To go to Critical Theorists Part 1: A-G, click here
This item will include 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.) 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 2 is alpabetically arranged from H to Z.
Its partner: Critical Theorists Part 2 is alphabetically arranged hrom A to G
Jurgen Habermas was a member of the so-called second generation of Critical Theorists. He was a member of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt when it returned there from New York after the Second World War. He was born in Dusseldorf in 1929. He came from a wealthy family. His father was the Director of the Cologne Chanber of Industry. When the War ended in 1945, Habermas was 16 years old and his conceptios of social and moral philosophy were dramatically shaped by the Nuremburg War crimes Trials. He realised early that German philosophy had failed to stem the gross excesses of the Nazi regime and that the instrumental rationality of the Third Reich besides being morally abhorent, also signalled the failure of rationalism itself within the German tradition. He studied at the universities of Göttingen (1949-50), Zürich (1950-51), and Bonn (1951-54) and earned a doctorate in philosophy from Bonn in 1954 with a dissertation entitled, The absolute and history: on ambivalence in Schelling's thought. During this period, in 1953, he had become interested in Heidegger's existentialism, and queried an earlier publication of Heidegger 's that supported National Socialism. He never received a reply, and this convinced him that German philosophy had, at its very moment of truth, failed to articulate the dangers and evils of fascism. It was at this point, that he turned his attentions instead, to that branch of Western philosophy emanating from the Anglo-American cultuure.
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Following this, in 1956, he studied philosophy and sociology under Horkheimer and Adorno at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Studies, now repatriated from New York His dissertation caused a rift between his two supervisors, and Habermas (who also felt that the Institute's disdain for modern and popular culture had rendered it ineffective) left to complete his habilitation in Political Science at the University of Marburg. It was his habilitation that first brought him to public awareness. habilitation, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (English ed., 1989), a detailed social history of the development of the bourgeois public sphere from its origins in the 18th century salons up to its transformation through the influence of capital-driven mass media. In 1964, at the suggestion of Adorno, he returned to Frankfurt to accept Horkheimer' s chair in philosophy and sociology.
His attention turned increasingly to the media in its role a cultural and social instrument and to different forms of rationality embodied therein. His primary focus was becoming clear - the nature and formation of the public sphere and its capacity for social transformation through a structural analysis of its effects. Two of his earliest books Toward a Rational Society (1970) and Theory and Practice(1973) begin to reveal this focus. In the former, he attempts to link his emerging conceptions of rationality with the student protest movements of the 1960s and their confrontation with the Establishment knowledge systems of advanced capitalism. We can witness his conceptions begin to crystalise in Knowledge and Human Interests (1971) where his understanding of the different forms of rationality becomes clear. These theories were later to influence Giroux and others in the field of Critical Education Theory as a means of unpacking the repressive potential of institutionalised and repressive knowledge systems. In this work he articulates for the first time the nature of scientific rationality asideological. In Knowledge and Human Interests we can see the beginnings of a methodologically pluralistic approach to critical social theory. This would be articulated further in his later writings. In particular, it was becoming clear to Habermas that the creation of a space for unrestrained public dialogue held out the greatest hope for future peace and equity. The rest of his life's work is devoted to explicating this goal. This explanation finds its clearest voice in his Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976) and his later Theory of Communicative Action(1981)
Here he describes the nature of the necessary public sphere where democratic communitive action might thrive. He noted that as routinised political parties and interest groups substitute for participatory democracy, society is increasingly administered at a level remote from input of citizens. As a result, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating. Democratic public life only thrives where institutions enable citizens to debate matters of public importance.
What lies behind all of this, is a serious questioning of the issue of truth. Habermas holds that the truth of a proposition does not necessarily depend upon its objective validity in scientific terms, but upon the agreed or consensual experience of the truth speakers. This is not to suggest that truth has no basis in fact, but that facts themselves are part of the discursive field of the public sphere and are dependent upon issues of cultural and personal experience. What is crucial for Habermas is not the factualness of a given statement in objective terms, but the ability of the truth sayers to recognise the collective validities of the differing realities of particvipants in the disrursive space.
"This discursive theory of democracy requires a political community which can collectively define its political will and implement it as policy at the level of the legislative system. This political system requires an activist public sphere, where matters of common interest and political issues can be discussed, and the force of public opinion can influence the decision-making process." (Wikipedia )
For an extensive analysis of Habermas' theories click here.
For a terrific, fully comprehensive and clear overview of Habermas' entire corpus of work click here
A Jewish intellectual, born in Stuttgart to a wealthy family, Horkheimer's early years were not perticularly academic. He left school at 16 to work in his father's factory. It was not until after the First world War that he entered University, to study philosophy and psychology and earned his doctorate with a study of German philosopherImmanuel Kant 's Critique of Judgement. Following this he moved to Frankfurt in 1930 to become Direcor of the Institute for Social Research, where he met his longtime friend and associate Theodor Adorno . In that same year he also took up the Chair in social philosopy at the University. Together with Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, Horkheimer was the foremost representative of the 'Critical Theory' associated with the Institute of Social Research (or 'Frankfurt School'). He organised the Institute's move into exile from Nazi Germany in 1933, when it was closed by the Nazis, and he supervised the return of the Institute to Frankfurt in 1949.
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The Institute for Social Research did not really achieve prominence until 1930, when Horkheimer (its second director) laid the groundwork for what was to become a comprehensive critical analysis of society, culture, economic theory and social development. In his inaugural address, Horkheimer set out three policy themes:
To restate all of the great philosophical questions
To reject orthodox marxism and to re-study Marx in the light of marxism's apparent failure
To develop a theory which would explain the connections between the factors affecting social development, so as to facilitate the project of universal social emancipation.
These themes were to be pursued through a systematic empirical and theoretical study. Although there was no "plan" or unitary "critical theory" which co-ordinated all the work of the Institute's staff, there was a great deal of overlap as its members followed their own (wide) disciplinary methodologies in pursuit of the themes. Indeed, if there were any common principles upon which they worked, chief among these was the imperative of what Douglas Kellner has termed "intradisciplinary study". The other abiding principle of the Frankfurt School was a passionate commitment to human emancipation, animated by an empathy with the suffering of the powerless. From 1930 until 1969 (when Adorno died) the Institute produced an impressive body of work, covering a wide range of social investigations. Large parts of this work became very popular in the 1960's and formed the theoretical basis for the social revolution of that time. The scope of the work carried out at the Institute was very broad and in some in¬stances anticipated much of the later work of the Postmodernists like Lyotard and Derrida. Hiis influence on the field of critical theorising remains paramount. In the opening chapter to the Institute's first publication Horkheimer made it very clear that:
"The term "human nature" here does not refer to an original or an external or a uniform essence. Every philosophical doctrine which sees the movement of society or the life of the individual as emerging out of a fundamental, ahistorical unity is open to justified criticism. Such theories with their undialectical method have special difficulty in coming to grips with the fact that new individual and social qualities arise in the historical process. Their reaction to this fact either takes the form of mechanical evolution: all human characteristics which arise at a later point were originally present in germ; or it takes the form of some variety of philosophical anthropology: these characteristics emerge from a metaphysical 'ground' of being. These mutually opposed theories fail to do justice to the methodolog¬ical principle that vital processes are marked by structural change no less than by continual development."
In other words, he recognised that theories of what it means to be a human being cannot be separated from the ideological position of those who promulgate these theories, that theories of “human nature” are always in the end ideological. This recognition proved to be extremely influential in the social theories which developed in the 1960s. During that time numerous social theorists and psychiatrists all questioned accepted definitions (and legitimations) of what constituted social and cultural normativity itself - what fundamentally constitutes the social categories of “sanity” and “madness”. They theorised that these categories were themselves shaped by the cultural struggle of competing groups as well as from the social conditions deriving from the social organisation of Capitalist production.
Horkheimer's essay on 'Traditional and Critical Theory' (1937) enshrined the ambitions of the Institute. In this essay, Horkheimer argued that "traditional theory," understood as heretofore existing social science theorising, has focussed exclusively on the accumulation of facts in specialised and isolated fields of study. This had tended to serve rather than challenge the existing social order. In contrast, he proposed a "critical theory" which would break traditional theory's separation of theory from practice, and values from research. Like Marx, he believed that theory and knowledge should be used to achieve greater social equity and justice fopr the masses. Critical Theory described the necessity of integrating philosophy and social science, and of developing a relationship of reciprocity between critical theory and political practice. In this sense, Horkheimer is seen by many as "the father" of Critical Theory.
His vision brought together a remarkably diverse group of thinkers, and created a very original new school of thought. The Institute founded its initia; works on the analysis of the writings and theories of Hegel, Marx, Freud, Max Weber, and Georg Lukács. The research methodologies they used included philosophy, social psychology, political economics, and literary and cultural criticism to uncover previously uncharted dimensions of the social world. Horkheimer and his colleagues did not simply advocate a revolutionary labour movement, or even political activism per se. Although the goal of their critical inquiries was the transformation of society, this was approached by way of the transformation of consciousness. Probably Horkheimer's greatest achievement was in confronting the dogma of orthodox Marxism and revealing both its inherent contradictions and its failures. He recognised that Marxism was not unique in these contradictions and that the application of the dialectic to Marxism itself suggested the need fo an ongoing process of revision and transformation if it was to remain relevant to the changes taking place in the 20th Century. It was this philosophy embodied in his work with Adorno The Dialectic of Enlightenment that so animated the New Left movement and the student uprising of the 1960s.
Unlike Adorno, he was not a prolific writer, although his essay Authority and the Family analysed the role of the family in capitalist production (as had Marx) andlaid the groundwork for much that was to come later on the relationship between the cultural forms that relate to and are influenced by the economic base of society. He shared with Adorno the distinction of co-authoring one of the most significant books to come out of the Institute - The Dialectic of Enlightenment. This book, together with Horkheimer's own The Eclipse of Reason(1947) became the foundation stones of the Critical Theory that was to have such a profound influence throughout the 1960 and the later Postmodern movement.
In The Dialectic of Enlightenment and subsequent work (e.g., Eclipse of Reason [1947] and Critique of Instrumental Reason[1967]), Horkheimer demonstrated how "instrumental reason"- the principle and methods by which means, such as factories or consumer goods, are calculatingly designed to efficiently meet certain ends, usually greater profit or control (what Giroux will later call Instrumental Rationality) has come to dominate everyday life through the mass consumption of commodities. Horkheimer and Adorno interrogated the relationship of man and nature (as also did Marcuse) - suggesting that such relations were based upon a model of domination which would ultimately lead to environmental degradation and collapse. In this they prefigured the Green movement by 30 years. In the same work they also devoted considerable attention to the reproduction of culture through commodification, coining the now famous term "culture industry" to explain the role of Marx's commodity fetishism to the reproduction of culture.
The significance of this work hads been extensive although its limitations (including the author's own inability to move beyond their own critique has been previously explained in the section on Adorno above. Nevertheless, Horkheimer's reputation as the Father of Critical Theory stands unchallenged.
He returned to America from 1954 and 1959 to lecture at the University of Chicago. He retired in 1955. He died in Nuremberg in 1973.
Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Jewish mother and had Italian, French and German as native languages. Illich was a student at the Piaristengymnasium in Vienna from 1936 to1941, but was expelled by the occupying Nazis in 1941 because his mother had Jewish ancestry (his father was a Roman Catholic). He learned Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grandfathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, and other languages. He went on to study histology and crystallography at the University of Florence. At this point he decided to enter and prepare for the priesthood. and went to study theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican (from 1942 to 1946) and medieval history in Salzburg In 1951 he completed his PhD at the University of Salzburg (an exploration of the nature of historical knowledge). He wrote a dissertation focusing on the historian Toynbee and would return to that subject in his later years. . One of the intellectual interests of this period was a developing understanding of the institutionalization of the church in the 13th century - and this helped to form and inform his later critique.
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In 1951, he was assigned as an assistant parish priest in New York Cityafter which he was appointed in 1956, at the age of 30, as the vice rector of the Catholic University of Ponce in Puerto Rico. It was in Puerto Rico that Illich met Everett Reimer and the two began to analyze their own functions as "educational" leaders. He spent only four years there, being forced out of the university in 1960 because of his opposition to the then Bishop of Ponce's forbidding of Catholics to vote for Governor Luis Munoz Marin (because of his advocacy of state-sponsored birth control). While still committed to the Church, Ivan Illich was deeply opposed to Pope John XXIII's 1960 call for north American missionaries to 'modernize' the Latin American Church. He wanted missionaries to question their activities, learn Spanish, to recognize and appreciate the limitations of their own (cultural) experiences, and 'develop assumptions that would allow them to assume their duties as self-proclaimed adult educators with humility and respect' In 1959, he traveled throughout South America on foot and by bus. Then, in 1961, he founded the Centro Intercultural de Documentación(CIDOC), (or Intercultural Documentation Center) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, ostensibly a research center offering language courses to missionaries from North America and volunteers of the Alliance for Progress program initiated by John F. Kennedy.
But he still wished to counteract the involvement of the Vatican in the "modern development" of the "Third World." He was appalled by both the liberal and conservative rhetoric that accompanied the emerging tide of global industrial development and viewed its the Church Missionaries as proponents of industrial hegemony and cultural imperialism - an ongoing neo-Colonialism - and, as such, an act of "war on subsistence." He tried to teach missionaries dispatched by the Church to identify themselves instead as guests of the host country. In this sense, he was a major figure in the imerging Liberation Theology movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His intent was clear:
"Upon the opening of our centre I stated two of the purposes of our undertaking. The first was to help diminish the damage threatened by the papal order. Through our educational programme for missionaries we intended to challenge them to face reality and themselves, and either refuse their assignments or - if they accepted - to be a little bit less unprepared. Secondly, we wanted to gather sufficient influence among the decision-making bodies of mission sponsoring agencies to dissuade them from implementing." (Celebration of Awareness 1973)
After ten years Illich was called to Rome for questioning about his oppositional work, due in part to a report from the CIA. He resigned his priesthood in 1969 to avoid the conflict between his work his superiors, and having previously resisted the Vatican's insistence that he close the CIDOC or resign from it. His theorising of the de-institutionalisation of society was by now becoming very clear and focused. He wrote a book chronicling the negative effects of schools - Deschooling Society (1971) and anothers:Celebration of Awareness (1973) andEnergy and Equity(1974), a critique of energy production and consumption. These were followed in 1976 with Medical Nemesis - a critical study of the medical profession and the medicalisation of culture. In Tools for Conviviality (1975), he extended his concerns about the medical profession to critically analyse the issue of professionalism in toto, providing a more general exploration of his concerns and suggesting some possible standards by which to judge 'development'. In this latter work, he echoed the concerns of Freire about the role of the expert in indigenous and rural communities. His solutions were also similar to Freire's (an emphasis on mutuality, human-scale technology etc.). His thinking (in 1971) was far-reaching, anticipating or present dilemmas with claritiy and precision. His words resonate down the years, anticipating the current environmental crisis by a good 40 years:
"I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which woill enable us to be spontaneous, independent yet rel;ated to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume - a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletiona and pollution of the environment. The future depends more on our choice of institutions which support a life of action rather than in developing new ideologies and technologies." (Deschooling Society 1971)
His opening statement was extraordinarily clear and its intent unmistakable:
"Many students, especially those who are poor, know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is therefore "schooled" to confuse teaching from learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imaginationnis "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for natiuonal security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocatinjg more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question." (Deschooling Society)
Yet his critical theories extended beyond a mere analysis of the present education system. He saw attempts to reform State education as pointless:
"Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries."
Like Freire, he also proposed informal learning networks as a means of liberation and emancipation. As his understanding developed, he began to realise that the institutions themselves were the problem, and his analysis then extended to other institutionalised systems - particularly Medicine (Medical Nemesis) and Institutions in general (Disabling Professions). He realised that the Institutionalisation of learning led inexorably to the institutionalisation of everyday life - to what Fromm would call Alienation - the excision of conviviality from everyday life.For Illich, the institutionalisation of education creates the conditions for the institutionalisation of society, and conversely that the de-institutionalisation of everyday life requires the deinstitutionalisation of education.
Deschooling Society is much more than just a critique. It proposes alternatives, and its remarkable prescience even anticipates the development of the technologies that will render them possible:
"The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity."
That he did not really live long enough to witness the extraordinary explosion of networking capabilities unblocked by the Internet that now exist is ironic, though no doubt he was astute enough to realise this potential.
By the mid 1970s, he (and the Centre) had achieved widespread popularity, largely through the publication of Deschooling Society (1971) and his other books. He was particularly popular in France where André Gorz had published his Tools for Conviviality in Les Tempd Modernes, along with several other of his writings. He travelled widely as his popularity grew, and also befriended Erich Fromm , who wrote the "Introduction" to Celebration of Awareness (1973). (Fromm also lived in Cuernavaca for a while). He reamained popular in France throughout the 1970s. However, his influence declined after the 1981 election of François Mitterrand as he was considered too pessimistic at a time when the French Left took control of the government.
But he was nothing if not reflexive and internally consistent. In 1976, concerned by the success (and subsequent creeping institutionalisation) of the CIDOC he shut the Centre down with consent of its other members. In 1977 he published Disabling Professions with several co-authors - extending the theories of Medical nemesis to the system of professionalism as a whole.
In the 1980s and beyond, Ivan Illich continued to travel extensively, mainly splitting his time between the United States, Mexico, and Germany. He held an appointment as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Science, Technology and Society at Penn State. He also taught at the University of Bremen. But his popularity waned. The Right accused him (incorrectly) of covert Marxist leanings, while the Left found his criticisms of the Welfare State and State Education to be elitist. After his death, the Guardian Weekly made the point well:
"Best known for his polemical writings against western institutions from the 1970s, which were easily caricatured by the right and were, equally, disdained by the left for their attacks on the welfare state, in the last 20 years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure (like Noam Chomsky today in mainstream America).
But he was steadfast in his critical reasoning, and was not about to surrender to those whom he saw as the problem. As his friend Peter Berger noted:
"It is easy to see why Illich’s ideas resonated well in the cultural climate of the time. But he disappointed, one by one, most of the groups who first believed him to be one of them. Catholics were irritated when he criticized missionaries in Latin America as cultural imperialists. The counterculture discovered that he found repugnant many if not most of their proclivities, from drugs to promiscuous sex. He upset the left when, after a visit to Cuba, he described the Castro regime as an odious tyranny. And feminists were deeply offended when he argued, some years after “Shadow-Work,” that women had been better off in traditional societies in which they devoted themselves to the life of the family. Illich was a genie who could not be kept in any bottle. Like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, he was a “spirit who ever negates.”(Remembering Ivan Illich
During his later years, he suffered from a cancerous growth on his face that, in accordance with his critique of professionalized medicine, was treated with traditional methods. He regularly smoked opium to deal with the pain caused by this tumor. At an early stage, he consulted a doctor about having the tumor removed, but was told that there was too great a chance of losing his ability to speak, and so he lived with the tumor as best he could. He called it "my mortality". (Wikipedia). He died suddenly in Bremen in December 2002.
Illich has left an indelible stamp upon our understanding of Institutionalisation, Alienation and the need for community praxis. As Peter Berger saw it:
"There are, I think, two threads that run through Illich’s opus from the beginning. There is a radical critique of all aspects of modernity, grounded in a profoundly conservative view of the human condition. And there is a deep respect for what Illich called the “vernacular”-the wisdom of ordinary people and their ways of coping with life".
These dual concerns led him to steadfastly unpack and reveal the contradictions in some of the most popular beliefs, ideologies and mythologies of our times. After his initial surge of post-1968 popularity waned, and the conservative ideoalogues of both Left and Right turned their backs on him, he continued to write prolifically and couurageously - trying to bring home the message that we are in deep planetary trouble and that only we - not our institutions - can save us. As his friend Fromm wrote in the "Introduction" to Celebration of Awareness:
"(He)..is a man of rare courage, great aliveness, extraordinary erudition and brilliance, and fertile imaginativeness, whose whole thinking is based on his concern for man's unfolding - physically, spiritually and intellectually. The importance of his thoughts... lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions."
As the Guardian Weekly noted in his Obituary,
"This position (of faded popularity after 1980) obscures the true importance of his contribution. His critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue." (Guardian Weekly Obituary)
I only met him once, when he came to deliver a seminar to the Faculty at the School of Architecture at Berkeley in (I think) 1972. My colleagues and I numbered about fifteen, and were seated around a large conference table while Illich stood at the blackboard, talking and drawing diagrams to illustrate his words. We all listened respectfully, but after about fifteen minutes I began to realise that I didn't understand the highly abstract monologue that he was delivering. So I raised my hand and said:
"Dr Illich", I said, "I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I have the feeling that you are not really here! Where are you?"
An eternity of silence and disapproval filled the room as my colleagues glared at me. Ivan Illich looked at me quizzically, broke into a smile and responded:
"You're quite right! I'm not here at all! I'm preparing a lecture to present at the University of San Francisco tomorrow." He put down the chalk, sat at the table and asked, "What shall we discuss?".
The seminar turned out the be an extraordinary exchange of ideas.
For a truly excellent synopsis of Illich's life and work together with access to the eTexts of Deschooling Society, Energy and Equity, Tools for Conviviality and other writings click here.
Like Fanon, Fromm and Reich Ronnie Laing was a psychiatrist. He was born, raised and educated in Glasgow and during his most renowned professional carreer was living and practicing in London in the 1960s. His theories of Schizophrenia dramatically challenged conventional models at that time. He wrote extensively on mental illness and particularly the experience of psychosis. He is noted for his existential views on the causes and treatment of mental illness, which went against the psychiatric orthodoxy of the time. By taking the expressions or communications of the individual patient or client as representing valid descriptions of lived experience or reality rather than as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder, Laing was challenging the normative diagnostic models of "mental illness". He is often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement although, like many of his contemporaries also critical of psychiatry, he himself rejected this label. He made a significant contribution to the ethics of psychology. He believed that the psychotic experience was singularly misunderstood in the Western World and that in other cultures it equated with highly prized and respected visionary experiences from which the "psychotic" could return with deep insights into the nature of (human) reality.
Laing was born and schooled in Glasgow before studying medicine at the University of Glasgow. Following this he spent two years working as a psychiatrist in the British Army and leaving in 1953 to work at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow. In 1956 he moved to the Tavistock Institute in London where most of his seminal theories were developed. He left there in 1964.
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Beyond or in extension of psychiatry, Laing's fields of interest were in social phenomenology and existentialism. He was very much interested in the realm of experience - of the subject. The publication of The Divided Self (1960) raised the issue of the social and culturwaql context of schizophrenia, suggesting that the schzophrenic's supposedly incompreensible utterings were understandable within the context of his or fhe social-life experience. In The Divided Self Laing explains how we all exist in the world as human beings, circumscribed by others who carry a model of us in their heads, just as we carry models of them in our heads. Our feelings and motivations derive very much from this condition of 'being in the world' in the sense of existing for others, who exist for us. In his studies of the family circumstances of schizophrenics, Laing demonstrated how amnbiguities and misunderstandings of attributed identity and denial of experience can be significantly related to psychotic episodes. Laing went beyond this, however, to suggest that the normative diagnostic and treatment patterns of schizophrenic patients, by extending the denial of the schizophrenic experience, actually contributed to it. This theory brought him into conflict with both the psychiatric profession (who continue to the present to be in the thrall of the pharmeceutical companies making fortunes from dispencing management-medications) and the families of schizophrenics who felt "blamed" by Laing for the psychosis of their family members. Much of this criticism was both ill-founded and unjust. Laing himself acknowledged that the families of schizophrenics were themselves unaware of the dynamics of their perceptions and expectations associated with their psychotic family members. Nevertheless, laing became to a large extent the bete noire of the psychiatric profession in the 1960s.
He began is theoretical journey in 1961 with the publication of Self and Others - in which he begins to interrogate the identity formation of individuals in social and particularly family relationships. In 1964, with Aaron Esterson he then went on to write Sanity Madness and the Family, in which they recorded a series of diadic interviews with several families of schizoprenic patients. Their interviews revealed the small dishonesties that exist in family settings in the interests of maintaining family "peace" and unity. These dishonesties lie at the root of the denials of experience that lead to psychotic episodes. But Laing's theories were extending beyond the limits of the family to suggest culture-wide bases for psychosis. In this he echoed the work and writings of Gregory Bateson who, in 1956 ghad proposed the double-bind theory of Schizophreania. Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Paul Watzlawick, Donald Jackson, and Jay Haley (1956, Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Jay Haley & Weakland, J., "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia", Behavioral Science, vol.1) articulated a related theory of schizophrenia as stemming from double bind situations where a person receives different or contradictory messages.) Madness was therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and trans-formative experience.(Wikipedia)
He was clearly extending his analysis of psychosis into sthe socio-political-cultural spheres, much like Fanon and Fromm). In 1964 he also participated with his colleague at the Tavistock, David Cooper in an analysis of the work of Sartre and in an attempt (like Gorz) to reconcile the works of Sartre with those of Marx. The result, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy(1964) was opaque and somewhat impenetrable.
In 1966 he extended his work with Esterson to undertake a Tavistock study of families in detail. The result, Interpersonal Perception (1966) was a remarkable and relatively unacknowledged revelation of family dynamics based upon a series of overlayed interviews. Laing and Esterson interviewed families in differing constellations. They interviewed individuals individually and in diads and then they interviewed the families as a whole. What appeared was a series of differing identities for each family member dependent upon the social (family) setting of the interview. People said dramatically different things about themselves and each other depending upon whether they were alone, with the person they were discussing or grouped with the whole family. What became apparent was a series of spiralling miscommunications or "knots". These would be later extended and dramatised in his 1970 book of that name.
Laing's socio-political theories begin to come clear in a 1967 polemic The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise in which he for the first time writes for a general audience:
"What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical 'mechanisms.' There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically 'normal' forms of alienation. The 'normally' alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the 'formal' majority as bad or mad." (The Politics of Experience, 1967)
And again:
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves, and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."
It was a book that was to launch Laing into the forefront of the 1960s Counterculture movement. It burst onto the public sphere at just that time when the quertioning of normative beliefs and values was at its height. A year later would see the assassination of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, the Chicago Democratic Conventiuon, the Seige of the Pentagon and the escalation of the Vietnam War (and the Draft). The book burst like a bombshell on the youth culture of the mid-1960s and led to a much wider interest in Laing's other theoretical and earlier writings. He became a cult figure - a situation he found distasteful. In 1970 he produced Knots- a simple but powerful analysis of the mysteries and ambiguities of diadic experience:
"They are playing a game.
They are playing at not playing a game.
If I show them I see they are,
I shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game of not seeing that I see the game."
It was a beautiful and simple testament to the intricasies of human communication. Although he published several more books, this was to be the last of his major influential writings, and he turned increasingly towards "body work". When I met him in 1967, he espoused a deep interest in the work of Wilhelm Reich , and later, in the early 1970s, he recommended that I study yoga with his own yoga teacher Arthur Balaskas. His involvement with Balaskas kindled in him a deep interest in the birthing experience and together with several colleages he became interested in Rebirthing.
I had met him in 1966 when I was (traumatically) researching British prisons, and later in 1968 when I was involved in studying mental hospitals. His writings left an indelible impression on my spirit. Literally, he helped me to find my voice. We met again in the early 1970s as his interest in Bodywork and Rebirthing was increasing.
He died in France at the age of 61 of a heart attack while playing tennis with his friend Robert Firestone.
Henri Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau, Landes, France. He studied philosophy at the University of Paris at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1920. By 1924 he was working with Paul Nizan, Norbert Guterman and others in the Philosophies group seeking a "philosophical revolution" This brought them into contact with the Surrealists and other groups, before they moved towards the French Communist Party (PCF). Lefebvre joined the PCF in 1928 and later published attacks on its opponents.
From 1930 - 1940 Lefebvre was a professor of philosophy; in 1940 he joined the French resistance. From 1944 - 1949 he was the director of Radiodiffusion Française, a French radio broadcaster in Toulouse.
His criticism of everyday life - (The Critique of Everyday Life (1947) exerted a profound influence on French literati and philosophers. It was among the major motives behind the founding of COBRA and, eventually, of the Situationist International. In 1958 Lefebvre was expelled from the PCF and grew close to the Situationists. During the following years he was involved in the editorial group of Arguments, aNew Left magazine whose
"chief merit lay in having enabled the French public to become familiar with the experiments in revisionism carried out in Central Europe in the twenties and thirties"
In 1961 he became professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, before joining the faculty at the new university at Nanterre in 1965. He wrote in French, English, and German.
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Lefebvre has dedicated a great deal of his philosophical writings to understanding the importance of (the production of) space in what he called the reproduction of social relations of production (idea which is the central argument in the book The Survival of Capitalism, written as a sort of prelude to The Production of Space). These two works have deeply influenced current urban theory, mainly within human geography. Lefebvre is widely recognized as a Marxist thinker who was responsible for widening considerably the scope of Marxist theory, embracing everyday life and the contemporary meanings and implications of the ever expanding reach of the urban in the western world throughout the 20th century. The generalization of industry, and its relation to cities (which is treated in La pensée marxiste et la ville), The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution were all themes of Lefebvre's writings in the late 1960s, which was concerned, amongst other aspects, with the deep transformation of "the city" into "the urban" which culminated in its omni-presence (the "complete urbanization of society").
In his book The Urban Question, Manuel Castells heavily criticizes Lefebvre's theoretical arguments contained in the books published in the 1960s about the contemporary city from a Marxist standpoint. Castells' criticisms of Lefebvre's subjective approach to Marxism echoed the structuralist school of Louis Althusser , of which Lefebvre was an early critic. Many responses to Castells are provided in The Survival of Capitalism. In it, he aske the fundamental question that vexed Marxist theorists and which became the central problematic of the Frankfurt theorists and which the Structuuralists like Althusser were themselves unable to resolve:
“Countless revolutionaries have vainly believed, and still believe, that a spark would be enough to engulf the world. It is not impossible, of course, that a local conflict can turn into a general one - in fact the fear of this is general enough. But in order to change something, is it not first of all necessary to change everything, ie. to change the whole first? Of course it is. But how can everything be changed without a start being made somewhere, without gradually changing each thing, each “being”, each “man”
The longer and denser The Production of Space proposes a new and startling resolution to the dilemma, and was much influenced by the Situationists with whom Lefebvre had a close relationship between 1957-62. What neither Althusser not Gramsci himself had recognised, however, was a particular function of the State which Engels himself had earlier indicated, and which plays an equally important part in the process of hegemony - the creation of territories, as Engels put it, or as Lefebvre would say, "the creation of space":
“... what has happened is that capitalism has found itself able to attenuate (if not resolve) its internal contradictions for a century, and consequently, in the hundred years since the writing of Capital, it has succeeded in achieving ”growth”. We cannot calculate at what price, but we do know the means: by occupying space, by creating a space.” (emphasis added)
Paradoxically, this other most significant reason for the non-collapse of capitalism had been inexplicably overlooked by the Frankfurt theorists and other analysts like Althusser and Gramsci. What they overlooked was precisely the ability of the capitalist economies to continuingly resolve their internal economic dilemmas and contradictions through a seemingly endless expansion and growth created by the spatial re-territorialisation of society. Why theorists should have overlooked the power of spatiality is not clear although Lefebvre has advanced the convincing theory that the oversight was the result of a preoccupation of marxist theoreticians with time, to the exclusion of space as a meaningful theoretical category. Lefebvre held that because Marx had developed his theory of surplus value on the basis of the time sold by the worker to the employer at a particular hourly rate (this rate/time component not being remunerative enough to allow the worker to buy the goods s/he had produced for the same amount as that which it had cost to produce) - time had become the crucial factor in all of the marxist theories regarding the collapse of the capitalist economy. What this construct lacked was any awareness that by creating and recreating increasingly differentiated and efficient spatial configurations, capitalism was able to continually expand its sphere of influence and defer the clash of internal contradictions which lay at the root of its ideology.
The realisation that the creation of space played and equally if not greater part in the process of social reproduction has been of major significance in a wide range of fields beyond philosophy - Geography, Urban Studies, Planning, Architecture etc. and has influenced the work not only of Castells, but also the work of authors such as David Harvey and Edward Sojaat UCLA. The concept took its bearings from some of the key concepts used by the Situationists.
In 1962 there was an acrimonious falling out between Lefebvre and the Situationists. and much of his subsequent work can be seen in part as a response to the disagreement with them. He followed the Survival of Capitalism with a fuller analysis of the role of space-creation in the reproduction of the social relations of production . In The Production of Space, Lefebvre asks, "What exactly is the mode of social relationships?" His conclusion -
"The study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself. Failing this, these relations would remain in the realm of 'pure abstraction,' that is to say in the realm of representations and hence of ideology: the realm of verbalism, verbiage and empty words."
From this Lefebvre develops a rich theory of the development of different systems of spatiality in different historical periods. His history of the different "modes of production of space" completes Marx's analysis of modes of production in urban, attitudinal and environmental terms. This is not just a theoretical question. A communist revolution must not only change the relationship of the proletariat to the means of production, but also create a new spatialization.
His theory provides a bridge from Marxist thought to environmental politics. Lefebvre advocated alternative and revolutionary restructurations of institutionalized discourses of space and new modes of spatial praxis ("differential space"), such as that by squatters or Third World slum dwellers, who fashion a spatial presence and practice outside the prevailing norms of enforced capitalist spatialization ("abstract space"). As a dialectician, Lefebvre understood that space and time were two categories that couldn't be separated. Before his death, he was working on a "rhythmanalysis" to link different rhythms (cyclical, linear, etc.) with different modes of spatiality. (See: www.newsletters.org)
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre contends that there are different levels of space, from very abstract, crude, natural space ('absolute space') to more complex spatialities whose significance is socially produced ('social space'). Lefebvre's argument in The Production of Space is that space is a social product, or a complex social construction (based on values, and the social production of meanings) which affects spatial practices and perceptions. As a Marxist philosopher (but highly critical of the economicist structuralism that dominated the academic discourse in his period), Lefebvre argues that this social production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself. Therefore, the notion of Hegemony as proposed by Gramsci is used as a reference to show how the social production of space is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance.
"Social space is a social product - the space produced in a certain manner serves as a tool of thought and action. It is not only a means of production but also a means of control, and hence of domination/power.
Lefebvre argued that every society - and therefore every mode of production - produces a certain space, its own space. The city of the ancient world cannot be understood as a simple agglomeration of people and things in space - it had its own spatial practice, making its own space (which was suitable for itself - Lefebvre argues that the intellectual climate of the city in the ancient world was very much related to the social production of its spatiality). Then if every society produces its own space, any "social existence" aspiring to be or declaring itself to be real, but not producing its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar abstraction incapable of escaping the ideological or even cultural spheres. Based on this argument, Lefebvre criticized Soviet urban planners, on the basis that they failed to produce a socialist space, having just reproduced the modernist model of urban design (interventions on physical space, which were insufficient to grasp social space) and applied it onto that context:
"Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa."
Henri Lefebvre was an original andd important critical threorist. He has rightly been called on of France's greatest intellectuals in the 20th Century, and has single-handedly transformed marxist theorising about social reproduction. He died at the age of 90 in 1991. His obituary in Radical Philosophy magazine read:
"the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28-29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism. (Wikipedia)
To download a more complete and detailed analysis of Lefebvre's theories in a PDF Hegemony and Space click here
To download three illustrated PDFs on The Social Conastruction of Spaceclick here
Although his work predates the Critical Theorists, Lukács is included here because his own work was extremely influential in directing the later members of the Frankfurt School towards their crucial revisionist perspective of Marxism. He was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He contributed the ideas ofreification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Wikipedia). He was born in Budapest to a wealthy Jewish banking family. He studied at Universities in Berlin and Budapest and received his PhD in 1906. He spent a great deal of time in Berlin where he befriended a number of critical philosophers including Ernst Bloch,Georg Simmel and Max Weber. He returned to Budapest in 1915 and began a philosophical debating circle that eventually included such luminaries as Karl Mannheim.
Following the First World War and the October Revolution in Russia, he joined the Communist Party of Hungary and became very active before being forced to flee to Vienna where he barely avoided arrest through the intercession of writer friends. His major work History and Class Consciousness was published in 1925 and was soundly attacked by the Communist bureaucracy for its leftist ideology. He criticised centralised Communism and called for a true dictatorship of the proletariat. He lived in Berlin until the rise of Hitler forced him to move to Moscow in 1933. He remained there until the end of the war, returning to Budapest to become an important figure once again in the Hungarian Communist Party. During the Hubngarian Revolution of 1956 he was critical of the Soviet intervention and with the failure of the Revolution was deported to Romania. He survived this exile to return to Hungary in 1957 and thereafter took a much lower profile in politics.
His book of essays, History and Class Consciousness is an investigation into Marxist Orthodoxy. In the first chapter he lays out his position quite clearly:
"Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders."
In this he was critical of the dogma of Stalinist/Leninist orthodoxy and much more of a mind with such Marxists as Leon Trotsky andRosa Luxemburg (to whom he devoted a chapter in his book). It was this willingness to critique received Marxist ideology that attracted him later to the Frankfurt theorists. He raised issues of ideology, alienation,reification, false consciousness, the place of culture. All of these were grist to the mill for the Frankfurt theorists. He died in Hungary in 1971.
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Critics of orthodox marxism have pointed to this distinction between the economic base and the determined superstructure as the core cause of the failure of Soviet communism and the failure of marxism as a formative ideology for social change. Beginning with the anarcho-synicalists like Makhno, through powerful dissidents such as Luxemburg down to the New Left of the 1960s and later postmodernists, these critics have all maintained that the revolution which will emancipate the masses cannot wait until all of the conditions for its existence are in place.
In the face of the Gulag revelations, which emerged from the 1930s onwards, Western marxists searched for an adequate means to explain both this and the ap¬parent refusal of capitalism to collapse. The doctrinaire version of marxism to which the party was attached promised the inevitability of the capitalist collapse. Marxist economics were held to be a natural law, governed by the same kind of forces as determined other natural phenomena (such as gravity). This deterministic version of Marx's historical materialism was first seriously questioned by Lukács and Karl Korsch and has subsequently been taken up by numerous other authors.
Lucáks, particularly, argued against the mistaken orthodox view of marxism which saw the inexorability of change stemming from a defined economic "base", suggesting that this theory contradicted Marx's own phi¬losophy and amounted to what Marx had called a "contemplative materialism" - one which ignored the all-important factor of human subjectivity and action. By ignor¬ing the element of human subjectivity and agency, Lukacs suggested that "orthodox" marxists had also abandoned the very thing which could provide the basis for revolutionary action. This position was supported explicitly by Engels himself in his later writings. He maintained that:
"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I ever asserted....The eco¬nomic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the super¬structure....the class struggle and its results- also exercise their in¬fluence on the course of historical struggles and in many cases pre¬ponderate in determining their form."
Yet the record is not so completely unambiguous. Marx himself seems to have taken a variety of positions and to have "softened" his insistence upon the primacy of the economic sphere in his later years. He suggested that the law, as a superstructural element was falsely characterised as being separate from and subordinated to capitalist production, whereas we have seen how they are mutually implicated. Most often Marx portrayed the determining element of history as the sum total of the relations of production - which necessarily included the workers themselves, rather than only the machines, plant and raw materials. He noted, for instance, that this totality:
"...constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness."
Occasionally, he isolated the actual instruments of production, but these instances are relatively few and minor, and as McLellan notes:
"He also makes it clear that the instruments of production can never be isolated from their social context....."It is not 'history' which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their own ends."
This seems to be consistent with one of Marx's most incisive ideas, reiterated innumerable times, that:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."
In other words, Marx seems to have seen the relationship between the economic and cultural realms as more reciprocal than later more conservative and Orthodox interpretations would seem to indicate. This was the perspective on marxism to which critics of orthodoxy, such as Luxemburg, Lucáks and Korsch subscribed. Revolution, for all of these critics, became an issue of process, rather than being viewed as an end product, and that process seems to involve an ongoing dialectic within the superstructural elements and the between them and the economic 'base' upon which they are supposed to be dependent. What this meant in simple terms was that it was now realised that elements of culture could and did affect the economic framework itself, and that change to the economic structure can and does take place in more than superficial ways as a result of changes taking place within the social and cultural spheres.
Although he was later to relent somewhat in this analysis (due to criticism from the Party) Lucáks’ work did open up a whole new way of looking at the practice of marxist theory. His work had a substantial influence after its publication in 1923, and was most systematically taken up by researchers at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the mid to late 1920's. Once liberated from its dependency upon economic change, the cultural component of everyday life could be investigated within its own frame of reference as an instrument of social transformation. As a major element in cultural production this meant that education could now also be investigated as playing an important part in the transformation of society. It is for this reason that we need to look more closely at the social implications of these later theories in regard to the whole issue of cultural production and reproduction and most specifically at the implications this might have for the educational enterprise.
Lyotard was born in Vincennes and was the son of a salesman. In his youth he aspired to the Dominican Order, or to be a painter or a novelist but eventually studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne where he became friends with Gilles Deleuze. His early studies involved the philosophiy of indifference and resulted in his M.A. dissertation Indifference as an Ethical Notion. His life until the Second World War was 'a poetic, introspective and solitary way of thinking and living.' During the war, in 1944, he acted as a first-aid volunteer in the fight for the liberation of Paris and subsequently adopted a commitment to the investigation of social interactions. In 1948 he married and acquired a teaching credential. He and his wife had two children. in 1950 he took up a position teaching philoosophy at a boys' school in French-occupied Algeria. From 1952 to 1959 he taught the sons of the occupying French military. During that time he readMarx and became convinced that the situation in Algeria was ripe for a socialist revolution. In 1954 when the war of independence broke out he became a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie,(Socialism or Barbarism) a political organisation formed to interrogate the emerging forms of domination in the Soviet Union. The group became increasinjgly popular after the suppression of the East German revolt of 1953 and the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1957. At this time he was completely committed to left wing revolutionary politics, writing for and occasionally editing Socialisme ou Barbarie. The latter became increasingly anti-Marxist. He resigned from the group in 1964. He was still committed to his socialist beliefs, however but after he gained a position at the University of Paris at Nanterre in 1966, Lyotard's philosophies moved inexorably to challenge all unitary and totalising interpretations of history - including the Enlightenment and Marxism. His leanings (much like Chomsky ) were increasingly towards worker collectives. Nanterre was a principal site of the student uprisings in May 1968, and Lyotard was heavily involved in supporting the student movement which sought to wrest the control of education from the State and to lodge it in the hands of the students. The fact that the Communist Party of France betrayed the students at the very moment of thei imminent success by reaching an accord with de Gaulle only served to reinforce Lyotard's ideology.
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During the mid-1960s Lyotard attended the famous seminars by the radical psychiatrist Jacques Lacan- a revisionist Freudian who has been widely cited in the literature on Postmodern theorising. Increasingly Lyotard began to challenge normative theories of knowledge and in the 1970s he came to international prominence with the publication of his famous book The Postmoderen Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). Here he devfeloped his critique of the Enlightenment in its fullest form,noting specifically that science has been the occasion and cause for untold crimes against humanity. He suggests that science is merely one "language" game among many - each with its own set of internally consistent values and rules, but that all of these systems of knowledge are incommensurate. He saves his severest criticism for the demolition of what he calls the Grand Narratives- those ideologicaly based theories that purport to totalise and uniformalise our perceptions of reality - for instance the deeply accepted societal myths of Universal Emancipation, absolute truth and the speculative unity of all knowledge. These mythologies, according to Lyotard are used to legitimate and support others (Progress, Objectivity etc.) which frame and order how we conceive of knowledge itself and within this, how we perceive ourselves as rational subjects, how we define the quality of humanness etc. From this perspective, each epistemological discipline usually asserts its legitimacy by reference to something outside of itself, ultimately to one of these Grand Narratives. Epistemological reality is by this means subject to a continual and necessary process of external legitimation. Marxism, for Lyotard, increasingly fell into this category. Science, as the quintessential tool of Enlightenment rationality comes in for special attention:
"With modern science, two new features appear in the problematic of legitimation. To begin with it leaves behind the metaphysical search for a first proof or transcendental authority as a response to the question, "How do you prove the proof?" or more generally, "Who decides the conditions of truth?" It is recognised that the conditions of truth, in other words the rules of the game of science, are immanent in that game, that they can only be established within the bonds of a debate that is already scientific in nature, and that there is no other proof that the rules are good than the consensus extended to them by the experts."
This being the case, the ability of science to carry out its legitimation function is severely compromised:
"It is therefore impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal species... (nevertheless) The scientist questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they are never subject to argumentation or proof. He classifies them as belonging to a different mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology. Narratives are fables, myths, legends, fit only for women and children... This unequal relationship is an intrinsic effect of the rules specific to each game. We all know its symptoms. It is the entire history of cultural imperialism from the dawn of Western civilisation. It is important to recognise this special tenor, which sets it apart from all other forms of imperialism; it is governed by the demand for legitimation."
Postmodernism for Lyotard, is therefore a moment of fracture with the past, with Enlightenment rationality, which he sees as being the very source of imperialism. In his presentation of Postmodernism, Lyotard suggested that Postmodernism originated in the post-war revelations of the atrocities of the Nazi death camps and the horrors of the Stalinist gulags. The dilemma these posed could not be explained as a mere aberration in the onward march of human progress and freedom, but rather as the embodiment of rationalism in extremis, using Universal Emancipation as its banner. The failure of the Marxist analysis to either predict the failure of Communism to ignite a worldwide revolution, coupled with the accord reached between de Gaulle and the french Government - together with Marxism's own reliance upon the Grand Narrative of human emancipation led Lyotard to ultimately to reject marxism . He was also critical of the marxist revisionism of the Frankfurt theorists, for, as he noted:
"...the social function of the principle of division, or class struggle, was blurred to the point of losing all its radicality; we cannot conceal the fact that the critical model in the end lost its theoretical standing and was reduced to the status of "utopia" or "hope" - a token protest raised in the name of man or reason or creativity, or again of some social category - such as the Third World or the students - on which is conferred in extremis the henceforth improbable function of critical subject"
But Lyotard's version of Postmodernism has itself been accused of establishing yet another Grand Narrative to replace those it has criticised and has done so, furthermore, by abandoning any notion of a moral imperative associated with his "language games" that might guide us in our social relations and in our specific relatio9ns with power. His analysis takes the form af a hermeneutic rationality which, as Giroux has noted:
"Though hermeneutic rationality has disposed of the illusion of objectivism, it has failed to develop an analysis that unravels how the relationship among power, norms, and meaning function within a specific socio-historical context to promote forms of self-misunderstanding as well as to support and sustain modes of structural domination. The hermeneutic mode of rationality does not ask the central question: How is it that a social system steeped in domination can legitimizse itself through a set of meanings and practice that prevent the development of an open, self-critical community of inquiring citizens?"
Critical philosopher Seyla Benhabib also provides an informative critique of Lyotard's version of postmodern-hermeneutic rationality, and at the same time sheds light upon the importance of a dialectical approach or reflexivity in all social theorising. She notes that the delegitimation of meta-narratives, the abandonment of the principles of universal truth or justice, and the reduction of social discourse to a series of "language games" - "the end of humanism" - presents us with two alternative views of history and social process. In the first (postmodern) case, society is viewed as a functional whole in which "performativity" becomes the guiding principle of knowledge. Knowledge in this sense is no longer regarded as a unified field behind which there stands a given reality which it is the task of science to discover and represent, but as a fragmented and dichotomous series of contingencies which acquire their legitimacy from the extent to which they satisfy the immediate needs of enquiry - the extent to which they "perform" within the narrow requirements of efficiency, productivity, and so on. This model basically depoliticises knowledge by disassociating it from the Enlightenment meta-narratives which have previously given it life.
In her critique of Lyotard, Benhabib goes on to note that the Enlightenment critique of the classical produced a fragmentation of the world into a tripartite epistemology - that of the observer (the subject), that of the observed (the object) and that of the signs by which we represent the observed. She aligns the critique of the episteme of subjectivity to Marx, who established history as a human artifact and not as an inexorable tendency of which humanity was merely the object. The world of the observed object on the other hand she assigns to Neitzsche, and to the tendency (most eloquently delineated by Sartre) between the object in-itself and for-itself - in other words, the distinction drawn between the object "as it really is" as opposed to the object "as apprehended". This distinction presumes a particular Cartesian form of subject, one in which a split between perception, and cognition, between the senses and the intellect, becomes fundamental. It is precisely this split in modern man (sic!) which Benhabib traces through Horkheimer and Adorno and which, she suggests, lies at the root of the need to dominate the world in order to apprehend it, since it is the conceptual structures which we overlay on the in-itself which in Western tradition imposes a homogeneity upon the world.
The third traditional critique of the classical, according to Benhabib, concerns the world of representation, of the signs by which we communicate our understandings of the world, and which become the filter through which we ultimately perceive it. This episteme she attributes to Ferdinand de Saussure and Wittgenstein. She notes that during the course of the twentieth century there has been a gradual movement in philosophy from the subject through the object to the sign and that it is here that Lyotard's theories properly sit. One of the implications of this epistemology of representation suggests (after de Saussure) that meaning is a collective phenomenon - that there are no private meanings. Coupled with Freire' s sense that in naming the world we make the world, this corresponds to Berger and Luckmann' s admonition that:
"Man's self-production is always and of necessity, a social enterprise. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations. None of these formations may be understood as products of man's biological constitution, which... only provides the outer limits for human productive activity. Just as it is impossible for man to develop as man in isolation, so it is impossible for man in isolation to produce a human environment."
Representation is also an issue for the French Structuralistswho suggest that meaning may be derived with no reference to a living subjectivity, but result from a system of structures and oppositions embedded in language etc. Lyotard suggests a third possibility - that of the fundamental irreconcilability of all "language games" - an "agnostics of language", as he calls it, in which different social realities are played out on the basis of local rather than global legitimacy. In other words, to a "possibility of justice beyond consensus". It is in this sense in which the paradox of Lyotard's postmodernist hermeneutic rationality begins to emerge, where we begin to question the basis of a definition of justice which potentially leaves behind any notion of injustice, any reference to social inequality or power. Can justice, for instance, be a (merely) local affair, or is its meaning only to be found as an absolute, no matter how inadequately or inarticulately framed? While Lyotard's high-minded rhetoric about oppression and cultural imperialism sounds plausible, he fails, in promoting it, to state from what moral position precisely he himself views the issue:
"The rhetorics of language (he) espouses does not distinguish between raising a validity claim and forcing someone to believe in something, between co-ordination of action among participants on the basis of conviction generated through agreement and the manipulative influencing of the behaviour of others".
In other words, Lyotard's own rejection of the meta-narrative of Universal Emancipation (for instance) cannot be itself legitimated without reference to something more than local imperatives, and in the absence of such more general legitimation, Lyotard himself is reduced to the level of personal conjecture which leaves him and us begging the question. He fails to distinguish between the investment of authority and the effective exercise of authority, the former being a matter of validity, the latter a matter of power. As Benhabib notes, one may be invested with authority but unable to exercise it, while on the other hand, others may be effective in exercising authority but may not be invested with the right to exercise it. Such, for instance is the case in a revolutionary setting, where old orders of invested authority and power are confronted by new orders which may be more effective in its exercise. This lapse leaves Lyotard to suggest that "only the one who effectively exercises authority is also invested with the title to it...." which boils down to the fact that, might and right become indistinguishable. While Lyotard presents the concept of the "language game", he significantly does not tell us what the rules of these games are, or if they are merely contingent or deadly serious. Referring obliquely to the experience of the games, he suggests that :
"to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech-acts fall within the general domain of agnostics. This does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win." (emphasis added)
The game, for Lyotard, operates without recognition of the disparities of power and suffering that characterise the everyday world. Philosophy is reduced in his analysis to a peripheral, an inconsequential play which is disconnected from the arena of social struggle. Yet it is paradoxically so devised on the basis, on the promise indeed, of its ability to release us from cultural imperialism and terror. Social criticism is, under these circumstances, reduced to a context-dependent activity, without any centralising theme. The oppression of women, for instance, while without doubt operating at a global level is denied any comparable unifying critique or meta-narrative in Lyotard's scheme, which might otherwise explain its universality. As Lyotard's feminist critics Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson put it in their book: Feminism/Postmodernism:Thinking Gender, his polemic leaves no place for challenging pervasive axes of stratification, of forms of dominance and subordination along lines like gender, race and class.
Yet it is precisely in order to absolve us from the terror of broad-based oppression that Lyotard delegitimises the meta-narratives in the first place. This non-reflexive contradiction within his theorising is then legitimated by another. He sets out to convince us that he wishes to delegitimate science and to elevate, at the same time, (at least by inference) the narrative knowledge forms of pre-modernism. He tells us that science normatively consigns these to mere irrationality:
"The scientist questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they are never subject to argumentation and proof. He classifies them as belonging to a different mentality; savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology. narratives are fables, myths, legends, fit only for women and children."
It seems from this that Lyotard is expressing a solidarity with the bearers of these narratives, against the scientists, yet he constructs an epistemology of narrative knowledge in such a way that it can no longer challenge scientific knowledge, let alone provide a criterion transcending it. For Lyotard narrative knowledge belongs to the past. In maintaining that narrative knowledge does not prioritise its own legitimation, but justifies itself "in the pragmatics of its own transmission without having recourse to argumentation or proof", he consigns it to an inferior status, particularly in view of the fact that he later uses the fractured conceptions of postmodern mathematics to further his own arguments. for his own delegitimated model of science (albeit non-reflexively) and as a privileged status over narrative forms. While appearing to equate narrative and scientific forms of knowledge, Lyotard fails to allow them a discursive equality in practice and ends up leaving everything as it is. In this way, his postmodernism falls into the trap of an internal contradiction - a failure to reflect critically upon his own premise - to apply to his own theorising the same critical criteria which he applies to modernism.
An alternative view of society which seems opposed to Lyotard's postmodern theorising is that of society as divided into two, as "an alienated, bifurcated totality, in need of unification" This view, exemplified by the writings of Habermas, extends marxist theorising beyond the language of determinism, and it is against this polemic that Lyotard pitches his hermeneutic theories. He does so on the premise that it is precisely the totalising nature of such discourses that flow from this position (Marx et. al.) which have previously prevented the liberation they purport to deliver. In their place, he suggests the abandonment of totalisations tout court.
In a further penetrating analysis of Lyotard's work, art critic and art historian Hal Fosterhas suggested (in his ground-breaking book The Anti-Aesthetic) that Postmodernism itself is not a uniform category. He suggests, for instance, that there are different kinds of Postmodernism - in particular, a Postmodernism of Reaction, and an opposing Postmodernism of Resistance, the latter working for emancipatory ideals and social change.
Despite these justifiable critiques, there is no doubt that Jean-François Lyotard's Postmodernism has had a remarkable influence on the philosophy of knowledge in the late 20th Century. His philosophies have impacted significantly in almost all epistemological fields and whether we accept them or not, have helped to extend our understanding of social justice, power and knowledge.
Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, born in Berlin. He served briefly in the First World War before taking his PhD at Freiburg in 1922 on the Künstlerroman, a German novel of a specific genre, depicting the lives and development of young artists - usually at odds with their bourgeois culture). He returned to Freiurg in 1929 to write his Habitation with Martin Heidegger. This was published in 1932 as Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity. Heidegger himself rejected the work. He joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Studies in 1933, but by then the National Socialist Party had risen to power in Germany, and like many of his other Jewish colleagues he moved first to Switzerland and than to the USA along with the Frankfurt School in exile. During and after the war he worked for the State Department and the OSS (the precursor of the CIA).
Work
He taught at Columbia in 1952 and Harvard, and after that at Brandeis and U. C. San Diego, teaching philosophy and sociology. During this time he was the most outspoken member of the Frankfurt School and remained an avowed Marxist. By the 1960s, his writings - especially Eros and Civilisation (an attempted synthesis of Marx and Freud) and One Dimensional Man. He had begun to exert a great influence of the emering youth culture and of the New Left Movement. One Dimensional Man, particularly, attracted the enthusiastic attention of the emerging student protest movement. In it, Marcuse compared American capitalism and Soviet Communism, demonstrating how the former, despite its prapagandistic assertions to the contrary, bore marked similarities to the latter. He suggested that the emerging world of consumerism and mass communication had the impact of producing "false needs", of producing a state of cultural and political quiescence and of reducing everyday life to a one dimensional state where critical reflection withered away. Against this, Marcuse proposed the "great refusal" - a resistance to consumption and to participation in mass communications such as television.
In 1967, along with R. D. Laing, David Cooper, Stokeley Carmichael and other Existentialists, Marxists and Anarchists, he presented a paper Liberation from an Affluent Society at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference held at the Round House in North London. The Conference was initiated by the Tavistock Institute (where both Laing and Cooper had worked) as part of its action-research programme. It was a watershed of critical thinking among the New Left at that time:
"The Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation, held in London in 1967, was a unique expression of the politics of modern dissent, in which existential psychiatrists, Marxist intellectuals, anarchists and political leaders met to discuss - and to constitute - the key social issues of the next decade. Amongst others Stokely Carmichael spoke on Black Power, Herbert Marcuse on liberation from the affluent society, R. D. Laing on social pressures and Paul Sweezy on the future of capitalism. In exploring the roots of violence in society the speakers analysed personal alienation, repression and student revolution. They then turned to the problems of liberation - of physical and cultural 'guerrilla warfare' to free man from mystification, from the blind destruction of his environment, and from the inhumanity which he projects onto his opponents in family situations, in wars and in racial conflict. The aim of the congress was to create a genuine revolutionary consciousness by fusing ideology and action on the levels of the individual and of mass society. These speeches clearly indicate the rise of a new, forceful and (to some) ominous style of political activity" (for details click here)
Marcusecontribution to the Congress was very significant. He was an invited speaker at many campuses and continued to exert an influence on Western philosophical thought up to and beyond his death of a stroke in 1979. He had gone to Frankfurt to deliver a lecture at the Institute for Social research and had been invited by Habermas to work at the Max Planck Institute.
Michael Parenti was born and raised in an Italian-American working-class family and neighborhood in New York City. received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. Like Noam Chomsky , he is an incisive critic of American domestic and foreign policy. He is an avowed Marxist who possesses a penetrating analytical mind and has been called “Chomsky for grownups”.
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Work
For many years Parenti taught political and social science at various institutions of higher learning. During his earlier teaching career he received grants or fellowships from the Louis Rabinowitz Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Brown University, Yale University, State University of New York, and the University of Illinois. For several years he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
Eventually he devoted himself full-time to writing, public speaking, and political activism. Since then he has won awards from Project Censored, the city of Santa Cruz, New Jersey Peace Action, the Social Science Research Council, the Society for Religion in Higher Education, and other organizations. In 2003, the Caucus for a New Political Science gave him a Career Achievement Award. In 2007 he received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from U.S. Representative Barbara Lee. For several years in the 1980s, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
He is the author of twenty books and many more articles. His works have been translated into at least eighteen languages. He lectures frequently throughout the United States and abroad. His book, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, A People's History of Ancient Rome, (2003) was selected as a Book of the Year for 2004 by Online Review of Books and Current Affairs.
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He now serves on the board of judges for Project Censored, and on the advisory boards of Independent Progressive Politics Network, Education Without Borders, and the Jasenovic Foundation; as well as the advisory editorial boards of New Political Science and Nature, Society and Thought.
Parenti’s writings cover a wide range of subjects: U.S. politics, culture, ideology, political economy, imperialism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, free-market orthodoxies, conservative judicial activism, religion, ancient history, modern history, historiography, repression in academia, news and entertainment media, technology, environmentalism, sexism, racism, homophobia, Venezuela, the wars in Iraq and Yugoslavia, ethnicity, and his own early life. Perhaps his most influential book is Democracy for the Few (1974) now in its eighth edition, a critical analysis of U.S. society, economy, and political institutions and a college-level political science textbook.
The list of his books is impressive and the titles alone give some idea of the breadth of his critique:
The Anti-Communist Impulse (1970).
Trends and Tragedies in American Foreign Policy (1971).
Ethnic and Political Attitudes (1975).
Democracy for the Few (1974.)
Power and the Powerless (1978).
Inventing Reality: the Politics of News Media (1986).
The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race (1989).
Make-Believe Media: the Politics of Entertainment (1992).
Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America (1993).
Against Empire (1995).
Dirty Truths (1996)
Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997).
America Besieged (1998).
History as Mystery (1999).
To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (2000).
The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond (2002).
The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome (2003)
Superpatriotism (2004).
The Culture Struggle (2006).
Contrary Notions (2007).
In addition to his books (which appeal to both lay and academic readers) he has also produced some 275 articles in scholarly journals, political periodicals and various magazines and newspapers. He appears on radio and television talk shows to discuss current issues and ideas from his published works. Dr. Parenti’s talks and commentaries are played on radio stations and cable community access stations to enthusiastic audiences in the United States, Canada, and abroad. He lectures on college campuses and before a wide range of community audiences, peace groups, labour organizations, scholarly conferences, and various other venues. Many of his presentations have been filmed and a list of downloadable Youtube videos is downloadable here.
Below is a comprehensive Wikipedia breakdown of Parenti’s points of critique:
Racism Parenti argues that western[verification needed] racism is systematic and historical in nature and should be regarded as more than just an attitudinal problem. He claims western racism has its origins in imperialism and slavery: To justify the colonial plunder of another nation or entire continent (as in the case of Africa) as well as the enslavement of conquered populations, imperialists and/or slave traffickers dehumanise their victims and define them as moral inferiors and subhuman.
He maintains that racism serves several functions for ruling interests in the United States
It divides the working class against each other.
It creates a "super-exploited" group of people who are forced to work at below scale wages thereby depressing wage levels for the entire workforce.
It distracts the (United States) white population from its own legitimate grievances by providing an irrelevant scapegoat in the form of minority populations
Culture and social structure In the late 1960s and early 70s, becoming increasingly critical of the existing socio-economic system, Parenti argued that images of the United States as a pluralistic, democratic society were more ideological than accurate. He did not deny the existence of a vast plurality of social, ethnic, and regional groups in America, but he felt that this group pluralism did not translate into a democratic pluralism in political life. Only limited portions of the political process are accessed by the general populace. Power in America is not broadly distributed, according to Parenti, but is highly concentrated in a social structure dominated by corporate moneyed interests, whose influence predominates in most mainstream institutions and major policy areas.[8] Parenti maintains that the resources of power are lodged in the social structure itself, the culture, institutions, and established social roles, and that ruling elements maintain their dominant positions not only by raw economic power but by attaining “cultural hegemony,” a concept formulated earlier by Antonio Gramsci
Role of US Media With respect to the US media Parenti, like Chomsky, has maintained that, while news coverage can be marred by problems of deadlines, space, and ordinary human error, much of the misleading coverage is the result of carefully honed ideological production. Reporters, he says, often exercise much skill to avoid the more important points of a story or news analysis so as not to offend anyone who wields substantial political and economic power, including their own bosses and corporate advertisers. Parenti concludes that their goal is to avoid fishing too deeply into troubled waters thereby maintaining an appearance of objectivity and moderation. Their careers, he suggests, depend in part upon their ability to equate centrist views with “objectivity,” and to stay within the prevailing ideological orthodoxy.
His treatment of entertainment media (movies and television) continues the argument that the media are not neutral and favor elitist interests. Exploring a wide range of films and programs, he has attempted to demonstrate that the entertainment media do more than entertain; they indoctrinate by propagating values in keeping with their corporate ownership and corporate advertisers.
He often attacks specific examples of the misleading coverage provided by the US media. In Blackshirts and Reds he cites historian J. Arch Getty's figures to demonstrate the exaggeration elsewhere in the US media of the executions effected by Joseph Stalin in the Great Purge. He critically reviews Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia in "The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic" and To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia finding similar exaggeration of war crimes in the breakup of the second Yugoslavia. In "Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth"[video] he observes, "western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La" then goes on to show that it was anything but.
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Culture across the globe Parenti maintains that, far from being neutral, culture is often ideologically driven in a highly skewed system of social power, benefiting some groups at the expense of others. “Growing portions of our culture are increasingly commodified and mass marketed.” “So we buy more and more of our culture and create less and less of it.” Rather than being accepted at face value, He says that all cultures should be subjected to critical investigation to be judged by “universal human rights standards” and by the criticisms voiced by those who are victimized within the various cultures of the world. He gives extensive attention to those who are regularly victimized by their own cultures, providing examples in chapters entitled “Custom Against Women,” “The Global Rape Culture,” and “Racist Myths.”
Role of voting fraud in US elections Parenti is among those who have cited a variety of studies claiming that the 2004 presidential election was fraudulent. In an essay entitled "The Stolen Election of 2004" he argued that modern voting technology allowed powerful corporations to manipulate the electoral results. He concluded the article by observing, about the forthcoming US election, "Given this situation, it is not likely that the GOP will lose control of Congress come November 2006. The two-party monopoly threatens to become an even worse one-party tyranny." In an updated analysis of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, he adds a postscript explaining why---despite the massive crossover reported in the polls away from the GOP—the Democrats won only a slim victory in the Congressional 2006 elections.”
Class and class power
Parenti stresses the role of class in all societies, particularly the purportedly classless US one. He extends the definition of class as a demographic trait relating to status, education, lifestyle, and income level to include the effects of social interrelationships. He observes that there can be no rich slaveholders without poor slaves, no powerful feudal lords without serfs, no corporate bosses without workers. The interrelationship is highly asymmetrical. It centers on the organized wealth of the society.
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He also believes that there is a third factor involved in class relationships, specifically the productive resources (land, agriculture, herds, natural resources, factories, technology, etc.). The dominant group in class relationships owns or controls these economic resources. The weaker class historically has had only its labor to sell. Hence the “dominant money classes” exercise a preponderant influence over workforces, markets, major investments, consumption patterns, media, and public policies. Parenti concludes that when discussing class, class power, how it is used, for whose interests, and at whose expense must also be discussed.
US downplay of class Parenti has repeatedly criticized the tendency among many who profess to be progressive to downplay the importance of class and class power as a formative force as compared to race, gender, and culture. He allows that each of these other categories of social experience have imperatives that are distinctly their own, sometimes of a life-and-death urgency. Still they should not be seen as being mutually exclusive of, or in competition with, considerations of class power in society, he argues, and should not be used as a means of evading class analysis. Democracy and capitalism From the late 60s well into the 80s, Parenti was one of many radicals and socialists who questioned the validity and value of what they called “bourgeois democracy,” seeing it more as a charade to mislead the people into thinking that they were free and self-governing. By the late 80s, however, he noticeably modified his position, arguing that democracy should not be thought of as merely a subterfuge or cloak created by ruling elites, although it certainly can serve that purpose. More often, Parenti claimed, whatever modicum of democracy the people attain in any society is usually the outcome of genuine struggle for a more equitable politico-economic order. Why credit the corporate class with giving people a “bourgeois democracy,” he asks, when in fact the ruling plutocrats furiously opposed most democratic advances in U.S. history, be it the extension of the franchise or the struggle for ethnic and gender equality, more direct forms of representation, more room for dissent and free speech, greater accountability of elected officials, and more equitable socio-economic domestic programs.
According to Parenti, reacting to mainstream commentators who turn every systemic vice and deficiency into a virtue, left critics of the status quo, seeing no real victories or progress in the centuries of popular struggle, have felt compelled to turn every virtue into a vice. To counter this trend, he says, people should recognize that real gains have been made, that democracy refuses to die, and both at home and abroad popular forces continue the democratic struggle, even against great odds.
For Parenti, democracy has two basic dimensions, the procedural and the substantive, both of which are equally important. Procedural democracy consists of the basic political forms: free speech and assembly, the right to dissent, accountability of officeholders, the right to vote in regular and honest elections, etc. Substantive democracy consists of egalitarian socio-economic outputs that advance the well-being of the populace, protect the environment, and curb the abuses and often untrammelled powers of great wealth. He quotes the German sociologist Max Weber who remarked almost a century earlier that it remains to be seen whether democracy and freedom can exist under the dominion of a highly developed capitalism.
He concludes that “there is no one grand, secret, power elite governing this country, but numerous coteries of corporate and governmental elites that communicate and coordinate across various policy realms. Behind their special interests are the common overall interests of the moneyed class,” which is not to say that differences never arise among these elites.
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Technology, money, and deficit spending Parenti believes that people's thinking about past and present developments needs to be contextualized, that is, seen in a social context of power and ideology. He gives the examples of technology and money. Both are seen as neutral entities that are inherently neither good nor bad. This may be true hypothetically, he writes, but in reality both technology and money have been developed within specific historical contexts by powerful interests that gained great advantage from their development. Almost all technology, he argues, is devoted to advancing the interests of higher circles, maximizing profits and corporate production, or in the case of government, maximizing surveillance, communication, and military striking power. New advances in technology are not neutral things. They impact upon us and our environment in ways that can advantage some and hurt others, according to Parenti. He writes similarly about money: “Like technology, money has a feedback effect of its own, advantaging the already advantaged,” liquefying wealth, making it easier to mobilize and accumulate. And with the growth of moneyed wealth comes a greater concentration and command over technology by the moneyed class.[30]
Few phenomena in the social order can operate with neutral effect even if supposedly pursued with neutral intent, according to Parenti. The national debt is a good example. Considered merely as a “problem” of excessive government spending, the national debt in fact works well for certain interests, specifically the moneyed class, he claims. By 1977 he noted how the national debt brought a transfer of income from the taxpayers to the wealthy creditors, the holders of government bonds. The greater the debt, the greater the upward transfer, as the government continues to borrow money from those they should be taxing (the big money interests). He concludes it is no accident that the biggest deficit spenders have been conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes. The national debt is in effect a way of privatising public spending and defunding the federal budget, he argues. The bigger the debt, the less money available for domestic programs, and the more money that goes from the pockets of ordinary taxpayers to rich creditors. Fascism Parenti’s treatment of fascism differs from that of the many writers who stress the irrational features of fascism: its state idolatry, nationalistic atavism, and leadership cult. While not denying that these are key components in the propagation of fascism’s appeal, he invites us not to overlook the “rational politico economic functions” that fascism performed. “Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols,” he claims. The emotive appeals of fascist ideology have served a class-control function, “distracting the populace from their legitimate grievances and directing their frustrations at various scapegoats.”
Most of the immense literature on the subject of fascism and Nazism focuses on who supported Hitler’s rise to power. Relatively little, he writes, is said about whom the Nazis supported when they came to power. In both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, he points out, wages were cut drastically, domestic programs were rolled back, huge subsidies were given to heavy industry, labor unions were broken, taxes on the very rich were greatly reduced or eliminated altogether, and workplace safety regulations were ignored or abolished. Fascism, he concludes, has a much overlooked politico- economic agenda; it involves something more than just goose stepping.
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Empire U.S. foreign policy is neither confused nor bungling, according to Parenti. It is quite consistently directed toward certain goals, and is largely successful. For the most part, U.S. leaders have maintained friendly relations with those governments that have opened up their countries to Western corporate investors, and have shown hostility toward those countries that have tried to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets for their own self-development, Parenti believes. Iraq was targeted for “having committed economic nationalism,” with a state-run economy that pretty much shut out Western investors. The same holds true for Yugoslavia, he claims. Both countries were bombed and invaded, and their public economies were shattered. Parenti believes that Yugoslavia was transformed from a viable social democracy to a cluster of little right-wing mini-republics.
His beliefs led him to become head of the United States chapter of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević in which capacity he added to the criticisms of bias in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
He also maintains that the U.S. empire feeds off the U.S. republic. The empire’s expansion abroad entails increasing costs for the republic. Ventures that are profitable for military contractors and overseas investors have to be paid in blood and taxes by the American populace. The many third world countries that are the targets of colonial intervention pay the highest price, he writes. They suffer not just from “underdevelopment”, but from “maldevelopment,” a result of generations of overexploitation.
Many on the left continue to deliver impassioned and blanket condemnations of deceased communist countries, Parenti notes. “Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anti-communists as ‘Soviet apologists’ and ‘Stalinists,’ even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society.”
He did in fact make a number of criticisms of the Soviet Union. In 1986 he wrote: "In the USSR there exist serious problems of labour productivity, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucracy, corruption, and alcoholism. There are production and distribution bottlenecks, plan failures, consumer scarcities, criminal abuses of power, suppression of dissidents, and expressions of alienation among some of the population."
More recently he wrote that the state owned economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union suffered “fatal distortions in their development” because of the years of “embargo, invasion, devastating wars, and costly arms build-up; excessive bureaucratisation and poor incentive systems; lack of administrative initiative and technological innovation; and a repressive political rule that allowed little critical expression and feedback while fostering stagnation and elitism.”
He argues that “despite the well-publicized deficiencies, crimes, and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, such as the free medical care and human services; affordable food, fuel, transportation, and housing; universal literacy; gains in women’s rights; free education to the highest level of one’s ability; a guaranteed right to a job; free cultural and sporting events, and the like.” He supported Gorbachev’s campaign of perestroika and glasnost until 1990 when it became evident to him that the Gorbachev reforms were leading to the implantation of free-market capitalism and were bringing hardships to the common people.
Social democracy Parenti maintains that the structural problems of free-market trans-national capitalism will only worsen the living standards of people in the United States and abroad, while deepening the environmental crises. He advocates a greater measure of public ownership in the USA. He asks “can socialism work? ... Is it not just a dream in theory and a nightmare in practice? Can the government produce anything of worth?” He goes on to point out that it already does citing publicly owned transportation systems, utilities, banking, education, and health services that are run efficiently by the governments of the USA and various social democracies and at far less cost than their private counterparts.
Ecology Parenti points to the increasingly catastrophic droughts, storms, floods, and abnormally high temperatures in many parts of the world to justify a hypothesis that the widely discussed ecological crisis of global warming will not be upon us “by the end of the century” or “in the lives of our grandchildren,” but is already happening today. He builds on this in an essay, "Why the Corporate Rich Oppose Environmentalism, to argue that immediate and immense profits that come at a cost to the environment are of more concern to corporate investors than the diffuse and long-run damage done to the global ecology.
History and historiography Much of Parenti’s work draws upon history. In his History as Mystery he takes the old adage that history is written by the victors and flushes it out with examples drawn from ancient and modern times. In regard to early Christianity, for instance, he maintains that, contrary to popular notions, the “Jesus worshipers” did not gather most of their followers from the poor and downtrodden but from the more affluent strata. Some Christian leaders discouraged slaves from converting to Christianity. Slaves were prohibited from becoming church deacons or priests, he maintains. Contrary to conventional US notions, he argues that the Christians were not the keepers of learning and scholarship during the Dark Ages but played a relentless role in destroying all the advanced learning and all the libraries of antiquity that were in their reach.
In The Assassination of Julius Caesar he states that many historians, both ancient and modern, have treated popular insurgencies and the common people with fear and loathing, depicting them as mindless rootless mobs of ne’er-do-wells. He also argues that Caesar and other popular reformers of the Roman Republic before him were assassinated not because they were violating the Roman constitution but because they were advocating reforms that benefited the commoners at a cost to the aristocracy.
Michael Parenti is a National Treasure. Even more than Noam Chomsky, he is the voice of informed dissent in America. And unlike Chomsky he has, for many years, abandoned the safety of academia to pursue his vision of a just society in the realm of everyday life.
Wilhelm Reich was born to a Jewish farming family in what is now the Ukraine. His first language was German and until the rise of Hitletr he was an Austrian Citizen. His mother committed suicide when he was thirteen, and his father ded four years later, leaving him to run the farm alone. Farming awakened his interest in biology and the natural sciences and he was familiar with sexuality from his earliest years, and until the death of his mother he was home educated by tutors. He was forced to flee his home when the First World War began and enlisted in the Austrian army. After the war, homeless and penniless he enrolled in the Vienna University Medical School. He graduated with a medical degree four years later with top grades in all subjects. His internships saw him working at the Neurological and Psychiatric Clinic and in the disturbed wards of the mental institute. He also studied hypnotherapy. In 1922 at the age of 25, he joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Circle, whose main star was Sigmund Freud and whose theories of sexual repression interested him most. Reich was one of the most active members of the group and soon became one of the most promising members of Freud's inner circle. He became the First Clinical Assistant at Freud's Psychiatric Clinic. It was widely assumed that Reich would take over the leadership of the Vienna Ciircle when Freud retired.
Over the next few years Freud placed less and less emphasis upon the libido (the sexual energy of the organism)as an actual physical energy. Reich, on the other hand, saw it increasingly as an actual physical force that, through repression, lay at the heart of most of societyy's ills. He saw that sexual gratification could erase neurotic symptoms, and he came to believe that its functionwas to maintain energy equilibrium by discharging excess energy that builds up naturally in the body. The real cause of neurosis was, for Reich, the structures and limitations imposed upon the individual by social controls. In this, he began to diverge markedly from the theories held by his colleagues.
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Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls,Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer,A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs. (Wikipedia)
His researches led him to develop theories of body armouring that is formed as an organism's own means of protection against trauma and repression. Body amouring operates in bands around the body -much like the segments of a worm, and the memory of trauma is locked into the musculaure of the increasingly rigidified tissues. His book Character Analysisoffers a detailed analysis and description of the role of the body in the development of neuroses. Reich's theories diverged increasingly from Freud's who continued to maintain his psychoanalytic modelling and treatments to the exclusion of physical manifestations. In other words, he ignored the actual functioning of the body in the psychoanalytic process, and attemppted to "manage" the neurosis without addressing (for Reich) the root social causes. Reich was interested in changing society. Freud was interested in adapting to it. This difference eventually led to a permanent break in their friendship. Furthermore, Reich repudiated Freud's postulation of a "Death Instinct", which he accused Freud of using to explain the failure of his psychanalysis with a number of patients. For Reich, the biological energy form he was discovering was entirely positive. The negativity which Freud was describing resulted not from an inherent instinct, but from the repression of this energy, giving even more power to his argument for the need for social change.
Reich's insistence on social change led him increasingly to embrace Socialism and Communism and he ran six clinics in Vienna, offering sex education and counselling to the thousands of the poor. Eventually he moved to Berlin, where, (alone amongst his colleagues who shunned "political involvement") he was vociferous in denouncing the rise of Hitler and National Socialism. Eventually he was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Society as well as the Communist Party. He fled Germany for Scandinavia with the rise of Hitler in 1933. He settled in Oslo and continued his work for the next six years, conducting biological experiments to discover the nature of the "bionic" energy that he had uncovered. His published results were condemned by the psychoanalytic establishment, and with the outbreak of War in 1939 he moved to New York to teach at the New School for Social Research - the American extension of the Frankfurt School for Social Research.
Reich settled in Maine, where he established what later became known as the Orgone Institute. There, he continued to conduct experiments into ways to harness and use the biological energy to cure diseases, including cancer. He built what he called Orgone Accumulators - boxes made of alternating layers of organic material and metal, and verified through the measurement of differing elecroscopic discharges in organic material both inside and outside the accumulators. He introduced cancerous mice into his accumulators and the results were so prominsing that he decdided to experiment with human subjects - building orgone accmulators large enough to sit inside. In 1941 he started to experiment with terminally ill cancer patients. While the patients showed significant improvements in critical areas - blood counts, tumor size etc., the patients still died. He became more convinnced than ever that the tumors were the symptom rather than the cause of cancer - which he attributed to a diminutionn of the bionic or orgone energy. In 1942 he began to build his clinic, called the Organon in upsate New York.
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There, for five years, he continued with his experiments, until, in 1947, following a vicious article in the New Republic ("The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich”) by Mildred Edie Brady, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into Reich's orgone energy accumulator. The Brady article claimed that Reich was conducting a sex racket, and the FDA assumed that his books must be pornographic literature. The FDA gestapo were uninterested in scientific information concerning the accumulator, and when Reich refused to cooperate with their witch hunt, the investigation bogged down, lacking any evidence against the accumulator. Then, in 1954, during the Joe McCarthy era, the Federal Government decided to go after Reich again. They gained an injunction ion Federal Court. Reich refused to appear and instead sent a lengthy letter explaining his reasons - that his appearance would legitimate the Court's judgement of scientific research, He included inj his letter a long and detailed exposition of all of his scientific writings and research findings. The judge found againjst him as though he had not made any submission. Without proof, the Food and Drug Administration succeeded in having a Federal court brand the accumulator a fraud, with the added dictum that orgone energy does not exist, and the order that all accumulators be destroyed and all literature even mentioning orgone energy should be burned. The FDA placed a ban on transporting or using Reich's orgone boxes. Because one of Reich's co-workers continued to transport the orgone boxes, Reich was imprisoned for two years for contempt of court. He died of a heart attack in prison at the age of 60 in 1957, the day before he was to go up for parole.
The destruction of Reich's writings and research results constitutes one of the most blatent and disgraceful episodes of censorship in American history. Fortunately, Reich's writings survived elsewhere, and since his death have provided profound insights and fruitful avenues of psychoanalytic research and therapy for future generations.
His most significant books include:
Character Analysis (1933 tr.1945)
The Sexual Revolution.(1936 tr. 1945?)
Listen Little Man (1948)
The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (1932 tr.1972)
People in Trouble (1953)
The Function of the Orgasm (1942)
The Murder of Christ (1953)
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933 tr. 1972)
The Sex-Pol Essays 1929-1934. (1972)
The Sex-Pol Essays 1934-37. (1972)
There is little doubt that in the repressive times of the 1950s, when Macarthyism was rampant, Wilhelm Reich was persecuted for his avowed Communism. Since that time, Reich's theories have been taken up by Alexander Lowen and others in the field of what they now call Bioenergetics. It is now a well-established and recognised field of study and therapeutic treatment.
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To view a comprehensive online biography of Reich click here
See also The Secret History of the Sexual Revolution: The Repression of Wilhelm Reich.Click here.
To view a related PDF The Body of Knowledge: Challenging the Intellectualclick here
Said was a Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic, political activist, and an outspoken advocate for a Palestinian state. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is regarded as a founding figure in postcolonial theory.
He was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935. His father was a wealthy Protestant Palestinian businessman and an American citizen while his mother was born in Nazareth also of Christian Palestinian descent. In his autobiography Out of Place (1999), he referred to himself as a "Christian wrapped in a Muslim culture" His sister was the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan. He described himself as having lived "between worlds" in both Cairo and Jerusalem until the age of 12. In 1947, he attended the Anglican St. George's Academy when he was in Jerusalem. He was thirteen when Israel captured West Jerusalem in 1948. His family fled with other Palestinian refugees to Cairo. He eventually attended Princeton and Harvard and settled in the U.S., where he became a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, a celebrated intellectual, and the leading advocate for Palestinian self-determination.
He wrote his first political essay, “The Arab Portrayed,” in response to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s declaration in 1969 that “There are no Palestinians.” Said writes that he took on
“...the slightly preposterous challenge of disproving her, of beginning to articulate a history of loss and dispossession that had to be extricated, minute by minute, word by word, inch by inch.”
That piece ignited the political imagination of the young man and led him on to a lifetime of writing and activism. He championed the rights of the Palestinian people to determine their own future—while insisting that Palestinians acknowledge the persecution and genocide suffered by the Jews. He promoted peaceful coexistence and wrote
“[T]he struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial,”
Said, like Fanon before him, was a product of colonisation. He was forbidden to speak Arabic at home, even to the servants, and was taught at the very best colonial schools, designed to raise an elite of young Arabs to administer the remnants of Empire. As he later recorded:
"I was born in Jerusalem and had spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt. All my early education had, however, been in élite colonial schools, English public schools designed by the British to bring up a generation of Arabs with natural ties to Britain. The last one I went to before I left the Middle East to go to the United States was Victoria College in Alexandria, a school in effect created to educate those ruling-class Arabs and Levantines who were going to take over after the British left. My contemporaries and classmates included King Hussein of Jordan, several Jordanian, Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi boys who were to become ministers, prime ministers and leading businessmen, as well as such glamorous figures as Michel Shalhoub, head prefect of the school and chief tormentor when I was a relatively junior boy, whom everyone has seen on screen as Omar Sharif" (Out of Place)
At the age of 15, Saïd's parents sent him to Mount Hermon School, a private college preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he recalls a "miserable" year feeling "out of place".
Said earned an A.B. from Princeton University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he won the Bowdoin Prize. He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as Professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades and subsequently became the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. In 1992 he was appointed University Professor, Columbia's most prestigious academic position. Professor Said also taught at most major Ivy League universities. He was fluent in English, French, and Arabic. In 1999, he served as president of the Modern Language Association. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Philosophical Society
Said was awarded numerous honorary doctorates as well as several prestigeous prizes from universities around the world. His autobiographical memoir Out of Place won the 1999 New Yorker Prize for non-fiction. His writing regularly appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch, Al Ahram, and the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. He gave interviews alongside his good friend, fellow political activist, and colleague Noam Chomsky regarding U.S. foreign policy for various independent radio programs Said also contributed music criticism to The Nation for many years. In 1999, he jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and close friendDaniel Barenboim.
In January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of Said's 238-page FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act. They showed that Said had been under surveillance from 1971. Most of his records are marked as related Israel and significant portions remain "Classified Secrets."
Edward Said died at the age of 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a decade-long battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia
Work
Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a social construction of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978), Said described the persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture. He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Despite the fact that his theories of Western perceptions of the East have been vigorously attacked (mostly by the right wing Zionist movement) they have nevertheless elevayted him to superstar status in the academic world. But Said did not only criticise the West. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites (like himself) who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.
In 1980 Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab culture in the West, characterising it as both a consequence of historical colonialism and a prerequisite for the continued appropriation of Arab land and resources. He wrote:
"So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression "
Orientalism has had a significant impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography. Taking his cue from the works of Franz Fanon ,Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such as A. L. Tibawi,Anouar Abdel-Malek, Maxime Rodinson, and Richard William Southern, Said argued that Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western ‘Orientalists’ (a term that he transformed into a pejorative):
"I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact – and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism." (Orientalism)
Said contended that Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that even most Western scholars could not recognise. His contention was not only that the West has conquered the East politically but also that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient deviates.
Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up. In 1978, when the book was first published, with memories of the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC crisis still fresh, Said argued that these attitudes still permeated the Western media and academia. After stating the central thesis, Orientalism consists mainly of supporting examples from Western texts.
Said's political outspokeness made him many enemies - not least amongst the Zionist community of the United States which has unquestioningly supported the Israeli colonisation and oppression of the Palestinian people. But Said refiused to denounce the right of Israel to exist. He called instead, for a policy of mutual acceptance and peaceful coexistence between the Palestinians and the Israelis. ¥et his activism exiled him from Israel and Palestine for most of his life and provoked criticism in the United States. He has been called everything from “the professor of terror” to a Nazi, and his office at Columbia was set on fire. But he persevered, publishing regularly in The Nation, the Arabic newspaper al-Hayat in London, and many other publications. His enduring legacy is the courage to say the most difficult things to the most difficult people in the most difficult circumstances.
As a (Westernised) intellectual voice of the Palestiniann people he was without equal - able to courageously bridge the gap between the polarised worlds of Western intellectualism and Arab activism, bringing each into sharp focus in a heroic attempt to promote a reconcilliation. Yet he never misunderstood the root causes of the conflict - Western imperialism of which the State of Israel was the willing participant. He was, without doubt, the epitome of Gramsci' s Organic Intellectual.
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To view Said's (2003) incisive critique of the (impending) war on Iraq click here.
To access a comprehensive source of articles by and about Edward Said click here
For a compelling though brief biography of Said' poliotical activism click here
For an outstanding summary of Said's cultural and political importance in his Guardian obituary click here.
Ira Shor is a professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches composition and rhetoric. Coming to the City University in 1971 after completing a literature PhD at Wisconsin, he experimented with critical literacy, taught Basic Writing for 15 years, and still teaches first-year composition as well as other courses. He started the new doctoral program in Rhetoric/Composition at the Graduate Center in 1993, where he directs dissertations and offers seminars in literacy, writing theory, critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, the rhetorics of space and place, and working-class culture. He also serves on the English faculty at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, where he teaches courses in writing, literature, and mass media as well as graduate classes for schoolteachers.
Born in 1945 in the South Bronx, he attended mediocre public schools for New York City’s working-class children until winning admission to the selective Bronx High School of Science where knowledge became a serious undertaking. In the Jewish South Bronx of the 1950s, he grew up in a rent-controlled apartment among all-white Eastern European families, descendants of immigrants, his being Russian. Shor’s father was a sheet-metal worker with a bawdy sense of humor who dropped out of school at 15, learned his trade from a family friend, built battleships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in two wars, and failed miserably in his own small business. His mother was a zany bookkeeper for small businesses who finished high school but could not afford college, which broke her heart, and turned her into a lifelong lover of Italian opera and Shakespeare.
After graduating the elite Science High, Shor attended the University of Michigan(BA, English, 1966), then the University of Wisconsin(MA, 1968, and Phd, 1971), both sites of student activism in the 1960s. His dissertation was on Kurt Vonnegut whose intense ethical stance against exploitation, violence, war, and cruelty drew Shor to this author.
Work
His influence in the field of critical pedagogy has been profound. Starting with his seminal book Critical teaching and Everyday Life (1980) he has been a consistent advocate and champion for student-centred education and critical pedagogy. Critical Teaching and Everyday Life was the first book-length treatment of Freire-based critical methods in the North American context and had a profound effect upon my own teaching practice. The book grew out of Shor’s literacy teaching for Open Admission students in the City University in the 1970s, where he helped build an open-access writing program recognized then as one of three successful efforts in higher education by the NCTE.
His 9 published books include a 3-volume set in honour of the late Paulo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator who was his friend and mentor: Critical Literacy in Action (college language arts) and Education is Politics (Vol 1, k-12, and Vol. 2, Postsecondary Across the Curriculum). Shor’s work with Freire began in the early 1980s and lasted until Freire’s unfortunate passing in 1997. He and Freire co-authored A Pedagogy for Liberation in 1986, the first “talking” book Freire published with a collaborator. Shor also authored the widely used Empowering Education (1992) and When Students have Power (1996), two foundational texts in critical teaching. In his book ‘When Students have Power’, Shor takes the concepts of student centred learning and sharing power in the classroom to new heights.
In this book Shor describes his students, mostly from working class areas and first generation to go to college. In his class Shor permits students to determine their classroom rules, the syllabus, course planning and how they will evaluate. Students also sign a contract for the grade they want to receive. Shor also established an After Class group that was responsible for critiquing the previous class and provided input for planning the next class. In addition they discussed with Shor curriculum changes and so practiced democratic power relationship. Shor says ‘this democratic disturbance of the teacher–centred classroom confirms a primary goal of shared authority: to restructure education into something done by and with students rather than by the teacher for and over them”
Shor frequently uses the questioning technique to ‘backload’ student’s responses and to push them into futuristic thinking. He constantly tries to reach his students who sit in what in calls ‘Siberia’ in the furthest away point in the room as they need to be a away from the authority figure of the teacher. He suggests that schools and colleges are teacher centred systems and are not student centred, and believes that many traditional teachers and lecturers don’t have the confidence to use other models of teaching.
He and his wife are raising a son, little Paulo, born in 2003. Contact:
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A large part of this biography is taken from Wikipedia which has provided an excellent and concise review of Thompson and his works.
Biography.
Thompson was an English historian, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, in particular his book The Making of the English Working Class (1963), but he also published influential biographies of William Morris(1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist as well as publishing one novel and a collection of poetry. He was one of the main intellectual members of the Communist Party who left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and he played a key role in the first New Leftin Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964-70 and 1974-79, and during the 1980s he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
He was born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents and educated at Kingswood School, Bath. During World War II he served in a tank corps in Italy, and then studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he joined the Communist Party. In 1946 he formed the Communist Party Historians Group along with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr and others. This group launched the influential journal Past and Present in 1952.
Work.
Thompson's first major work was his biography of William Morris. It was part of an effort by the Communist Party Historians' Group to emphasise the domestic roots of Marxism in Britain at a time when the Communist Party was under attack for always following the Moscow line. But it was also an attempt to take Morris back from the critics who had emphasised his art and downplayed his politics for more than 50 years. As Thompson noted:
“William Morris was the first creative artist of major stature in the world to take his stand, consciously and without shadow of compromise, with the revolutionary working class: to participate in the day-to-day work of building the Socialist movement: to put his brain and his genius at its disposal in the struggle. It is no small matter for a man of fifty, in the face of the ridicule of society, the indifference of wife and friends, to set aside the work he loves and fashion his life anew. But this is what Morris did...His was the steady enduring courage of the realist, which upheld him in all the drudgery, committee wrangling and trivial duties of the movement... Morris will always occupy a position of unique importance in the British revolutionary tradition"
In 1956, after Khruschev revealed that the Soviet party leadership had long been aware of Stalin's crimes, Thompson started a dissident publication inside the CP, called The Reasoner. Six months later, he and most of his comrades left the party in disgust at the Soviet invasion of Hungary. But he remained what he called a "socialist humanist", and with others set up the New Reasoner, a journal that sought to develop a democratic socialist alternative to what its editors saw as the ossified official Marxism of the Communist and Trotskyist parties and the managerialist cold war social democracy of the Labour Party and its international allies. The New Reasoner was the most important organ of what became known as the "New Left", an informal movement of dissident leftists closely associated with the nascent movement for nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The New Reasoner combined with the Universities and Left Review to form New Left Review in 1960, though Thompson and others fell out with the group around Perry Anderson who took over the journal soon after its launch. The fashion ever since has been to describe the Thompson et al New Left as "the first New Left" and the Anderson et al group, which by 1968 had embraced Tariq Ali and various Trotskyists, as the second.
Thompson subsequently allied himself with the annual Socialist Register publication, and was (with Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall) one of the editors of the 1967 May Day Manifesto, one of the key left-wing challenges to the 1964-70 Labour government of Harold Wilson.
Thompson's most influential work was and remains The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 while he was working at the University of Leeds. It told the forgotten history of the first working class left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below:
"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'Utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties".
A major work of research and synthesis, it was also important in historiographical terms: with it, Thompson demonstrated the power of an historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers. It remains on university reading lists 40 years after its publication. He wrote the book whilst living in Siddal, Halifax, West Yorkshire and based some of the work on his experiences with the local Halifax folk.From their stories, Thompson excavates a whole new landscape of forgotten history and colonisation and he draws a very clear and revealing picture of the Enclosures, and what they meant for the common folk of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
The process of colonisation abroad was synchyronous with and continued with the Enclosures, which legally created a "private" space, where before had existed only the "commons". Thompson’s classic work solidly establishes the role of the appropriation of space by capitalists and gentry through the intervention of the state as an indispensable ingredient in the conditions which allowed the development of industrialised capitalism. He is worth quoting at length:
“(Regarding the impact of the Enclosures) we may still sketch certain of the general processes at work in many parts of the country. And first we should remember that the spirit of agricultural improvements in the eighteenth century was impelled less by altruistic desires to banish ugly wastes - or, as the tedious phrase goes - ‘to feed a growing population’ than by the desire for fatter rent-rolls and larger profits....The arguments of the enclosure propagandists were commonly phrased in terms of higher rental values and higher yield per acre. In village after village, enclosure destroyed the scratch-as-scratch-can subsistence economy of the poor. The cottager without legal proof of rights was rarely compensated. The cottager who was able to establish his claim was left with a parcel of land inadequate for subsistence and a disporoprtionate share of the very high enclosure cost. Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers... it is possible to overlook the larger fact that what was at issue was a redefinition of the nature of agrarian property itself."
Thompson shows how this rupture was neither accidental nor unsystematic. It formed part of a historical programme of dispossession of the peasants from the existing means of production, the destruction of the spatial relations of the existing means of production and the superimposition of a whole new spatial order.
“Copyhold (landholding by virtue of ‘copy of court roll’) and even vaguer customary family tenancies (which carried common rights) might prove to be invalid at law although they were endorsed by the collective memory of the community. Those petty rights of the villagers, such as gleaning, access to fuel, the tethering of stock in the lanes or on the stubble, which are irrelevant to the historian of economic growth, might be of critical importance to the subsistence of the poor....Enclosure, indeed, was the culmination of a long secular process by which men’s customary relations to the agrarian means of production were undermined. It was of profound social consequence because it illuminates, both backwards and forwards, the destruction of the traditional elements in English peasant society.”
The re-spatialisation of the landscape, and through it, the transformation of the relations of production took place not only through the Enclosures in Britain and Europe, but on a global scale, where the spatial basis of capitalist expansion and production was extended to the appropriation of indigenous lands, their surveying, their mapping, and most of all their legal allocations under individual titles, destroying not only the relations of and between tribal and extended family groups to the land, but through the land, through the means of production. Nor has the process been confined to indigenous peoples. The spatialisation of the landscape has, since the early 1800s, been at the same time both the most profound and the least noticed of capitalism's inexorable transformations.
In 1967, while still at Warwick, Thompson extended his analysis of the respatialisation of British Society through the Enclosures with a study on Time. His influential Time, Work and Industrial Capitalism(1967), published in Past and Present sought to show how the development and growth of capitalism would have beenimpossible without the equal colonisation of time - that is, the displacement and replacement of indigenous and collectively understood conceptions of time (based upon natural phenomena and folk wisdom and experience) and the imposition by the State and capitalist binterests of by mechanical clock time. His analysis paralelled that of Henri Lefebvre, who, working in the reverse orrder, first undertook a critical review of the Marxist obsession with time, before developing his critical theories of space.
Thompson left Warwick University in protest at the commercialisation of the academy, documented in the book Warwick University Limited (1971). He continued to teach and lecture as a visiting professor, particularly in the United States, but increasingly worked as a freelance writer. He turned to freelancing, contributing many essays to New Society, Socialist Register and historical journals. In 1978 he published The Poverty of Theory, (here he famously describes counterfactualism as "unhistorical shit") which attacked thestructuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers in Britain on New Left Review, and which provoked a book-length response from Perry Anderson,Arguments Within English Marxism.
During the late 1970s he acquired a large public audience as a critic of the then Labour government's disregard of civil liberties his writings from this time are collected in Writing By Candlelight (1980).
From 1980, Thompson was the most prominent intellectual of the revived movement for nuclear disarmament, revered by activists throughout the world. In Britain, his pamphlet Protest and Survive, a parody on the government leaflet Protect and Survive, played a major role in the revived strength of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Just as important, Thompson was, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, an author of the 1980 Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament, calling for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal, which was the founding document of European Nuclear Disarmament. Confusingly, END was both a Europe-wide campaign that comprised a series of large public conferences (the END Conventions), and a small British pressure group.
Thompson played a key role in both END and CND throughout the 1980s, speaking at innumerable public meetings, corresponding with hundreds of fellow activists and sympathetic intellectuals, and doing more than his fair share of committee work. He had a particularly important part in opening a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which he was denounced as a tool of American imperialism by the Soviet authorities.
He wrote dozens of polemical articles and essays during this period, which are collected in the books Zero Option (1982) and The Heavy Dancers (1985). He also wrote an extended essay attacking the ideologists on both sides of the cold war, Double Exposure (1985) and edited a collection of essays opposing Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars (1985). Thompson was one of the most dearly loved British Socialists.
To download my own three-PDF Critical Theory of Space click here
Harold Walsby was one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. We crossed paths only very briefly between my 17th and 21st years, and then he dropped out of my life completely. At the time of our meeting I was a young trainee architectural assistant, studying at Blackburn Technical College and completing my Testimonies of Study for the RIBA. He was 46 but seemed through the inexperienced eye of youth, to be much older – perhaps in his late 50s. He had just moved with a wife and two adolescent children into a small stone terraced cottage up on the moorland not 300 metres from my house.
I had met him at the local Arts Show – a display of the works of local artists in the Mechanics Institute that housed the town library downstairs and an exhibition space above. The whole building straddled the River Irwell which disappeared underground 20 metres upstream. (and which made me always want to pee every time I went to the library).
I had entered a couple of my pen and ink drawings and watercolours in the show - the very first time that I had dared to air my works in public, and was standing, pretending to admire a work that hung next to mine, so that I could see what people had to say about them. Along limped an elderly man with soft eyes and jowls displaying a three-day beard. There was a boy of about thirteen with him. They stopped in front of my works and looked at them for a moment. Then Harold (for that is who it was) gestured towards one of the works and said to his son David, “That drawing there has been done by a young man who is training to be an architect.”
My amazement got the better of my shyness, and I blurted out. “How did you know that?”
Harold turned to me with a gentle smile and asked, “Are they yours, then?” “Yes! But how did you know?”
“I used to be an architectural draughtsman,” he said, and there began a brief but wonderful encounter that was to change my life. Harold, it turned out, had a sculpture in the show – a grotesque life-size plaster human form labelled The Unknown Bureaucrat, an early indication of his lack of respect or tolerance for anything institutional. He mentioned that he met, once a week, with a couple of old friends who shared their ideas on painting, politics and philosophy. He invited me along to their next Thursday night meeting. His friends, it turned out, were retired academics one (Slatterly by name) had been at Manchester University teaching textile technology and had left, I suspect under pressure for having been an avowed communist. The three of them briefly shared this small once-a-week world with my young self and opened up to me a whole universe of literature and critical thought that has shaped everything since.
After the first session, Harold invited me up the hill to his cottage to meet his wife, Dod. We strolled up onto the moorland track as he probed my understandings and beliefs with his incredible analytical skills. On arrival I stepped under the low door-head into a tiny space, modest living/kitchen area which was crammed with his paintings. There were two rooms opening off this, two very tiny bedrooms. I was incredulous that someone of his obvious age, maturity and experience could be living with his family in such a modest way. Over a cup of tea, he told me that he had moved there from St. Ives in Cornwall, where he had made a simple living as an artist. It seemed incredulous that he should have chosen Bacup over St. Ives, and never did discover why. What I did find out (in the numerous walks that came later) was that he had studied Hegelian dialectics and Marx (who was to me at that time still akin to Count Dracula), and that he was a man of profound knowledge.
Over tea he began to pull canvases out from the stacks around the walls – landscapes mostly, in oils, with a rough texture to them in varying muted shades of grey, blue, and green. I saw nothing in his artwork to arrest my attention, although I am sure that this was more a result of the lack of attention and perception of an arrogant teenager that of the artworks themselves. But whatever he thought, he was always respectful, always intent on preserving my dignity, always kind and generous in his comments. It was the beginning of an improbable yet for me significant friendship. Harold’s opened up for me a whole world of metaphysics and his recommended reading of the Mentor edition of The Age of Ideology still graces my bookshelf to this day.
As our friendship grew, I began to imagine in my young mind that I could argue against Harold on important issues and win. The opportunity was not long in presenting itself. Harold wrote a long and impassioned letter to the local newspaper the Bacup Times, decrying the arms race, vilifying the Pentagon and Foreign Office as war-mongers and international terrorists, and telling of the likely outcome of a nuclear confrontation. The year was 1959, I think - four years before the Cuba crisis and at a time when fall-out shelters were in growing demand in the States. Harold was adamant that the emotive language of foreign policy was destined to lead us into Armageddon, unless a higher form of rationality prevailed. Steeped as I was in the Tory jingoism of the post-war years, with ever-present memories of Churchillian rhetoric, I wrote a reply, couched in ill-concealed sarcasm, explaining that the cold war was an inevitable result of Soviet expansionism and that the “Free World” needed to stand fast to resist the downfall of civilisation as we know it. I suggested that his own arguments were what one would inevitably expect from a person with such Communist sympathies. I waited eagerly to see if he would respond.
He did, gently but firmly and with no personal animosity, dissected my arguments. demonstrating their contradictions and in the process leaving me with nowhere to go, conceptually. Then he gently, and publicly put me back together. When I next visited him I was received with undiminished warmth and affection, and no mention was made of my foolish indiscretion. It was yet another lesson in human dignity from this intellectual aristocrat. I began to realise that, through a lifetime of toil and disappointment he had grown increasingly compassionate where others whither and grow increasingly more bitter and petrified. His wrinkled face and his gammy leg were the only marks of hardship that life had made upon his body. Below the surface he was enormous, huge. Where others relent, he had grown, for truly, he saw only the marvellous in life. Its magic, its mystery, were always at the forefront of his mind, always in step with his every action and utterance: complete, humble compassionate, tender, gracious, grand..
Following the public encounter,, we would occasionally walk together across the moors close to his house. As we walked, him shuffling along with his polio-crippled leg, he would utter the most profound critical and analytical analysis on a vast range of subjects – not only Marx and Hegel, but Bertrand Russell (with whom he had been connected in the 1950s), chess (he was taught by a grand master), the balance of power, birth control, Freudian and Jungian analysis, the Nuclear Arms race (he was a founder-member of CND as I was to learn later to my own cost), Algebra, Design, Existentialism, cooking, farming, Botany, Astronomy, Art, Architecture. There was never a subject that I might raise about which he did not have a deep and extensive understanding. He was my first experience of a public intellectual. Yet he was self-taught.
He told me that he left home at the age of 15 and got a job drawing bathroom details in a London architect’s office. Tiring of this almost immediately, he left again to bum his way around London from odd job to odd job. It was during this period that he came into contact with Dylan Thomas, and lived for several years in Soho, drinking wine and living what we would now call a Bohemian existence. It was here that he met Russell also (whose prolific writings he knew almost by heart, and with whom he committed himself to the CND movement. I was later to discover that he was remembered by those who knew him in his Soho days as familiar figure there and in Trafalgar Square a formidable debater in matters of logic and the Dialectic.
Harold and his family moved away from Bacup in 1959 I seem to remember, no doubt because there was little market for works of art in the industrial valleys of the Irwell and Calder. He moved instead to the Lake District, drawn no doubt by the prospect of a better reception for his painterly talents. The family moved into an old barn and outbuildings in Grasmere, opposite the studio of Heaton Cooper the well-known watercolourist and a quarter of a mile or so from Wordsworth’s cottage. We kept in touch and I visited him there several times, hitch-hiking the 100 miles or so from my home.
Surrounded by mountains, and engulfed in rain and winter snows for over half of the year it must have been a truly inhospitable place to settle with a family – notwithstanding Wordsworth’s “host of golden daffodils” that would emerge every spring. The old building leaked like a sieve. Initially they occupied one corner of the building that had previously served as a doss house for the stable hands. The Westmoreland green slate walls were invariably damp and refused to hold even a smear of plaster. Icy water gurgled ice cold from an old tap into an old stone slop-sink, and there was no heating save for a small and noisy fan heater that failed to make a dent in the Wintry blasts that leaked through the cracks. I remember being amazed at the Spartan condition in which the family were living and at their truly pioneering spirit. Most of their time appeared to be taken up in building kilns and knocking the second floor gallery into shape for art displays. It was rare that they could find the time to devote some attention to improving their living conditions.
To earn some money for food, Harold’s son David would labour in the mountains, digging field trenches for the local farmers, while his daughter earned a meagre living serving coffees in the local cafés during the tourist season. Apart from this, they appeared to have nothing. All of their savings seemed to have been buried into the purchase of this derelict old building and a supreme act of faith in their ability to prosper. They all slept together in a 120 metre square room and ate in the one room withy a water supply which served as a kitchen and living area. It seemed incredible to me that someone could risk so much for so little on the borderline of what is normally considered to be “retirement” (although in retrospect I have to confess that I had never asked Harold his age and just assumed him to be older than he in reality was).
When I would visit, he would take time off from the day to day chores to walk with me along the valley, marvelling at the flowers and listening to the birds calling across the valley floor. Occasionally, I would hike over the mountains from Ullswater, along Striding Edge and down from Helvellyn into Grasmere, on those occasions envying Harold the courage that had allowed him to make such a dramatic shift. In truth, it was his courage that I remember most – not just the courage to undertake a life of economic uncertainty that would be daunting to most people, but also the intellectual courage of a man who was his own free thinker, who refused to be institutionalised or to embrace the dogmas and taken-for-granted realities of other so-called intellectuals. His grasp of and commitment to the dialectic with which he dissected the logics of everyday life were applied with equal measure and courage to his own.
Once the Grasmere complex was habitable and more comfortable Harold and the family moved again – this time to Ambleside, but by that time I had also moved on, to Birmingham, London, Portsmouth and eventually California, and I never saw him again. My last contact was sometime in 1964, when, as usual, I had hitched a ride to visit him, and leaving too late to get to the M6 motorway before dark. I got stuck somewhere near Kendal at midnight, on a freezing cold night. I managed to get back to Grasmere and dossed down in one of the outbuildings, not wanting to wake the family. I left early in the morning before they were awake and left a not saying goodbye. I had no idea then that it would be our last communication.
Epilogue
All that has gone before was written sometime in 1973 in Berkeley, California and about the approximate time (as I later learned) that Harold died of a heart attack in Ambleside. I wrote it then, because I wanted to have a record of the remarkable man who had had such an impact upon my young adult life and upon the entirety of my intellectual growth and maturation. It was written as a tribute to a friend – one of the many “elders” who have guided me throughout my life. I hoped, as one does in the ignorance of youth, that my words would be a record of an otherwise unknown and unheralded intellectual giant. I had never had the time or intellectual capacity to master Harold’s own grasp of philosophy, phenomenology of Hegelianism. I had simply known that there was a man, an elderly kind friend, who needed to be heard by those who consider themselves to be intellectuals. My written piece lay dormant until this year (2008), when, leafing through old manuscripts to upload onto my website, I came across it once again, and decided to post it there.
I imagined that Harold must now be dead, and decided to Google his son David, to see if I might make contact and find out what had happened in those last forty years of silence. Nothing. On another impulse, I decided to Google Harold himself, and was astonished to discover that which I should have known all along – that Harold Walsby was, indeed, famous; that my old friend had, indeed, been recognised as one of the foremost critical theorists of his time in Britain; that in the 1930s when Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Reich were promulgating their critique of Marxism, Harold Walsby was pre-empting them all and developing parallel and much more incisive critiques of Marxism that were later to be published in his seminal 1947 work The Domain of Ideologies: A Study of the Development and Structure of Ideologies.
I was to discover that Harold even has a society named after him – the The Walsby Society– convened shortly after his death in 1973 by a group of friends and fellow theorists, amongst them his friend and colleague George Walford with whom he had formulated the theory Systematic Ideology (as it was renamed by Walford in 1976) – the study of ideologies – in the 1930s.
The group they formed was a breakaway from the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Like their counterparts in Frankfurt, they were interested in understanding the failure of Marxism to capture the public imagination of the working class. The theory they developed was expressed by Harold Walsby himself in his 1947 book The Domain of Ideologies and those involved in the group set up an organisation to propagate their views called the Social Science Association, which existed from 1944 until 1956. It was later succeeded by the Walsby Society after Harold’s death and the journal which emerged from it called Ideological Commentary.
Unlike their Frankfurt counterparts, however, they chose to interrogate not just the nature and internal contradictions of Marxist ideology in particular, but of all ideologies in general, Harold’s realisation that not merely dialectical materialism but materialism in general was inherently self-contradictory (in the sense that it postulates a completely objective reality independent of or essentially unrelated to the knowledge of it, which however is and can only be a mere abstract concept and thus completely subjective) brought him to a general systematic critique of Marxist political assumptions, especially in far as they turn on the view that men's consciousness is basically formed by or dependent on their material conditions of existence and by the ownership of the means of production.
Furthermore, it was clear to Walsby and his associates that ideology is the central motivator in human affairs; that the characteristics that make up the major ideologies occur in sets; that those sets of characteristics form a series; and that the ideological series forms a system. These systems are not, as Marx, suggested, derived from the material conditions of society or from the ownership of the means of production, but from deep-seated cultural beliefs in essentially conservative values – family, authority, tradition and familiarity. According to the theory the (conservative) ideologies will inherently have the most adherents and these will hold sway in any political situation. The ideology most able to encompass these values will therefore have the best chance of establishing its hegemony. The theory was criticised as bordering on determinism – a revisionist theory of human nature in which evolved individuals were able to progress to less populist but more accurate understandings of social and ideological reality.
In 1976 Harold produced another important work – one that he had no doubt been working on during our many conversations about Hegel, the dialectic and mathematics. The Paradox Principle and Modular Systems Generally attempted to expose the inherent contradictions in mathematical theorising, demonstrating how Aristotle’s famous principle that something cannot be and not-be at the same time imposed a false and misleading horizon on theorising and that a reconceptualisation of the place of Zero in mathematics was a necessary corollary to moving beyond the stultifying orthodoxy of the time. Alongside his earlier dialectical analysis of ideology, this work parallels and in some ways reflects that of Heisenberg in which such contradictions are accepted as commonplace in quantum physics. It came, moreover, out of a concern for Design. In 1967, after I had seen him of the last time, he published a piece called Special Announcement to Potential Subscribers. There, he once again undertook a critique of the limits imposed by Aristotelian thinking and its aversion for contradiction. He applies this reasoning to Design, reminding us in the process that improvements in quality come in the first place:
“..through increased understanding of opposition and conflict, e.g. within oneself, or in others, or even in the arts and activities of everyday life, including one's own thinking - this latter, being central, results in greatly increased flexibility of thought, with accompanying feelings of liberation from the constraints of past ways of rigid thinking, and therefore in greater self-control generally”
These characteristics and the spatial arrangements that are contingent upon them were recognised as being self-evidently common in everyday life and discourse, and therefore as essential elements in unconscious formulations. He had recognised for some time that ordinary language is permeated with direct and indirect references to height and width, and from this he set out to explore the wealth of associations with vertical and horizontal alignment, etc., integrating his mathematical analyses with his artistic and aesthetic work. The general disposition of this relationship and its relevance for the creative process had been pointedly outlined earlier by no less a mathematician than Albert Einstein:
"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily reproduced and combined... Taken from a psychological point of view, this combinatorial play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought - before there is any connection with logical in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. The above mentioned elements are, in any case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will. According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for. In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely additive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage as already mentioned."
Looking back I see intimations in my own work in Gestalt Therapy and Design as Harold continues with his analysis, recognising life as an element of “flexibility” – seemingly paralleling the earlier theories of Wilhelm Reich. He speaks of the “balance” of opposites, indicating in the process a reciprocity between the inner world of the designer and the geometric and relational quality of the thing designed. In this writing he attempts to integrate his abstract work in mathematics and Hegelian logic with his “other” life as an artist – the man that I knew.
In the last ten years of his life he moved beyond his analysis of spatial relationships and, like Henri Lefebvre devoted his attention to what he termed the “last problem” – that problem of time and continuity. Sadly, his thoughts was never articulated in print. One wonders what extraordinary insights Harold Walsby might have left for us to ponder had he lived longer
All of this is, as I say, a complete revelation to me who as a young man, was accepted as a friend by this remarkable theorist. At no time during our friendship did he allude either to his writings or to his important place in the intellectual community of the mid-century. And I for my part was too immersed in the enjoyment of having my own contradictions lovingly unpacked to bother to look beyond my own gratification - to the reality and history of my interrogator. Harold simply accepted me, supported me intellectually and emotionally, and unleashed a curiosity which has carried me a long way. I thank him, belatedly for that. I find it remarkable now, looking back over the intervening fifty years since we met at the intellectual trajectory my own life has taken – not least in the direction of Marxism, Critical Theory, Education and Design. The most extraordinary part of all this is that as I sit now, typing the concluding thoughts to this homage to a departed friend, I realise for the first time, at the age of 66, what a remarkable influence he has had on my life and how deeply he must have planted the seeds of curiosity in the mind of a self-involved teenager.
Along with E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams stands as one of the most influential and respected British intellectuals of the 20th Century. And like Thompson, a significant part of his work involved an analysis and excavation of the political, cultural and spatial politics of Britain during the Industrial Revolution. He was also one of the most prolific critical theorists in Britain, with more than 750,000 copies of various books and essays published.
He was born near Abergavenny, Wales, Williams was the son of a railway worker in a village where all of the railwaymen voted Labour while the local small farmers mostly voted Liberal. It was not a Welsh-speaking area - he described it as 'Anglicised in the 1840s' (Politics and Letters, 1979). There was, however, a strong Welsh identity. "There is the joke that someone says his family came over with the Normans and we reply: 'Are you liking it here?'".
He attended Grammar School in Abergavenny though his teenage years coincided with the rise of Nazism and the threat of war. He was 14 when the Spanish Civil War broke out, and like Chomsky , was very conscious of what was happening. At this time he was supporter of the League of Nations, attending a League-organised youth conference in Geneva. On the way back, his group visited Paris and he went to the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition. There he bought a copy of The Communist Manifestoand read Marx for the first time.
Work
He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, but his education was interrupted by war service. He joined the British Communist Party while at Cambridge. Along with Eric Hobsbawm, he was given the task of writing a Communist Party pamphlet about the Russo-Finnish War. He says in (Politics and Letters) that they "were given the job as people who could write quickly, from historical materials supplied for us. You were often in there writing about topics you did not know very much about, as a professional with words." No copies of this work seem to have survived. At the time, the British government was keen to support Finland in its war against the Soviet Union, while still being at war with Nazi Germany.
In the winter of 1940, he decided that he should join the British Army. This was against the Party line at the time, though in fact he stayed at Cambridge to take his exams in June 1941, the same month that Germany invaded Russia. As he describes it, his membership lapsed, without him ever formally resigning.
At the time he joined the army, it was normal for undergraduates to be directed into the signal corps. He received some initial training, but was then switched to artillery and anti-tank weapons. He was seen as 'officer material' and served as an officer in the Anti-Tank Regiment of the Guards Armoured Division, 1941-1945, being sent into the early fighting in Normandy after D Day. In Politics and Letters he says "I don't think the intricate chaos of that Normandy fighting has ever been recorded". He commanded a unit of four tanks and mentions losing touch with two of them during fighting against SS Panzer forces; he never discovered what happened to them, because there was then a withdrawal.
He was part of the fighting from Normandy in 1944 through to Germany in 1945, where he was involved with the liberation of one of the smaller concentration camps, which was afterwards used to detain SS officers. He was also shocked to find that Hamburg had suffered saturation bombing, not just of military targets and docks as they had been told.
He received his M.A. from Trinity in 1946 and then served as a tutor in adult education at the University of Oxford for several years.He made his reputation with Culture and Society, published in 1958 and an immediate success. This was followed in 1961 by The Long Revolution. Here, in Chapter 3: "The Growth of the Popular Press") he anticipated by thirty years the later excavations by Chomsky (in Manufacturing Consent). Williams provides an exhaustive analysis of costs, circulation figures and industrial growth in the British newspaper industry from 1665 to the present, showing their revolutionary intent and potential and their subversion by the industrial/capitalist complex. The book ranges also through the myriad fields of British culture, interrogating Language ("The Growth of "Standard" English"), Education ("Education and British Society"), and Literature ("The Social History of English Writers") - preparing the ground for others like Terry Eagleton to cultivate. Here, for the first time, he also problematises the notion of "culture" itself ("The Analysis of Culture"). His interrogation of the print media was expanded in 1962 into an even more prescient and Chomskian analysis in his Communications. Here, he carries out a systematic step-by-step analysis of the history and content of newspapers by both quantity and quality - critically appraising how they deal with controversy and how they go about the business of establishing and maintaining hegemony.
Williams' writings were taken up by the New Left and given a very wide readership. He was also well-known as a regular book reviewer for the Manchester Guardian newspaper (before it moved to London and became Establishment). His years in adult education were an important experience and on the strength of his books, Williams was invited to return to Cambridge in 1961, eventually becoming Professor of Drama there (1974 - 1983). He was Visiting Professor of Political Science at Stanford University in 1973, an experience that he used to good effect in his still useful book Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974). A committed socialist, he was greatly interested in the relationships between language, literature, and society and published many books, essays and articles on these and other issues. Among the most important is The City and the Country (1973), in which chapters about literature alternate with chapters of social history. It is here, in particular, that his work closely echoes that of E. P. Thompson. His writing is passionate, clear and scathing about the impact of the Enclosures and of the subsequrent const5ruction of the many grran houses that were consequentially impposedupon what had once been common land, shared by the ordinary peasants for centuries:
“Some of them had been there for centuries, visible triumphs over the ruin and labour of others. But the extraordinary phase of extension, rebuilding and enlarging which occurred in the 18th century, represents a spectacular increase in the rate of exploitation, a good deal of it, of course, the profit of trade and of colonial exploitation; much of it, however, the higher surplus value of a new and more efficient mode of production. It is fashionable to admire these extraordinarily numerous houses: the extended manors, the neo-classical mansions, that lie so close to rural Britain. People still pass from village to village, guidebook in hand, to see the next and yet the next example, to look at the stones and the furniture. But stand at any point and look at that land. Look at what those fields, those streams, those woods even today produce. Think it through as labour and see how long and sys¬tematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to rear that many houses on that scale... What these ‘great’ houses do is to break the scale, by an act of will corresponding to their real and systematic exploitation of others. For look at the sites, the façades, the defining avenues and walls, the great iron gates and the guardian lodges. These were chosen for more than their effect from the inside out... they were chosen, also, you now see, for the other effect, from the outside looking in: a visible stamping of power, of displayed wealth and command: a social disproportion which was meant to impress and overawe. Much of the real profit of a more modern agriculture went not into productive investment, but into that explicit social declaration: a mutually competitive but still uniform exposition, at every turn, of an established and commanding class power."
As his writing matured and developed, his interest in hegemony also grew. He became fascinated by meaning - by how language and meaning are transformed by social, political and economic structures and changes. This led him to write Keywords (1976) -an exploration of the actual language of cultural transformation. Neither a defining dictionary nor a specialist glossary, it is a record of an enquyiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings concerned with the practices and institutions described as "culture" and "society". He charts the historical changes to key meanings in key words that help to shape our understandinng of life and society.
His tightly written Marxism and Literature (1977) is mainly for specialists, but it also sets out his own approach to cultural studies, which he called cultural materialism. This book was in part a response to "structuralism" in literary studies and pressure on Williams to make a more theoretical statement of his own position against criticisms that it was a humanist Marxism, based on unexamined assumptions about lived experience. In his later Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980) he tackles the central problematic of Marxist revisionism head on. His essay "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" is an attempt to counter (like Thompson) the structural Marxism of Althusser. For the first time, Williams makes considerable use of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. Williams was also interested in the work of Pierre Bourdieu . His book Culture (also published under the title The Sociology of Culture 1981/1982), also further develops some key arguments, especially about aesthetics, and finally, his The Politics of Modernism, (published posthumously in 1989) places him firmly at the critical intersection with Postmodernism. Here, his "When Was Modernism?" poses a crucial question which situates the critical theorising in its social, economic and political context. He shifts the terms of the Modernism-Postmodernism debate from formal analysis to an analysis of social formations (much in line with his priorSociology of Culture). He questions the role and status of the avant-garde in society and asks what might be meant by a cultural theory "beyond the modern" which avoids the pitfalls of much postmodernism and examines the implications of both modernism and the avant-garde for socialist-political organisation.
Raymond Williams started out writing of the 15th and 16th Centuries and ended up writing about today and our own dilemmas. Williams can accurately be called the grandfather of British Cultural Studies and laid the foundations in his work for the later developments in that field by Stuart Hall and others at Birmingham.
Howard Zinn was born in New York City and grew up in a working-class family in Brooklyn where he became a shipyard labourer.
He volunteered in World War Two to fight fascism, and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant Air Force bombardier, to fight fascism, and he bombed targets Czechoslovakia, Hungary and later Germany. In April, 1945, he participated in one of the first military uses of napalm, which took place in Royan, France. The bombings were aimed at German soldiers who were, in Zinn's words, hiding and waiting out the closing days of the war. The attacks killed not only the German soldiers but also French civilians. Nine years later, Zinn visited Royan to examine documents and interview residents
Zinn said his experience as a bombardier, combined with his research into the reasons for and effects of the bombing of Royan, sensitised him to the ethical dilemmas faced by G.I.s during wartime. He questioned the justifications for military operations inflicting civilian casualties in the Allied bombing of cities such as Dresden, Royan, Tokyo, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
In his books, The Politics of History and The Zinn Reader, he described how the bombing was ordered at the war's end by decision-makers most probably motivated by the desire for career advancement rather than for legitimate military objectives.
His experience of war led him to take a life-long stand against imperialism, militarism, jingoistic nationalism and neo-colonialism, and led to him becoming both one of the most respected and most vilified historians in American history.
Work
After his discharge from the military he attended New York University and received his bachelor's degree in 1951. He did graduate work in political science at Columbia University, completing his Masters in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1958. During this time he was an instructor at Upsala College in East Orange, NJ, from 1953 to 1956.
Zinn's doctoral dissertation on New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's congressional career was published in 1959 as LaGuardia in Congress. Zinn portrayed LaGuardia as a feisty liberal Republican who fought for pro-labor legislation and criticized the upper-class bias of his party's economic policies. Although LaGuardia would remain one of his heroes, Zinn's own political views grew much more radical. In Zinn's introduction to his anthology New Deal Thought (1965), he argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his leading advisers thwarted a possible American social revolution by pursuing the modest goal of restoring the American middle class to prosperity and rejecting more radical social reform.
After finishing his PhD he was appointed chairman of the department of history and social sciences at Spelman College in Atlanta, where he participated in the Civil Rights movement and served as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later wrote the book SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964). At Spelman, Zinn collaborated with historian Staughton Lynd and mentored young student activists, among them writer Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman now president of the Children’s Defense Fund who acknowledges Zinn as major influence in her.
Although tenured, Zinn was fired from Spelman in 1965 for siding with students in their desire to challenge the University’s traditional emphasis of turning out "young ladies" rather than acknowledging that Spelman students were likely to be found on the picket line, or in jail for participating in the greater effort to desegregate in public places in Atlanta. As he himself noted: his seven years at Spelman College, were " probably the most interesting, exciting, most educational years for me. I learned more from my students than my students learned from me." While there, he participated with his students in the sit-ins and freedom rides and was critical of the failure of the supposedly liberal Kennedy administration for its inability or unwillingness to enforce federal laws more stringently in favour of the de-segregationists.
Zinn wrote frequently about the struggle for civil rights, both as a participant and historian and in 1960-61, he took a year off from teaching to write SNCC: The New Abolitionists and The Southern Mystique. The SNCC book was both an impassioned first-hand description of the civil rights struggle and a cogent historical analysis of the modern movement's links with pre-Civil War abolitionism.
Following his dismissal from Spelman he accepted a position in the political science department at Boston University. His classes in civil liberties were among the most popular classes offered at BU with as many as 400 students subscribing each semester to the non-required class. He taught at BU for 24 years and retired in 1988. While there he was politically active in many acts of resistance – in particular towards the war in Vietnam.
He became well known in New Left circles for his opposition to United States military involvement in Vietnam. In his book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal (1967), he made a powerful case for reversing the Lyndon Johnson administration's policy of escalation. Zinn's role in the peace movement was not limited to his scholarly writings. Throughout the mid-1960s he was active in the American Mobilization Committee's national drive to bring an end to the United States intervention. In February 1968, he travelled to North Vietnam with the radical priest, Father Daniel Berrigan , to secure the release of three American bomber pilots shot down on air raids. As he had done earlier with his experiences in the civil rights movement, Zinn wrote articles that offered a first-hand account of his trip to Hanoi.
Traditional academics scolded Zinn for being partisan about his subject matter. In a collection of his essays, The Politics of History (1970), he rejected the view that historical scholarship was objective. He argued that all historical writing was political and that historians should align themselves with humane values. To fail to speak out against evil, he warned, was to be irrelevant and irresponsible. He sought to illustrate the usefulness of a politically engaged approach to history in his essays on World War II, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. They provided examples of how his historical approach worked in practice.
When Daniel Ellsberg, a former RAND Corporation consultant secretly copied The Pentagon Papers, (which described internal planning and policy decisions of the United States in the Vietnam War) he gave a copy of them to Howard Zinn. Along with Noam Chomsky, Zinn edited and annotated the copy of The Pentagon Papers. Zinn's longtime publisher, Beacon Press, published what has come to be known as the Senator Mike Gravel edition of The Pentagon Papers, four volumes plus a fifth volume with analysis by Chomsky and Zinn.
At Ellsberg's criminal trial for theft, conspiracy, and espionage in connection with the publication of the Pentagon Papers by The New York Times, defense attorneys called Zinn as an expert witness to explain to the jury the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from World War II to 1963. Zinn discussed that history for several hours, noting that there was nothing in the papers of military significance that could be used to harm the defense of the United States, that the information in them was simply embarrassing to our government because what was revealed, in the government's own interoffice memos, was how it had lied to the American public. The secrets disclosed in the Pentagon Papers might embarrass politicians, might hurt the profits of corporations wanting tin, rubber, oil, in far-off places. But this was not the same as hurting the nation, the people, Zinn wrote in his autobiography. Most of the jurors later said they voted for acquittal. However, the federal judge dismissed the case on grounds it had been tainted by the burglary by President Richard Nixon's administration of the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
When critics charged that the New Left historians' historiography was deficient because radical scholars had not produced a full-scale synthesis of American history, Zinn set to work to prove them wrong. His now famous A People's History of the United States (1980), surveyed all of American history from the point of view of the working classes and minority groups. He documented the history of race, sex, and class; the history of civil disobedience; how hopes for a more egalitarian society had been frustrated, and how a small, upper-class elite had retained its hold on power and wealth.
The book presents American history through the eyes of workers, American Indians, slaves, women, blacks and populists. A People's History has sold more than a million copies, making it one of the best-selling history books of all time. Despite its lack of footnotes and other scholarly apparatus, it is one of most influential texts in college classrooms today - not only in history classes, but also in such fields as economics, political science, literature, and women's studies. His position, his perspective, was unapologetically critical of American domestic and foreign policy.
In reply to the critics who accuse him of a bias in his historical analysis he acknowledges the overtly political agenda of A People's History in an explanatory coda to the 1995 edition:
"I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching."
In the 27 years since the first edition of A People's History was publishe, it has been used as an alternative to standard textbooks in many high school and college history courses, and is one of the most widely known examples of critical pedagogy. According to the New York Times Book Review it "routinely sells more than 100,000 copies a year"
His academic life has never been very far from his political and personal perspectives. More recently, he opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and has written several books about it. He asserts that the U.S. will end its war with, and occupation of, Iraq when resistance within the military increases, in the same way resistance within the military contributed to ending the U.S. war in Vietnam. He compares the demand by a growing number of contemporary U.S. military families to end the war in Iraq to the parallel "in the Confederacy in the Civil War, when the wives of soldiers rioted because their husbands were dying and the plantation owners were profiting from the sale of cotton, refusing to grow grains for civilians to eat." Zinn argued that "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable."[
In response to Zinn’s critics Dale McCartney, editor of the Canadian online magazine, Seven Oaks, has written:
"Zinn is not neglecting a more objective perspective on American history; he's rejecting it in favor of an openly political stance that reclaims the history of oppressed peoples, regardless of race or gender. His popularity is testament to both the appeal of such a reading of American history, and the desperate thirst of working class people, people of colour, women and the many other victims of modern society's ravages for a history in which they are at the centre. I would go so far as to argue that not only has Kazin underestimated the importance of this role for Zinn's book, but that the academic tradition of objectivity (read: liberalism that favors white men) has played a key role in marginalizing oppressed peoples and derailing social movements. Zinn's work is an important corrective to this destructive tradition in historical writing."
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