Abstract
This article examines a post-war generation of academics in the United States and in Britain, who, coming from lower-class families without any previous experience of university education, became internationally famous but nevertheless continued to feel out of place in the academic world. Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of habitus, field and doxa is useful in studying the world of such outsiders and exiles who shaped post-war sociology. Without an established canon of sociology, these students typically developed critical and creative perspectives on society. In Britain the post-war welfare state was the foundation of this new breed of academics. John O’Neill is the classic example. In America ‘The Disobedient Generation’ were influenced by race, the Vietnam War, and the draft. William Connolly and Stephen Turner provide two case studies of highly successful academics who were often subjectively outsiders. ‘Event’ and ‘hazard’ imply that successful careers are in fact merely accidental. Neoliberalism may have closed off such accidental careers.
Keywords
William Connolly’s Resounding Events
The sociology of both philosophy and sociology are now well-developed areas of research (Collins, 1988). In some respects, the most useful approach has been developed by Pierre Bourdieu (1988) in Homo Academicus. His conceptual distinction between the specific situation of an academic, their habitus, the doxa of ideas and concepts, and the broad field of power within the faculties in which they operated has been valuable, and we can see it applied to the situation of Martin Heidegger, who was out of place in various prestigious German universities but especially at Marburg. Coming from a provincial peasant background, his awkwardness was, for example, captured at a dinner party by the wife of Ernst Cassirer who commented on Heidegger’s old fashioned black suit, his regional accent, his piercing eyes as one might find in a workman from Bavaria (Bourdieu, 1991: 48–9). The problem was not lost on Bourdieu, who was also conscious of his own background, variously described as peasant or petit bourgeois from a small town in rural France (Jenkins, 1992: 13). Bourdieu is perhaps better known for his work in the field of cultural production on the habitus of the ‘penniless bourgeois’ who occupy ‘an ambivalent relationship to the dominant class within the field of power’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 165). Why should we be interested, apart from idle curiosity, in the location of outsiders in the university system? One obvious answer is that they throw further light on an issue discussed, for example, by Robert Merton (1972) in his insider-outsider distinction. At the time, Merton had in mind the racial divisions within American universities. There is, in addition, a well-developed line of inquiry into the status of exiles with reference to the wave of Jewish exiles escaping from Nazi Germany to universities in the United States and Great Britain (Kettler, 2011). Perhaps the most studied group of Jewish exiles was the Frankfurt School. In more recent research into exiles, attention has turned to Muslim/Arab uprooted scholars and perhaps most notably to Edward Said, whose Out of Place (Said, 1999) exactly captures many of the issues contained in the volumes under review.
Many of the features of being out of place were explored in The Disobedient Generation (Sica and Turner, 2005), which examined 18 sociologists from the 1960s. This post-war generation was involved in or influenced by the May events of 1968 in France and the UK or by similar student protests in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s. While this sense of being out of place characterized professors from both the US and the UK, the driving force behind their alienation was very different. The experience of students in the US in this period was conditioned by the Vietnam War and the draft, plus the racial divide which separated white and black students, which also carried over into the military. What they came eventually to experience was the impact of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. What these sociologists shared was that they typically carried their student disobedience into their careers as university professors, often by challenging the top-down bureaucratic authority of the management systems that came to dominate university life in the age of neoliberalism. It was often sociology departments that were threatened by closure. Mrs. Thatcher’s infamous interview in 1972, in which she claimed that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families’, was an expression of her disdain for the humanities and social sciences. Although the precise wording of her claim has been much disputed, for me as a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen at the time, it spelt the end of sociology as a career in Britain. My response – as I assume for many of my generation – was to migrate, typically to more friendly Commonwealth universities. Another target of conservatives was cultural studies. A well-known example was the controversial closure of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in 2002 because of ‘restructuring’. The school had been made internationally famous by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. Hoggart, who came originally from a slum in Leeds, was to become the warden of Goldsmiths College. In what was a standard reference in sociology at the time, he described the sharp division of society into ‘them’ and ‘us’ (Hoggart, 1957). Hall, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, became famous as a champion of cultural studies, the founding editor of The New Left Review, and a leading critic of Thatcherism.
In this review article, my specific interest therefore is to examine a post-war generation of academics, primarily in political theory and sociology, who, coming from lower-class families with no previous experience of university education, became internationally famous and who nevertheless often continued to feel out of place in the academic world. I consider the generation of students who entered universities in the post-war period but especially in the 1960s, and who, coming from the working class or lower middle class, were often the first generation to benefit from the expansion of universities after the war. To take two immediate examples: Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most successful British example, was born in Edmonton, London, into the lower middle class and eventually entered the House of Lords via Cambridge and the LSE. Although he became widely known in sociology through his theory of ‘structuration’, he was a public intellectual through his development of the idea of ‘The Third Way’ that was the basis of the electoral success of Tony Blair. However, I would argue that the classic example of the working-class boy who rose to prominence in sociology was John O’Neill. He was an Irish Catholic, working-class boy from north London – who, after migrating to Canada, became a famous academic with publications that included everything from Sociology as a Skin Trade (O’Neill, 1972) to Essaying Montaigne (O’Neil, 1982). He never abandoned his working-class persona and diction. On a personal note, I recall attending a conference at Heidelberg with John where his colourful language shocked the German professors and their wives.
Against this introduction I consider two recent publications by two senior American professors from working-class backgrounds, whose autobiographical reflections on their careers are perfect examples of socially mobile academics who, in various ways, have retained their sense of ambiguity with respect to their place in the power structures of the university system.
The clear and articulate example of a working-class boy out of place is the volume by William Connolly. The title of the book was not chosen casually. Indeed, one might reasonably conclude that the book is in fact an analysis of the nature of events rather than a conventional biography. This conclusion regarding events might explain the somewhat odd organization of the book. It is composed of three voices: Connolly explaining his general philosophy and the role of events, plus the voice of an anonymous reader (in italics) who asks Connolly pertinent questions, and an academic commentary in bold print on some aspects of his work. It is probably wise to read the Epilogue first in which he explains the significance of Hair in his personal evolution, the value of Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment, various comments on misinformation about Dr Anthony Fauci and the pernicious fake news emanating from Donald Trump and his followers. Chapter 5 (‘The New Fascist Revolt’) first appeared as a revised version of an article from Theory & Event. Resounding Events is as much an account of his philosophy as a biography. In fact, the biography as such starts on page 43 when Connolly notes: ‘Billy was born on January 6, 1938, to working-class parents in Flint, Michigan. His dad, the son of Irish and Scottish immigrants, had broken with the low-level managerial career of his father in General Motors to become an assembly-line auto worker and to join the 1937 sit-down strike at Fisher No. 2 in the heart of the city.’ The narrative then proceeds to describe a happy domestic scene that was eventually disrupted by his father’s war-time service and by an accident from which he never fully recovered. His mother then bore the full brunt of domestic responsibility. The book concludes with a long account of Connolly’s successful journey through various universities and a discussion of his evolving research interests.
Connolly’s first appointment was at Ohio University in 1965. He went on to secure various university appointments, eventually joining Johns Hopkins University in 1985, where he remains as the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor. He published The Terms of Political Discourse in 1974, which won the Benjamin Evans Lippincott Award in 1999. The book offers a defence of the idea of essentially contested concepts whereby he criticized the notion that the academic language of politics is a neutral medium existing independently of the structures whereby it is produced. Connolly writes of that publication and the award: ‘I continue to cherish that award, thinking of it as a testament to the arrival of a boy from Flint into the academy’ (Connolly, 2022: 80). He describes the main argument of the book as a quest but ‘not the pursuit of community; it was the pursuit of a positive ethos of engagement between the multifarious partisans that encourages contestation to proceed without violence and allows new majority assemblages to form’ (Connolly, 2022: 81). The quest of behaviouralism and other forms of scientism was in fact to close down politics as an arena of creative contestation.
His amicable divorce is briefly discussed on pages 99–100 and the evolution of new relationships that were to follow. His working-class background – and feelings of being out of place – struck him more forcefully when he hesitated to join a gay pride march in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s. He confessed to the chasm that had emerged in his background and the emerging work of sexual experiment: ‘Not enough in my working-class background had primed me to engage this discrepancy’ (pp. 204–5). Reading Foucault, watching gay films, and with the encouragement of friends, he eventually removed the nervous knots in his stomach. His working-class view of masculinity required serious revision.
In Chapter 4 – ‘The Hopkins School of Theory’ – we are introduced to his many conflicts with university administrators and other bureaucrats over appointments and questionable dismissals that were only the preface to the impact of neoliberalism on universities on both sides of the Atlantic. These conflicts continue to be endemic to all universities and threaten to destroy the creativity and innovation that we need from them. The remaining chapters and epilogue discuss his mature work in which he has grappled more systematically with issues about climate change, religion and pluralization. Chapter 5 on ‘The New Fascist Revolt’ describes where we are now. I turn to these aspects of his recent work having discussed the meaning of ‘event’.
Coming to the issue of events, the title of this work was not chosen lightly but rather carefully and judiciously. Although the whole biography is about events, he offers only one concise definition: ‘An event is thus a contingency, or a cluster of contingencies, that affects profoundly one or more constituencies – human and/or nonhuman. An event stands out in that it arrives unexpectedly, pressing those who encounter it either to change course or to become more obdurate in staying the course. Events are thus not history’. There is a short but amusing definition of event by reference to two everyday phrases, namely, ‘nobody’s perfect’ and ‘shit happens’. He notes that these two phrases, while annoying, together emphasize ‘the place of contingencies of various sorts in the organization of subjects. Collectivities, spiritualities, and economies, as well as in the surpluses that occupy each formation’ (p. 99). In passing, I note that Connolly nowhere in this volume refers to the work of Max Weber, whose sociology can be read not so much as an account of social action but of its unintended consequences. Most notably we might say that the ‘spirit of capitalism’ was the unintended consequence of the ‘Protestant ethic’. This theme has been to some extent identified by Fredric Jameson (1973) in terms of Weber’s ‘narrative structure’. The ‘iron cage’ of capitalism was the unintended consequence of (the event) of Puritanism.
My interpretation of the idea of event in Connolly’s autobiography is a warning about how to think of our life stories, that is, about memory. To what extent do we think about the past as somehow meaningful in that it can be constructed in terms of a familiar pattern – birth, development, maturity, and death – that makes sense? By contrast, we may think about our lives as largely determined by events over which we have no anticipation and the consequences of which we cannot control, let alone predict. By the very fact of constructing a narrative about ourselves, we impose some sort of order or meaning that gives our lives some purpose or significance. Alternatively, we might think about events as episodes with unanticipated consequences. Our attempts at an orderly biography are retrospective attempts to create an intelligible narrative. Perhaps the real meaning of our eventful lives is that they underline the vulnerability of our existence. This view of the eventfulness of human existence inevitably brings religion into view.
Connolly’s experiences of Christianity in his youth were relatively unimportant in his development. In fact, Connolly early on in his youth embraced atheism. Now in his maturity, Connolly comes to criticize both liberalism and secularism as inadequate in relation to what he calls ‘the visceral register of being’ in Why I Am Not a Secularist (Connolly, 1999: 29). Consequently, in his recent work, religion has become more significant, partly because political theorists must take notice of the connections between the far right and evangelical Christians, especially in relation to Donald Trump (Connolly, 1999). An example is the recent rise of the NAR (New Apostolic Reformation), which plans to train spiritual warriors to protect Trump. However, what is often referred to as ‘the turn to religion’ in philosophy and sociology has a much greater significance that goes beyond contemporary American politics. Of particular interest has been recent interpretations of the letters and mission of St Paul to create a new community as essentially contributions to political theory.
One significant figure here is Alain Badiou, who has interpreted Paul as a major political figure in the eventful emergence of a new religion as a consequence of the Christ-Event (Badiou, 2003). The life of Paul and the eruption of a new religio-political community were events that challenged existing social structures and ways of thinking. In later publications, Badiou came to write extensively on the radical politics of the event (Badiou, 2006). The event can spring into view when it breaks into the social scene, that is, when it ruptures normality. Events are revolutionary political convulsions that in Badiou’s work can be interpreted as a development of Maoist theories of revolution. For Badiou, reality is based on a void constituted by an ‘inconsistent multiplicity’. There appears here to be some intellectual connection with Connolly’s own embrace of the notions about complexity and fragility (Connolly, 2013). To recognize that Connolly reads widely and eclectically would be an understatement to say the least, but these developments in theology, philosophy and political theory have yet to emerge in his criticisms of liberal democracy and engagement with religion and secularism.
Stephen Turner’s Mad Hazard
I turn now to the life and work of Stephen Turner – another working-class boy who has often been the gadfly of American sociology. In The Impossible Science, Stephen and Jonathan Turner (1990) debated the prospects of sociology as a science. Although they disagreed over many issues, they concluded that sociology struggles to achieve the status of a science because ‘the organization of [the discipline] as a whole hinders its development as a science’ (Turner and Turner, 1990: 8). Stephen Turner works in both sociology and philosophy, and in his recent publications he has been critical of the work of experts in modern society – including, one can assume, the expert opinion of professional sociologists. In The Politics of Expertise (Turner, 2014), he argued that expert knowledge undermines the conditions of liberal democracy where knowledge is unequally distributed, resulting in ‘epistemic inequality’. Turner has spent most of his academic career at the University of South Florida between sociology and philosophy, and from which location he has conducted what can only be called a ‘campaign’ against the sociological establishment. Perhaps we might surmise that he is also out of place?
Turner’s biography certainly follows the pattern of being a working-class boy with a meteoric career. While Connolly grew up in an all-white neighbourhood, Turner was born and raised in an all-black community in Chicago, Illinois. His parents, as evangelical Christians, chose to live there because they believed that the racial division could be healed by good intentions. However, after a white boy was murdered in a street confrontation with black youths, ‘A campaign was organized to preserve the neighbourhood, and white people pledged to stay to build an integrated neighbourhood. It was a fantasy. After their bicycles were stolen, their kids threatened, their businesses robbed, and reality sank in, the whites gave up’ (Turner, 2005: 287). As a consequence of these early experiences, Turner felt more comfortable with black than with white kids. As a result, his career was full of contradictions, or at least subject to (fortuitous) accidents.
Although by any measure Turner has enjoyed a successful academic career and has an impressive list of publications, he has engaged in a life-time struggle with the professional elites who have controlled academic sociology in the United States. This struggle has been in part over the status of sociology as a science. While the gatekeepers of the profession decided that statistics and mathematical models were the way forward, if sociology was to be recognized as a science, Turner has dismissed this project as an illusion. While the guardians of American sociology generally ignored European social theory, in the ASA debate in 2004 on the place of theory in sociology, Turner claimed that social theory thrives in Europe but not in American sociology. His life-time critique has guaranteed his status as an outsider, but nevertheless a successful outsider. It is perhaps no wonder that he admires the work of other successful outsiders, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour. Perhaps Turner is closest to Latour, who also spent a lifetime deconstructing the official notions of science. Turner also admires Karl Popper – a Viennese exile who first took refuge in New Zealand and later in London – who struggled to defend his own understanding of science against persistent criticism.
Turner’s career was determined by eventful turns and accidents such as the good fortune to be supervised at Chicago by a demanding Edward Shils, whose erudition was daunting. Like Turner, Shils also worked across different disciplines, having come to sociology via an immersion in literature. As the founding editor of Minerva, he was also involved in debates about science and expert knowledge. Shils had worked with Talcott Parsons – often a target of Turner’s wrath – but he was of course a key figure in the scholarship surrounding Max Weber. Shils was also deeply critical of sociology, and in The Present State of American Sociology (Shils, 1948) he documented the internal divisions within professional sociology, the absence of any visible accumulation of relevant theory, the lack of historical knowledge, and the lack of interest in large-scale modern societies outside America, and a propensity to focus on trivia. Shils spent much of his academic career outside America and was a fellow of Peterhouse College Cambridge – one of the ancient, elite and, perhaps one can say, exotic colleges in Cambridge. One can fully understand Turner’s respect for Shils, for example in The Calling of a Social Theorist (Adair-Toteff and Turner, 2019). In his critical engagement with the illusions of sociology, Turner has perfectly displayed the career of a famous academic who nevertheless remains an outsider, or at least sees himself as a stranger to professional sociology in America. In that regard perhaps both Connolly and Turner are outsiders who have found themselves ironically also on the inside.
On the Demise of the Working-class Academic
Connolly and Turner both belonged to a post-war generation of successful academics from the working class who rose to great heights in the world of university professors. They enjoyed the benefits of post-war reconstruction. The building of the British welfare state via the election of the Labour Party in 1945 created educational opportunities for a whole generation who came to maturity in the 1960s. The American experience was eventually overshadowed by the Vietnam War and the constant anxieties caused by the draft. Both societies were to be transformed by the neoliberalism of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Both Connolly and Turner tend to regard their lives as having been conditioned by events over which they had no control. However, both men can reasonably see their lives as conditioned by unpredictable but ultimately beneficial events. Their histories leave us with a question, namely: has the educational route to success and fame for the working class been cut off by the transformation of the modern university? There are obvious indications of a failing institution. One issue is demographic. With the falling birth rate, universities must survive financially by recruiting large numbers of Chinese and Indian students. However, because universities cannot survive the stigma of failing or unhappy students, standards must be compromised. To maintain happy students, university education must be entertaining rather than challenging. At the same time working-class entry into universities is compromised by the rising cost of an undergraduate degree, which is often seen, at least by conservative politicians, as irrelevant to the needs of industry. As a result, student enrolments in the United States have fallen by 25% in recent years. There are, however, other challenges on the horizon. For example, will AI render many university programs irrelevant? The delivery of university courses can be more efficiently undertaken with AI instructors. Many of these developments – especially working and studying at home – were an outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic when schools and universities were effectively closed. These developments mean that the prospect of working-class mobility via a university degree has been eroded by a series of unforeseen consequential events.
