no significant individual works of their own, but because their combined work - the publication of The Social Construction of Reality A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966) has been one of the most influential Critical Therory texts in the latter part of the 20th Century.

Like many of his Critical Theory colleagues, Peter Berger was born in Vienna and moved to the United States at the end of the Second World War. He is a sociologist and a Lutheran Theologian - a strange combination for someone so influential ijn Critical Theory. After completing a Bachelor of Arts he moved to the New School for Social Research in New York where he completed an MA (1950) and a PhD (1952). Following a series of appointments at Rutgers and Boston College he finally settled at Boston University where he has been a professor of Sociology and Theology since 1985. His many books include studies in sociological theory, religion and Third World development. Titles include: Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (1997); Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning (with Thomas Luckmann, 1995); The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions About Prosperity,Equality and Liberty (1988); and The War Over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground (with Brigitte Berger, 1983). In the 1960s he met and collaborated with Ivan Illich developing programmes at the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Berger's co-author, Thomas Luckmann was born in Slovenia - a part of Yugoslavia. He too is involved in theorising in the areas of include the Sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, the sociology of communication and the philosophy of science. Sijnce 1984 he has been an Emeritus Professor at the University of  Constance in Germany. He was educated at the University of Vienna and Innsbruck and (like Berger) The New School for Social Research in New York. THe is a major figure in the postwar development of the social sciences - not only in regard to religion. Hs name has also been associated with major theoretical and methodological developments in both philosophy and sociology. But it is for his work in the Socioloogy of Knowledge tghat he is best known. These particular works include his two books with Berger, The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning (1995) as well as his Structures of the Life-World (1982, together with his colleague Alfred Schütz that he is best known. Schutz had a significant influence on Luckmann and his work is mentioned extensively in his Social Construction of Reality.(Schutz worked as a banker most of his life and taught intermittently at the New School for Social Research. He was primarily interested in the Phenomenology of Husserl and the works of Max Weber in the Sociology of Knowledge).

Work 

As Berger and Luckmann so eloquently articulate, we are not born with the model or view of the world through which we order and interpret our sensory and cognitive realities. It develops as we develop from the institutionalised normativities into which we are born and through which we ourselves grow and develop. Its development is part of the normal process of socialisation which marks the course of our life experiences, and it is given shape and form by those experiences as we either accept or reject the socially institutionalised conceptions and meanings which form the basis of our everyday lives. It is ordered, in fact, by the classification systems which we use to separate, distinguish and organise our structured understanding of reality. 

This classification system pervades every corner of our social existence and influences extensively our "knowledge" of the world.   This is the case in general, but it is also and perhaps particularly the case in the professions and the higher reaches of academia where high-order conceptual distinctions are made and legitimated between different areas of knowledge.  These high-order classifications exert a wide and pervasive influence not only within the professions themselves, but also in the wider world outside. Indeed, to speak of an "outside" or an "inside to professions is to acknowledge that the conceptual classificatory systems by which they operate are constituted of  linguistic boundaries by which they define themselves as an area of exclusivity.

The conceptual categories by which the professions organise their "internal" reality as well as their collective understanding of the wider epistemological world within which this reality is located are, like all such understandings, socially constructed.  As institutionalised systems of common values and meanings, the professions engage in a continual process of reality formation, protection and modification. In general, this process of the social construction of reality is the province of the field of knowledge known as the Sociology of Knowledge - a term first coined by the philosopher Max Scheler, who was interested in the way in which socio-historical selection of ideational contents of knowledge categories might be studied, believing that the actual contents are independent of socio-historical analysis. 

The field was later developed in much greater detail by Karl Mannheim, who first introduced the notion of a concrete relationship between knowledge and ideology,  suggesting that all human thought is infused with the ideological influences of its social context. It is Mannheim's theories, later developed in yet greater detail by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann which form the basis for this work. It is from this field, initially, that I will draw some explanatory models which I will use to investigate the ways in which the fields of architectural education and practice are socially constructed, and the roles played by ideological factors in their formation and development.

To speak of knowledge as "socially constructed" is to say that even though social institutions and collectivities seem to have "a life of their own", their formation and continued endurance results from the collective actions, understandings and values which their members bring to bear upon the process of concept-formation. As Berger and Luckmann note:

This "knowledge" will necessarily be understood as the various and collective meanings which its members and participants bring to its language. In spite of normative theories to the contrary, there is no essential or unifying foundational thematic language - no core of meaning to any of the disciplines or fields of knowledge, no central theory that can be attributed to the field. Rather, there is a field of discursive activity where different and often opposing theories, meanings and ideologies engage with each other in a continuing struggle for conceptual inclusion. These competing theories represent the interests of opposing social and cultural groups. In other words, knowledge creation and reproduction is not a politically or ideologically neutral activity, but on the contrary, is the site of an acute ideological struggle linked to structures of institutionalised power which derive from the capitalist means of production.

To explain the process of institutionalisation, Berger and Luckmann posit the empirically unlikely example of a male/female couple who create an institutional world de novo. As their mutual habituated interactions develop they are able to consign large parts of their lives to the background, in the process, releasing individual and mutual time and attention for an ever-widening engagement with the outside world. Their lives become increasingly efficient. With the birth of children, their habituated interactions assume an aura of historicity so that these interactions become, for the children, an objective reality, a given.

The parents also experience their habituated behaviours as objective realities through the reflective perception of their children. Thus for the social collective as a whole, the institutional world is experienced collectively and increasingly as an objective social reality which antedates the individual's life span. Of course, in actual society it would be impossible for parents to enter into an institutional relationship ex nihilo - that is, without any prior socialisation. In reality, the objectivation of social institutions is an on-going process which is already heavily sedimented for each generation, and hence increasingly experienced as an objective facticity - as having a life of its own, separate from human agency.

Language plays a fundamental role in both the formation and continuation of human institutions. It binds everyday reality and translates experiences into the terms of reference of realities as they are already understood. The very fact of language itself reinforces not only the taken-for-grantedness of everyday reality, but also the reality of non-everyday experiences within the frame of reference of everyday reality itself:

It does this through the  establishment of semantic fields which are conceptually bounded and which circumscribe all experience within the framework of the already-known.  Language is the keystone of the process of social institutionalisation therefore. Different aspects of everyday life are constituted and ongoingly reproduced through the objectifying uses of different languages. Professional work, for instance, is often constituted by a different semantic field which orders and makes sense of the experiences one encounters there. A process of selection operates by which some experiences are integrated into the semantic field and others are ignored or discarded. Some semantic combinations are more significant than others from a survival point of view (identifying domains of criticality) and these have greater prominence within the field. By this ordering process, a common stock of knowledge is accumulated which is passed down through successive generations and which therefore helps to maintain social continuity and stability across time.

Social institutions, thus structure and organise themselves through the mediation of language, establishing distinct semantic fields which also reciprocally bestow social orientation and identity upon their members. In the professions, the selection of frames of reference which constrain these semantic fields define both the cultural inclusivity and the exclusivity of professionals as professionals - that is, the role and social identity of the professional is both defined and prescribed not only within the profession itself, but also within the larger social context of everyday life.

These role definitions then circumscribe the common stock of knowledge about the social status and experience which is contingent upon it. Hence these reciprocal influences between role definition and social status tend towards a self-fulfilling reciprocity. Put simply, we can say that certain linguistic codes act as a social filter, ensuring that only those with a particular social background are attracted to membership, being best able to interpret and understand the codification of the complex language systems involved.  Pierre Bourdieu has separately and fully articulated the process by which this happens.

Everyday conversation plays a crucial role in the process of the social construction of reality. Yet everyday conversation is rarely used consciously to define the nature of reality. Rather, it serves as a backdrop against which the nature of reality is silently taken for granted. Thus conversation implicitly and unconsciously binds the reality of the world together. This is to say that the binding power of language remains largely invisible. Language, which forms the basis of our internal conversations about the world is therefore fundamental not just to the process of describing reality, but in constructing and maintaining it. And since language is a social phenomenon, it follows that our conception of reality is mediated by the social forms which structure everyday life.  Social groups who use the same language (be it everyday language or specialised technical language) implicitly reproduce and convey through their conversations a model of the world imbued with particular meanings and associations of which they themselves may not be fully aware, but which bind together the concrete reality, the world in question.  In addition, we should keep in mind that, as Wittgenstein reminds us, the meanings inherent in language itself do not come ready-made:

Within the overall social order, different groups attempt continuingly to have their own version of reality accepted by the larger social collective as the paramount reality - this process is called hegemony. An extremely important aspect of this hegemonic process resides within the meaning and structure of language itself.

In other words, one of the functions of attributing specific meanings to specific conversational words is social intentionality - that is, words are given meanings with the intention of creating an overarching common and shared reality structure which corresponds to the reality of particular cultural groups. In other words, the intentionality of language is deeply implicated in the social struggle of different social or cultural groups to establish their hegemony over society as a whole.

Two groups may view the very same events or phenomena from a radically different point of view, and frequently, within the framework of the social struggle for hegemony, these viewpoints are dialectically opposed. Two such oppositional cultures will therefore attach oppositional meanings to key conceptual categories. Such oppositional meanings will more than likely also be mutually exclusive.
To give an example, we will readily appreciate how, after the Reformation, the meanings attached to specific Christian beliefs, rituals and icons were transformed to become counter-beliefs. The beliefs surrounding the Virgin Mary (the notion of a virgin-birth etc.), the reputed infallibility of the Pope, the granting of Indulgences etc. were cast under Protestantism as evidence of the corruption of Christianity rather than its exemplification.   Similarly, after Marx, the notion of profit was cast not as the admirable result of good business sense, but as the exploitation of workers denied the surplus value of their labour. When such counter-meanings become widespread within the common stock of language, the significations of that language often becomes apparent to its proponents for the first time. Put another way, our conversational structures tend to remain invisible to us until we view them as an exteriority, ie. from within another conversational structure or convention, and these meanings are often, within the struggle for cultural dominance, oppositional. 

In their theorising, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann outline a structure and methodology for a deeper understanding and investigation of the field of the Sociology of Knowledge. Their approach draws much from the methodological style of the Institute for Social Research (known as the Frankfurt School), and particularly of the Critical Theory for which that School was and is justly famous. Although their work has been extremely influential since it was first published in 1966, it has in many ways been superseded by that later critical analysis which it stimulated, not least of which has been the body of writing and theorising which has come to be called Postmodernism.  

To download a more detailed and extended description and analysis of Berger and Luckmann's theories click here. 

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Ernst Bloch (1885-1977)

Biography

Born in Germany of a Jewish Railway worker, Block studied philosophy and later became friends with notable Marxists, writers and playwrights Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno . Bloch's work focuses on the concept of hope in the role of human affairs. A Marxist philosopher, he taught at the University of Leipzig (1918–33), and adopting Marxist thought during the 1920s. He fled the Nazis after 1933, moving first to Switzerland and then to the United States. Bloch’s magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, which was published in German (3 vol., 1952–59; tr. 1960), emphasized the role of hope as a human drive. He returned to Leipzig in 1948, where he remained until conflict with Communist Party officials compelled him to defect to West Germany (1961). There, he taught at the University of Tübingen.

Work

His work is a both a documentation of, but also a contribution to the optimistic drive forward into new philosophical territories. From his early Nietzschean and expressionist work 'Geist der Utopie' (spirit of utopia), via his studies of the relationship between Religion and History ('Atheismus im Christentum') through to his analysis of human dignity and natural law ('Naturrecht und menschliche Würde' - written after his experience of living under Stalinist rule in Leipzig), he was constanty concerned with demonstrating that human beings not only exist but do so in a continual state of becoming. His influence on critical thought has been great though rarely acknowledged - perhaps because of the impenetrability of his prose but also because of the breadth, extent and complexity of his writing. . 

He placed the issue of culture firmly at the centre of the revisionist Marxist critique. For Bloch the notion of becoming is central. He sees humanity as essentially unfinished, and its project is the reclamation and possession of itself by transcending the alienation and false consciousness engendered by capitalism. He, above all of the critical theorists, promotes utopianism - not as a realisable finished state, but as a process of self realisation. Most significant, is his profound commitment to the notion of hope in this process. His concept of hope begins with imagination - the ability to visualise that which is not-yet, that which is better than what we have experienced. But imagining is not the same as fantasising - which is disconnected from our lived reality. Instead it suggests and eventually reveals a path to action for the realisation of the imagined. Bloch understood that this process took place in the social and cultural world - at the interface between the individual and the social collective. He understood that the realisation of this utopia-process must necessarily be a collective enterprise. 

In this, he firmly rejected the orthodox Marxist dogma of the primacy of the economic base over the cultural superstructure, asserting forcefully that collective cultural production remained, in Marxist orthodoxy, a degraded potential, but that it held out the possibility for true social and economic transformation. He assedrts that in  the (small) choices made by individuals lies the capacity for significant social transformation. In this sense he echoes the later writings of Existentialists such as Sartre and Laing.It is in these choices and in the role and importance of the imagination that Bloch has a special  respect for art. Art, for him, is a cultural practice that at onne and the same time gives shape to the creative imagination throuugh a process of social dialogue. The artist, for Bloch, reveals in his or her work, both the reality and the potential of our humanity/

Bloch begins with Marx's notion that the architect is distinguished from the bee by building the structure first in the imagination. The imagination and the correct process of building are intertwined. The process which facilitates authenticity is that of sifting the facts and utilizing them in accord with their latent tendency of utopian content. The arts are for Bloch a kind of functionally prophetic envisioning. They involve us in a process of cognition in which the subject-object divide is transcended within the receptive subject. Music, for Bloch, is one of the art forms in which this capacity is most vividly present. He was particularly interested in the works of the Expressionists - like Schoenberg, whose project was specificaly to give expression to the dialectic of the not-yet-imagined. Unlike orthodox Marxists, he also saw that religion had an impotyant part to play int the imaginative creation and realisation of hope. In this he distinguished sharply between those organised and institutionalised religions which he saw as serving specific class interests, and the religious or spiritual impulse, which has existen as an essentially human characteristic from the beginning of time. Here, he foreshadows the later emergence of cultural studies, liberation theology and postmodern indigeneity not to say New Age spirituality. However, this is not to suggest that Blochʻs philosophy is unworldly. Rather it seeks to reconcile those elements that have been rejected or abandoned by Marxism and to reinstate them into a coherent vision of hope.

For a terrific analysis of Bloch's importance by Douglas Kellner click here  

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Murray Bookchin (1921-2006)

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Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

Biography

Bourdieu was born in Denguin in the South Atlantic Pyrenées and educated at the lycée in Pau, before moving to the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. From there he gained entrance (like Foucault and numerous critical social scientists before him) to study philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure. He studied with Louis Althusser and became a school teacher at Moulins from 1955 to 1958.

In 1958, following in the footsteps of Lyotard, he took up a post as lecturer in the faculty of Algiers at a time when the Independence movement there was becoming particularly violent. For Bourdieu, the conflict between the Algerian people and French colonists could only be clarified by understanding the original economic and social structures and conditions of the indigenous civilisations. He chose to study the Kabyle peoples - the Berbers. The result was his first book, The Algerians..

In 1960 he returned to Paris and taught at the University of Paris until 1964, when he took up a post at the From 1964 on, Bourdieu held the position of Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (the future École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). In 1968, he took over the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, which he directed until his death. In 1981 he was appointed to the chair of Sociology at the Collège de France.

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Work

The Wikipedia article on Bourdieu gives a succinct account of his influences:

The habitus, for Bourdieu, constitutes a set of acquired patterns of thought, behavior, and taste  These patterns, or "dispositions," are the result of internalization of culture or objective social structures through the experience of an individual or group. Membership of the group is created, determined and maintained through the use of different symbolic languages. Differences in linguistic abstraction operate as boundary filters - both separating different levels of the social hierarchy and at the same time instrumentally defining and monitoring social movement between them. One must "learn" or adopt the new language of any other level in the social hierarchy to be allowed to participate in its operation. Language in this sense operates as what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed a mechanism of social distinction.

This is to say that the social hierarchy in any society corresponds to the levels of abstraction of the linguistic forms through which it operates. Hence, as Berger and Luckmann have noted, the objectivated distinctions between different social realities and between their corresponding linguistic systems are increasingly and ongoingly experienced as real. This lends an objectivated sense of order to the social framework as a whole so that, for instance, the social reality which operates at the level of university knowledge is seen within the common stock of objectivated and legitimated knowledge  of society as a whole to be a superior form of knowledge to that which operates in everyday life. This holds true within the boundaries of any overarching social collectivity which accepts the legitimacy of the university as a legitimate and legitimating social institution.

Any movement between these language/social systems is controlled, so as to maintain the social order implicit in the social reality as a whole by maintaining the relative autonomy of the linguistic spheres through the policing and continual demarcation of their conceptual as well as their geographical boundaries. What this means in everyday terms is that in any society, hierarchical distinctions tend to become sedimented and objectivated through their respective languages such that the very notion of hierarchy itself becomes similarly sedimented and synonymous with a "natural" social order. Thus a person who wishes to move "up" the social and linguistic hierarchy is required to learn and to accept that s/he must learn an entirely new language system. This system is correspondingly more abstract, and at the same time must be accepted as a superior explanation of reality than that from which s/he originates.

Since the objectivated "superiority" of this "higher" social realm must be internalised by the social climber as a function of institutional acceptance, this almost invariably sets up an internal conflict between internalised social realities which frequently acts as a substantial disincentive to upward mobility. Berger and Luckmann describe how lower class children not only absorb a lower class perspective in their formative years (with all of the received and accepted sedimentations of class circumscriptions) but are also faced with internalised conflicts, when they desire to migrate from their culture of origin.  Freire points to a similar phenomenon in which the child's reflective and internalised "family" self - that which is formed in the context of family perspectives and values - is brought into conflict with the internalised and deprecated self which emerges from the reflective experience of living in a classed society.  Bourdieu calls this framework of cultural dispositions the habitus.  

Bourdieu calls this totality the "habitus" - suggesting a habituated "life space", which operates through an awareness (albeit unconscious) of a series of socially-constructed oppositions.  Inscribed within the habitus is the:

In other words, occupations, education, income level, titles, academic qualifications, sporting achievements, material possessions, residential location, manner of dress and speech, all tend to influence as well as express the social status and power of the individual. Each aspect of our lives carries with it a different value in our own and other social groups. These different values make up the sum total of what Bourdieu calls cultural capital and symbolic capital. This is why, we lay such great store in driving the "right" car and being seen with the "right" people. The habitus is found if not in  all of the properties, then at least in a loose unconscious relationship which binds them together. Indeed, property as such can be seen as a mechanism for allowing the exercise of the social distinctions which the habitus bestows.

Bourdieu shows in more detail how these linguistic and cultural barriers operate through the establishment of cultural codes. He describes how a "work of art" contains a coded language system which operates to distinguish between those individuals who exist at different levels of the social hierarchy:

It is through processes such as these that cultural capital is acquired and augmented, and by which social hierarchies are maintained and social and cultural reproduction takes place. The medium for this process is, according to both Foucault and Bourdieu, the body, upon which the values, attitudes and distinctions are at one and the same time impressed and repressed. 

Bourdieu has left a lasting impression not only in the field of sociology, but in almost every branch of the social sciences. It is not without reason that he has been called, "the greatest French intellectual of the 20th Century".

To download a more complete and detailed analysis of Bourdieu's theory of the Habitus in a PDF Hegemony and Space click here

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Noam Chomsky (1928- )

Biography 

Strictly speaking, Noam Chomsky does not fit easily into the category of Critical Theorist - this on a series of levels. First of all he is not that interested in Marxist Humanism, or Marxist revisionism, but has rather described himself as an Anarcho-Syndicalist, more interested in open democracy and citizen power than in institutionalised forms of governmentm and advocating instead forms of worker ownership and control over the means of production. He abhors State Communism, while at the same time saving his most incisive criticism of the major capitalist states and their mosrt recent brand of U. S. colonisation and imperialism. And although his theories of media hegemony have had a very wide reading and a profound influence upon our analysis of the relationship between the Fourth Estate and the military-industrial complex, this has not translated easily into prescriptive (rather than descriptive) discourse. He has no website of his own - choosing to place the importance of his work in the ideas themselves rather than in his own ability to voice them. Having said this, he is undeoubtedly one of the great intellectuals of the 20th Century whose work has shifted paradigms on several differnt levels. He was born in Philadelphia in 1928 to a father who was a Hebrew scholar and a member of the Wobblies. In his film Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky himself has acknowledged the importance of this early influence of political activism and intellectual rigour - which seems to have been pervasive in his whole family. His political activism has been a lifelong involvement and he is one of the very few intenatuionally renowned publioc intellectuals in the USA to consistently and forcefully call his own government into question.

"Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known—especially internationally—for his media criticism and politics. He is generally considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of United States politics. Chomsky is widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments."(Wikipedia)

He was totally immersed in Hebrew culture in his early life and experienced anti-Semitism from an early age. At eh age of ten he wrote an article on the Spanish Civil War, warning of the upsurge of Fascism after the fall of Barcelona.By tyhe age of 13 he was already identifying with the Anarchist Movement which had been so successful there.

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Work 

Later, he studied linguistics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in Linguistics in 1955 after 4 years at Harvard. He thern joined the faculty at MIT (where he has since taught continuously for 52 years). Two years later, in 1957, he published his book Syntactic Structures. Behaviourism - which was to revolutionised the field of linguistics and which stands today as one of the most important works in the field. The basic premise of the book is that humans are "wired" to understand the syntactical structures of language - that children have an inate ability to understand the grammatical srtructures of all languages. This theory flew in the face of prevailing linguistic and psychological theorising at that time -the theories of promoted by B. F. Skinner and others - which held that there are no inate tendencies, and that behaviour is entirely conditioned by contingencies of reinforcement.

But his academic success failed to deter his political asctivism. In 1967 he came out very forcefully and publicly against the Vietnam War in an essay by the title The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the New York review of Books. He followed this with a book, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969). The latter extends the arguments of the former, maintaining that the intellectueal classes and academics of the United States were and are largely responsible for U. S. militaristic foreign policy. In this, he articulates one of the primary understandings of - that Political Power and Knowledge are not mutually exclusive but rather are intimately connected. The relationship between power and knowledge has been one of Chomsky's abiding interests, and has shaped much of his subsequent theorising and work.

Yet despite all of his political activism, Chomsky has consistently refused to be drawn into supporting postmodern and post-structrualist critiques of science, suggesting instead that the scientific method offers the most significant hope for human emancipation. His theories carry a remarkable degree of internal consistency. He also refuses steadfastly to support censorship in any form and himself refuses to pursue legally those who defame him.

Over the years, his philosophies have led him to oppose not only the Viertnam War, but also the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, the U.S.  support for the Contras in covert war against the freely-elected Sandinista government in Nicaracua, the 1989 invasion of Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Chomsky sees all of these American foreign policy actions as imperialistic and tied directly to the need to maintain American hegemony worldwide in the interest of maintaining control over "free" market capitalism. He has been rated as the most important intellectual of the 20th century and one of the eight most read and cited intellectuals of all time. Noam Chomsky is an intellectual giant by any measure, and his critical theorising has been arguable the most influential of all of the critical theorists cited here. He is the recipient of numerous Honorary Doctorates and is the recipient of the New Zealand Peace Foundation Prize.

Perhaps Michael Apple sums up the life and works of Noam Chomsky best when he says:

 (Michael Apple in Review of Chomsky on Miseducation (Macedo))

To download Nopan Chomsky's Critique of Postmodernism and Deconstruction click here  

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Ward Churchill (1947-)

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Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

I thought long and hard about whether to include Derrida in this list of critical theorists. Wikipedia suggests that:

"His voluminous work has had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy".

But like Noam Chomsky, for the most part I have found his writings to be difficult to understand and (again like Chomsky) that he uses "pretentious rhetoric" to obscure the simplicity of his ideas. Chomsky groups Derrida within a broader category of the Parisian intellectual community which he has criticised for, on his view, acting as an elite power structure for the well educated through "difficult writing" and obscurantism. On the other hand, his (Deconstruction) conceptualisations have proved to be immensely helpful to me on a couple of occasions and have helped me to clarify key points in my own critical analysis. So here he is.

Biography

Derrida was born in 1930, in Algeria, when that country was still under freench colonial domination. He was, the third of five children. 

On the first day of the school year in 1942, Derrida was expelled from his high school by French administrators implementing anti-Semitic quotas set by the pro-Nazi government. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish school formed by displaced teachers and students. At this time, Derrida read works of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Camus, Nietzsche, and Gide. He began to think seriously about philosophy around 1948 and 1949. He became a boarding student at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, which he did not enjoy. Derrida failed his entrance examination twice before finally being admitted to the École Normale Supérieure at the end of the 1951–52 school year.

On his first day at the École Normale Supérieure Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. He entered the École Normale at a time when a remarkable generation of philosophers and thinkers was coming of age. Besides Althusser, there were also Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Lyotard, Barthes , and Marin. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, deBeauvoir, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and others. The Fifties in France was the time of phenomenology, and Derrida studied closely Husserl's then published works as well as some of the archival material that was then available. The result was a Masters thesis from the academic year 1953-54 called The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy; Derrida published this text in 1990. He also became friends with Michel Foucault, whose lectures he attended. He completed his philosophy agrégation on Husserl's "The Origin of Geometry." Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University. During the Algerian War of Independence, Derrida asked to teach French and English to soldiers' children in lieu of military service from 1957 to 1959.

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Work 

From 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and from 1964 to 1984 at the École Normale Superieure. Beginning with his 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his work assumed international prominence.  In 1967, he published his first three books—Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology—which would make his name. He completed his Thèse d'État in 1980; the work was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations."

Derrida travelled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. He was director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. With François Châtelet and others. In 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academy. He was elected as its first president. In 1986 he became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.  He was a regular visiting professor at several other major American universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, and The New School for Social Research. All of this superstar status flows from his initial conception of Deconstruction, which has proved to be a powerful analytical tool for uncovering the hidden and often ambiguous meanings

Characterising Western knowledge as being grounded upon what he calls a "metaphysics of identity",  Derrida has noted how language organises the world into oppositional categories - body/mind, culture/nature, subject/object, male/female, and so on. 

Using textural readings of Kant, for instance, he has investigated the truth claims of art and aesthetics. In his investigation of Kant's Third Critique, he develops Kant's notion of parergon, literally "what we call ornaments" i.e. those things which "do not belong to the complete representation of the object internally as elements, but only externally as components".  Derrida shows how Kant's parergon or frame of reference cannot be separated from the otherwise essential quality of the art itself. He reveals the internal contradictions in Kant's classification system by showing that what is essential to a particular work of art or architecture remains ambiguous in Kant's own terms. In seeking which aspects can be left out without detracting from the whole, he isolates elements whose marginality defies classification.

This critical analysis of art precipitated by Derrida's concept of the parergon (and suupported by Bourdieu's concepts of cultural codes and cultural capital ) reveals a world of elitism, of cultural dominance, of silencing. This cultural dominance through Art, developed over four centuries and finally given a philosophical seal of approval by Kant, was finally consolidated by the rising hegemony of the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in particular through the Romanticism of Keats, Byron, Constable, Turner and Blake and a host of artists and poets who embodied the detached, aristocratic ambience of eccentricity so beloved of the nineteenth century Englishman. Here was consolidated the myth of the universal man, the Grand-Tourist, the consummate coloniser, the true cultural aristocrat, the determiner of taste in an environment of manufactured scarcity in a burgeoning market in which he was that essential direct connection, an anchor to that which was not transitory, but which was permanent and timeless.

Derrida's work and concepts have had a profound influence in a wide range of fields - not always in ways that he would have supported or which are internally consisten. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2004.

To download an critical analysis of Deconstructivist architecture in three PDFs click here  

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FranTz Fanon (1925-1961)

Biography

In a strict sense, the name of FranTz Fanon might seem odd alongside those of other critical theorists of the 20th century. Yet he is perhaps one of the most influential theorists and writers on issues of culture, consciousness and colonisation of all time. He was born to (relatively) well off parents in Martinique - a French Caribean colony, and as a child experienced the brutality of French colonial rule. After the fall of france in the Second World War, the French Vichy navy was blockaded in Martinique and the brutal excesses  of the French to the black islanders was graphic and educational - revealing to him the evils of racism when combined with colonial power. At the age of 18 he fled the island to join the free French forces under Charles de Gaulle. He fought in Europe and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, but (along with other black soldiers) was excluded from the triumphant and publicise crossing of the Rhine because of his colour. He returned briefly to Martinique after the war and then moved to France to study medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. While therehe also studied existential pghilosophy and litereature.

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Work

After qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951, Fanon did a residency in psychiatry under the radical Catalan psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles, who invigorated Fanon's thinking by emphasizing the important yet often overlooked role of culture in psychopathology. (Wikipedia) In this he paralleled the work of Erich Fromm, as well as the existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Yet it was his theorising of the intersection of the issues of class, race, colour and culture with psychopathology that made him such an important theorist and critical thinker. He practiced pasychiatry in France for a year. During this time he published his first book, Black Skin White Masks - an analysis of the effect of colonial subjugation on the human psyche. There, Fanon used psychoanalytical theory to explain the feelings of dependency and inadequacy that Black people experience in a White world. He speaks of the divided self-perception of the Black Subject who has lost his native cultural originality and embraced the culture of the coloniser. The behaviour, Fanon argues, is even more evident in upwardly mobile and educated Black people who can afford to acquire the trappings of White culture.  Black Skin White Masks has had a profound impact upon our understanding of colonisation and the process whereby the colonised come to act against their own self-interest and to participate in their own oppression. When it was published in 1952 it caused a sensation and it still, today, resonates with the experiences of colonised cultures.

Following the publication of his book, Fanon moved to Algeria in 1953. There, he worked as chef de service at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he stayed until his resignation in 1956. As the Wikipedia article on Fanon perceptively notes:

"...one might wonder why Fanon spent over 10 years in the service of France, but his servitude to France's army... For Fanon, being colonized by a language had larger implications for one's political consciousness: "To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization". Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French."

Fanon's experiences in Algeria were to coalesce into a clarity of thouight about the intersection of colonisation, race and class that found its expression in his psychiatric practice. he began to introduce cultural and social issues into his disgnosticv models of psychosis - relating (like Reich, Laing and Fromm) the condition of his patients to their social and political circumstances rather than to decontextualised notions of libido. Whenm the Algerian Revolution against French colonialism began in 1954, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) - the Algerian nationalist movement dedicated to the overthrow of French ruie. He supplied equipment to the FLN, safe havens for militants on the run, as well as psychiatric treatment for the tortured and the torturers alike. He quickly came to be seen as a foreign representative for the FLN at conferences abroad.

By 1957 Fanon was receiving regular death threats, making his work in Algeria unsafe. He resigned and was expelled from Algeria, leaving for France before travelling secretly to Tunisia. In his resignation letter, he described his experiences of colonial Algeria:

“If psychiatry is a medical technique which aspires to allow man to cease being alienated from his environment, I owe it to myself to assert that the Arab, who is permanently alienated in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalisation. The status of Algeria? Systematic dehumanisation.”

His next book, A Dying Colonialism, (originally published as Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution) was a portrait of the impact the liberation movement had on all those involved in it. There, he described how Algerian women fighters would put the veil on or take it off according to the needs of the liberation movement – if it was easier to pass the checkpoints dressed as a European then the veil would disappear. He also records out how the determination of colonial authorities to “liberate” Muslim women from the veil directly inspired more women to wear it.(See: Socialist Worker)

Fanon's last book was also his most profound and influential. In The Wretched Of The Earth (1961) Fanon analyzes the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for national liberation. Both books established Fanon in the eyes of much of the Third World as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century. This was his final book, published after his death from leukaemia in December 1961, only months before Algerian independence was declared. Dictated rather than written, this volume contains Fanon’s views on violence, the role of the peasantry in the liberation struggle, and his fears for what might happen after independence.

Fanon rightly understood that the French and British empires had taken land and resources by military conquest, and would only give these up when forced to do so. Algeria’s bitter independence struggle was proof of that analysis. His theories have had a profound impact upon the anti-colonialism movement and ongoing struggles of the colonised for more than fifty years. His range of influence has extensded to jean paul Satrte (who wrote the Introduction to Wretched of the Earth), Steve Biko in South Africa, Malcolm X in America, and Che Guevara. His writings continue to influence a broad range of contemporary scholars, indigenous peoples and marxist revolutionaries around the world.

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Biography

Foucault was born in Poitiers to an eminent surgeon. His schooling was mediocre until he attended a Jesuit college, where he excelled. until he attended the Jesuit Collège Saint-Stanislas, where he excelled. During his High School years he lived under German occupation. After the War, he gained entry to the École Normale Supérieure - a traditionally prestigeous gateway to an academic career in the humanities. While there he became interested in phenomenology - particularly the works of Martin Heidegger, but he was also interested in Hegel and Marx, and attended the lectures of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. During this time he also experienced periods of deep depression and undertook psychiatric analysis. This probably led to his interest in Clinical Psychology, which he eventually gained a license to practice. He also acquired a degree in philosophy. The combination of the two interests led him to devote much of his professional life to the philosophical investigation of state institutions for the criminal and the insane. His earliest writings - a long "Introduction" to his translation of Dream and Existence by Ludwig Binswanger, (arguably the first existential psychiatrist), and Maladie mentale et personalité, (Mental Illness and Personality - a short book on mental illness) are clearly influenced by his twin interests in Marxism and Existentialism. He untimately abandoned and criticised both, undertaking instead, his own particular brand of "archeological" analysis of the relationship between culture and the social construction of identity. From 1950-1953 he was inducted into the Communist Party by his friend Louis Althusser, but he abandoned his membership in protest against the policies of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

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Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault

Work

From 1953-4 he taught psychology at the University of Lille, from where he moved to the University of Upsala in Sweden. He left therein 1958 to move to the University of Warsaw and then the University of Hamburg. He returned to France in 1960 to finish his PhD before teaching philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. He acquired his doctorate in 1961 and published a part of it under the title Madness and Civilisation in 1965.

Originally published as The History of Madness in the Classical Age it comprioses a study of the emergence of the modern concept of "mental illness" in Europe, and is formed from both Foucault's extensive archival work and his intense anger at what he saw as the moral hypocrisy of modern psychiatry. It excavates the process by which the insane became an institutionalisable category, by which the social construction of insanity came to be. Standard histories saw the nineteenth-century medical treatment of madness (developed from the reforms of Pinel in France and the Tuke brothers in England) as an enlightened liberation of the mad from the ignorance and brutality of preceding ages. But, according to Foucault, the new idea that the mad were merely sick ("mentally" ill) and in need of medical treatment was not at all a clear improvement on earlier conceptions (e.g., the Renaissance idea that the mad were in contact with the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy or the 17th-18thcentury view of madness as a renouncing of reason). Moreover, he argued that the alleged scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments of insanity are in fact covers for controlling challenges to a conventional bourgeois morality. In short, Foucault argued that what was presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery (that madness is mental illness) was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and ethical commitments. Foucault's next history, The Birth of the Clinic (1963) can similarly be read as a critique of modern clinical medicine.(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ).

In 1965 he moved to Tunis with his five-year partner Daniel Defert and accepted a position at the University of Tunis in 1965. In 1966 he published Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), which was enormously popular despite its length and difficulty. This was during the height of interest in structuralism and Foucault was quickly grouped with scholars such as Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes as the latest thinkers to challenge the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre.  In the fall of 1968, following the student uprising, he returned to France, where he published L'archéologie du savoir (The Archaeology of Knowledge) in 1969.

His particular brand of analysis involved turning Kantian philosophy on its head. A quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes this point very clearly:

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Paulo Freire (1921-1997)

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Erich Fromm (1900-1980) 

Biography

Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900, the only child of orthodox Jewish parents. He began studying jurisprudence at the University of Frankfurt in 1918, but moved to the University of Heidelberg the following year, where he switched to to sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of the famous sociologist Max Weber). He studied psychology under the brilliant psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jasper, and philosophy with Heinrich Rickert. Being brought up in Jewish orthodoxt, Fromm's thesis looked at the relationship between spiritual teachings and social relations. Fromm received his Ph.D. in sociology in 1922. He then trained to become a psychoanalyst. He began his own clinical practice in 1927 in Berlin, where in 1930 he met Wilhelm Reich and other Marxist analysts at the Berlin Institute. The same year, he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychoanalytical training. Here he delved more deeply into Marxism, and his interests turned decisively to issues of the socio-psychological nature of different social and political formations. In this he shared the same interests as reich, whose Mass Psychology of Fascism later attempted to understand and explain why it was that Hitler's support stemmed mainly from the working class who should, according to Marxist theories, be instead supporting the socialist revolution.

With the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York to work at the New School of Social research along with his other refugee Frankfurt colleagues Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno.

Work

He worked there until the late 1930s when a diagreement with his colleagues about his abandonment of Freudian "drives and an eventual bitter condemnation from Marcuse (who labelled him a "neo-Freudian revisionist") led him to withdraw. The problem had been in Fromm's interest in Freud's theory of the libido - as being, from a Marxist perspective, independant of the socio and economic circumstances operating in society. Fromm's socio-psychological theorising suggested that indeed the libido of the individual was not by definition shaped only by instinct, but also by the social circumstances of the society in which it experienced itself. From this perspective, whole societies were able to exhibit markedly different manifestatuions of libido - and of the subconscious. The individual, from this perspective, adapts to the social circumstances in which he or she finds him/herself and repressions come into play which are culture-specific. By this measure, whole societies can exhibit patterns of mass psychosis. There are echoes here again of the later work of laing, who maintained that the manifestation of schizophrenia resulted from the self-preserving adaptation of individuals to insane (family) circumstances.

Fromm first gave voice to these theories in his groundbreaking book Fear of Freedom (1941), in which he suggested (again presaging Existentialists like Sartre and R. D. Laing) that an inherent fear of taking responnsibility for and control of one's own life in the face of society's demands and mores constitutes a real and present psychological impulse - leading in extreme cases, to the kinds of passivity and public quiescence that had occurred in Nazi Germany. He noted that:

"We believe that man is primarily a social being, and not, as Freud assumes, primarily self-sufficient and only secondarily in need of others in order to satisfy his instinctual needs. In this sense, we believe that individual psychology is fundamentally social psychology or, in Sullivan's terms, the psychology of interpersonal relationships; the key problem of psychology is that of the particular kind of relatedness of the individual toward the world, not that of satisfaction or frustration of single instinctual desires."

His theory was that people in modern society were unable to translate their "freedom from" into a capacity to experience "freedom to"", and instead sought refuge in totalitarian systems and regimes that made the crucial life-transforming decisions for them. He extended this thesis later with the publication of The Sane Society (1955) in which he described the nature of manʻs alienation from himself. In the same work he goes to some lengths to describe the "true" or creative nature of human existence that is realisable through a transformed social world. This idea is extended yet again in his later The Art of Loving (1956) in which he places the capacity (or incapacity) for self love and love of other as the benchmarks of emotional and mental health. From had considerable personal success in the United States, but was unable to achieve any wide acceptance or understanding of his theories.

Fromm had moved to Mexico in 1950 and lived there teaching (as well as in America). In the mid 1950s he joined the American Socialist Party, and his teachings incorporated an ideology that rejected both capitalism and State Communism. In 1958 he recorded three television interviews with CBS's Mike Wallace. These encapsulate most of Fromm's theoretical base and can be viewed below.

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During the 1960s he became politically active against the Vietnam War and in support of Senator Eugene McArthy's bid for the Presidency (1968). He continued to teach in America and Mexico until 1974, when he moved to Switzerland with his third wife where he continued to writer and publish in social isolation. He died there in 1980. In his later years he publishe4d a final work on identity - the difference between an insecure  identity based upon possessions and a secure one based upon experience. He tied this theorisinng back to the work of Marx, closing the circle on his own theoretical journey.

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To read a brief but comprehensive biography of Fromm, click here. 

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Henry Giroux (1943- )

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André Gorz (1923-2007)

Biography:

A year before André Gorz committed suicide with his wife Dorine in September 2002, at the age of 84, he wrote a book, Lettre à D. Histoire d’un Amour - an homage to Dorine. There, he said:

"You’ve just turned 82. You are still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We’ve lived together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. Lately I’ve fallen in love with you all over again and I once more carry inside me a gnawing emptiness that can only be filled by your body snuggled up against mine.

He was 83. A year later they took their own lives so as not to be separated by Dorine's terminal cancer. They were together for 60 years, and this final act brought to an end a life of remarkable intellectual and political activism.

Gorz who was born as Gerhard Hirsch and was also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet was an Austrian and French social philosopher. a journalist, and co-founded in 1964 of the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur.. He was a friend and supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre and for a good part of his life was immersed in the philosophies of Phenomenology and Existentialism. He leaned towards an existentialist version of Marxism which supported and advocated the significance of the subjective.  He broke with Sartre after (the student uprising of) May '68 and became more concerned with political ecology, becoming one of its leading theorists. His central theme was work: liberation from work, just distribution of work, alienated work, etc. He was also one of the advocates of a Guaranteed basic income.He was a leading left thinker of his time and Sartre once claimed that Gorz had the "sharpest brain in Europe". (Wikipedia) His disagreement with Sartre typified the pattern of his relationships with other intellectuals and political movements. He continued to grow, to change, to transcend, and to follow his own moral, political and intellectual intuitions rather than to become addicted to dogma and orthodoxy.

His father wass Jewish, his mother Catholic. The father converted to Catholicism in 1930 to avoid the emerguing anti-semitism and the young Gerhard was shipped off to Lausanne in Switzerland at the outbreak of the Second World War. There he completed his degree in chemical engineering in 1945, and in 1954 took up French citizenship.

Work

He met Sartre in 1946, and the latter became a close friend. In 1949 he moved to Paris and worked as a journalist and private secreatary. It was when working as an economist journalist on L'Express in Paris that he adopted the name Michel Bosquet.

In the late 1950s he published two books, Le Traître (Le Seuil, 1958 (prefaced by Sartre) and La Morale de l'histoire (Le Seuil, 1959) -  both of which adopted an Existentialist/Marxist approach. By the 1960s he had become a leading figure in the New Left, and Marxist Humanism. He was friendly with Marcuse and strongly identified with the Frankfurt critical theorists. He was deeply involved with the french Union movement - particularly the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (advocating worker co-operatives and self-management systems) and the National Union of Students of France. In 1964 he published Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (Le Seuil, 1964), criticizing Capitalist economic growth and analysing the options for trade unions. He also left L'Express and co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly (under the name of Michel Bosquet).

He saw the May '68 uprising, and the students' demands and manifestos as vindication of his Existential Marxism and as an appropriate critical analysis of the repressive role of the State. His analysis embraced issues of Alienation, Institutionalisation and human emancipation and led him to the writings of Ivan Illich, publishing several of his writings in Les Temps Modernes.

Hie was increasingly taken with the work of Illich and inexorably moved away from his earlier Marxist leanings. His philosophical and political transformation led to a break with his colleagues in Le Temps Moderne, which from 1969 he assumed the editorial responsibility. In April 1970, his article Destroy the University (Détruire l'Université) provoked the resignation close colleagues.  In 1974 he himself finally resigned from Les Temps Modernes. In addition, his position as an economist at Le Nouvel Observateur became untenable and rte was replaced by mosr ctraditional economists. It was at this time that he also broke with Sartre.

At this time he was becoming increasingly interested in the relationship between capitalist expansion and environmental issues. In particular, he wrote a combative article against the nuclear industry. The State electricity agency responded by withdrawing its advertisement from Les Temps Modernes. He responded by ptrying to ublishing a special edition of the magazine on nuclear issues. When the editorial board refused his request, he subsequently published it in the Que Choisir? consumers' magazine. 

His increasing interest in environmental issues led to him becoming a leading figure of political ecology, publishing regularly in the ecologist monthly magazine Le Sauvage, related to Friends of the Earth. In 1975, he published Ecologie et politique (Galilée, 1975), which included the essay Ecologie et liberté, "one of the foundational texts of the ecologic problematic". Gorz's ecology was further strengthened by his reading of the Club of Rome's 1972 report, Limits to Growth.(Wikipedia)

His central concern is the liberation of time and the abolition of work. He points out that work has not always existed in its present form. Our current understanding comes from the emergence of the capitalist econoimic system which requires that work be done for another in return for a wage and under time and spatial conditions and for a purpose determined by the employer. As he notes, the terms "work" and "job" have become interchangeable that one "has" and is understood as the sale of one's time. Under these circumstances, work is always only a means of making money and not an end in itself. (The latter sense is the same as that implied by Freire when he says that "by making the world we make ourselves!").

Within a Marxist context, the difference between wage labour and self-determined labour is the same as the difference between exchange value and use value. We work for a wage in order to have enough money to ourselves purchase enough time from society (in the form of manufactured commodities and foods as well as leisure. Self-determined work, in contrast, is not concerned with the exchange quantities of time. It is an end in itself, and is essentially the heart of the creative process (of creating oneself). Sale is not the object of this kind of creation - but consumption by oneself, family or friends. According to Gorz, the abolition of work (through automation etc) will only be emancipatory if it allows for the creation and development of the creative process inherent in autonomous activity.

Gorz maintains that the abolition of work is already in pprocess with the likely massive levels of unemployment inherent in new technologies already beginning to appear. (The large scale homelessness and unemployment of the 1990s were a validation of Gorz's theory). He maintains that this process will continue and accelerate and tghat if widespread social unrest is to be aviloded then it is imperative that ways be immediately developed to facilitate the creative work of autonomous, self-determined activity. Gorz argues that a necessary condition for this development is that a distinction be made between the right to work and the right to earn a living. This in turn means that communities develop[ and maintain thr ight tgo produce at least ppart of their goods and services that they consume without the need to sell their labour. This suggests different forms of community stuctures and collectivities based in part upon Illich's notion of conviviality and access to tools. Farewell to the Working Class is more than a warning, but a thesis on how these necessary social and economic changes might be accomplished threough a reconfiguration of the way we organise our social lives. This theorising led him to point out in Métamorphoses du travail  Metamorphosis of Labour (1988) how Capitalism was using personal investments which were not paid back and led inexorably to the conclusion that the only way to avoid the coming social and economic crisis was for the development and acceptance of a Guaranteed basic income, independent from "labour. It was a concept which dovetailed easily with his growing concerns about ecology and the impending global environmental crisis and which has been picked up and developed since by others, notably the Americasn Sociologists Stanley Aronowitz and social philosopher Murray Bookchin. 

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Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

Biography

Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia as the fourth of seven sons to a clerk in the local Registrar's office. His family were Arbëreshë (descendants from 15th Century Albanian immigrants who live in their own ethnic communities throughout Southern Italy. They have largely retained their own language and culture). When Antonio was seven his father was imprisoned for six years for embezzlement and the family became destitute. The young Gramsci was forced to leave school and do work at small jobs to help sustain the family. With his fathe's release, Gramsci attanded secondary school in Caligari and lived there with his older brother who was a socialist. He was a brilliant scholar, and at the age of 20 won a scholarship that allowed him to study at the University of Turin. He studied literature and linguistics. Turin at that time was in the process of rapid industrial development and the huge Fiat and Lancia factories were recruiting low paid workers from the provinces. Gramsci became involved in the formation of the Unions and attended many socialist meetings while at the same time attending to the small groups of Arbëreshë who lived there. In this was, his interest in the dual issues of cultural identity and hegemony, Marxism and social justice began to take shape. In 1913 he joined the Italian Socialist Party.

Although he acquired an extensive knowledge of philosophy and history, Gramsci was forced to abandon his studies in 1915 because of poor health and financial problems. He was increasingly drawn towards Marxist thinkers and had, while at University, met and befriended the leading Italian Marxist philosophers of the day. He took to journalism, and from 1914 to 1917 wrote mainly for the Socialist Newspaper Avanti on a wide variety of topics. He began to take a more prominent role in the Socialist Party. Gramsci became one of Turin's leading socialists when he was both elected to the party's Provisional Committee and made editor of Il Grido del Popolo.(a leading Socialist newspaper). Turin at tyhat time was a hotbed of Revolutionary thought. Italy then was, like today, socially and economically divided between the North and the South. The former waqs largely industrialised, the latter mostly made up of poor peasant communities who remained largely illiterate. The city was seen as thecentre of Marxist thought. In 1919, there was a concerted effort to take over the factories and to establish Workers Councils. This led to the arrest bofall of the leaders of the Socialist Party.

In April 1919 with Togliatti, Angelo Tasca and Umberto Terracini, Gramsci set up the weekly newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo. In October of the same year, despite being divided into various hostile factions, the Socialist Party moved by a large majority to join the Third International. The L'Ordine Nuovo group was seen by Lenin as closest in orientation to the Bolsheviks, and it received his backing against the anti-parliamentary programme of the extreme left. (Wikipedia) Following the strikes of 1919 and 1920, Gramsci supported the Workers Councils as a means of establishing social change, but there were bitter arguments among Socialists between the Centrists (who wanted centralised control of the movement) and people like Gramsci who supported the workers' groups. With the failure of the workers' councils to develop into a national movement he moved towards a more Centrist philosophy and in 1921 became one of the fouder members of the Italian Communist Party in which he remained a prominent leader throughout the rest of his life.

In 1922 he traqvelled to Russia where he met and married Julia Schucht, a young violinist with whom he had two sons. While he was there, Mussolini came to power in Italy and embarked upon a Fascist purge of Communists and Socialists. Gramsci returned from Moscow with instructions to form a working relationship between the CPI and the Soviets, but this caused major disagreement in the Italian wing, which feared losing its identity and independence under a centralised system directed from Moscow.

In late 1923, the head of the CPI, Amadeo Bordiga was arrested by Mussolini, and by 1924, Gramsci has assumed to the head of the Italian Communist Party and was elected as representative of the Regional Council (Veneto) where he tried to reconcile factional differences. He launched of the official newspaper of the party, called L'Unità (Unity), living in Rome while his family stayed in Moscow. At its Lyons Congress in January 1926, Gramsci's theses calling for a united front to restore democracy to Italy were adopted by the party. (Wikipedia)

Despite the fact that he possessed diplomatic immunity, Gramsci was arrested in another Mussolini purge. At his trial, Gramsci's prosecutor famously stated, "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning". He received an immediate sentence of 5 years in confinement (on the remote island of Ustica); the following year he received a sentence of 20 years of prison (in Turi, near Bari). He remained in prison in continuing ill health until 1934, when he was granted his conditional freedom. He died soon afterwards in Rome at the age of 46.

Work

Imprisonment failed to stem Gramsci's influence. While incarcerated he wrote morre than 30 notebooks and 3000 pages outlining theoretical issues that hve been hugely influential since they were fiirst translated into English in the 1970s. Published as The Prison Notebooks, they contain many insightful analyses of Italian history, Marxism, Critical Theory, Education and transformative practice. In particular, his critical analysis of the notion of Hegemony has been enormously influential and has been instrumental in major developments in Cultural Studies and Education. In The Prison Notebooks, he advocates worker education and critiques the orthodox Marxist ideology of economic determinism, proposing instead the impiortance of culture in the maintenance of dominant culture hegemony. In this alone, he has been profoundly influential in Western Marxist theorising. He recognised that secular Marxism lacked the capacity to fulfill the spiritual needs of the community and advocated changes to Marxist ideology that would close this gap.

In Education, he critiqued the normative notion of the intellectual (as someone predominantly involved in mental activity, and argued instead (in advance of Freire) that such interpretations are elitist and help to cement the power structres of the ruling class. Instead, he argued that intelectual activity was an inherent human activity, andf that the false distinction made between intellectual activity and labour actually pointed to an important relationship between theory and practice. He proposed the concept of the Organic Intellectual as a necessary component of social transformation. The organic Intellectual is groubnded in the culture of the oppressed and reatains its values and imperatives while being able to move and operate within the dominant culture.

In addition , Gramsci also made clear the difference between The State and Civil Society, demonstrating how the blurring between the two allowed the dominant culture to continue to promulgate its hegemony. The former (police, army judiciary etc) is used as an element of force, while the latter (media, the Church(es), Education etc.) is used as an element of persuasion. In reality, the two often overlap.

Gramsci's advocacy of Historicism was also very important. He maintained (against the mainstream Marxist thinking) that truth was shaped by historical experience. Consequently,

"The concepts by which we organise our knowledge of the world do not derive primarily from our relation to things, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts. Resultantly, there is no such thing as an unchanging "human nature", but only an idea of such which varies historically. Furthermore, philosophy and science do not "reflect" a reality independent of man, but rather are only "true" in that they express the real developmental trend of a given historical situation. (Wikipedia)

Despite his short life and imprisonment, gramsci has had a profound impact upon cuiltural theorising in the late 20th Century and early 21st Century. His influence has been felt in a wide range of areas and his insights have given new impetus to the Critical Theories of his better-known contemporaries.

To see an excellent site on Gramsci, Schooling and Education click here. 

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