Odd man in: A critical appreciation of the work of Phil Cohen

Abstract

This article provides a critical appreciation of the life and work of social theorist Phil Cohen, tracing the evolution of his ideas and activities from working class ethnography, through his years as a street and housing activist, to his years at the University of East London in the 2000s. His important contributions to youth cultural theory and race relations theorising are described. He both set agendas and moved them forward. Cohen’s writing style was literary, characteristically digressive and dense, but always ambitious in scope. The piece ends with a brief consideration of the status of intellectuals on the left as well as a consideration of Cohen’s later innovative work on cartography and cultural mapping.

For authors there is a need to impose some kind of narrative and thematic order on what might otherwise be an incoherent series of discrete and inconsequential experiences.

Waypoints (2019).

“Every project has its founding myth, a story about its origins in which the cold rational prose of ‘aims and objectives’ melts into the thicker air of an auto-poetics. The risk is that in the process starting points become end points, and the capacity for improvisation gives way to the observation of teleologies. How many organisations have foundered because their journeys are governed by inflexible ‘road maps’ laid down by their founders?”

The Occasion of Poetry in Waypoints (2019).

Phil Cohen, activist and cultural theorist, who died in November 2023, was a key thinker in the social sciences, writing across four decades in areas spanning cultural studies, psychoanalysis, youth studies, geography, critical race theory and narratology. The importation and cross fertilisation of usually disparate frameworks was one of the things that made his theorising so distinctive and influential. Cohen deliberately sought to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and academic fences and fashions. His conceptual appetite was voracious, and he never stopped contributing to debates and exploring new theories and methods. However, he was also sceptical of the academic habit of cultivating acolytes and deifying theorists.

Cohen had a lifelong fascination with vernacular creativity, and this was reflected in his early work on working class community and subcultures which inspired many of the contributors to Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 2006 [1976]) and, more widely, others in the fields of youth studies and radical criminology. He was also not a conventional academic, never obtaining an undergraduate degree nor writing a doctoral thesis, instead gaining his PhD by publication. Cohen was questioning of those who stayed within the safety of the ivory tower, theorists who commented upon the lives of those ‘below’ without ever really getting their hands dirty. Many have used Cohen’s ideas, but perhaps fewer appreciated the depth and breadth of his scholarship. Partly for these reasons we feel it is important to say something both valedictory and critically appreciative. This short paper will discuss his life and work and his mode of theorising with particular emphasis on his contribution to subculture theory and youth studies.

The unorthodox scholar

Cohen grew up in a flat in London’s Bloomsbury, away from the East End where Hitler was carpet bombing the docks and where, many years later, he became Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of East London. Born during WWII, the son of a doctor and a nurse, young Phil was evacuated from the city, a process his parents believed inflicted lifelong psychological scars. After the war, he thrived academically as a student at the St Paul’s Cathedral School, where he studied history and classics, but was uneasy with his school’s crusty elitism, and developed radical sympathies and an interest in postwar youth culture. He was a budding subject of the protest culture that was being driven by rebellious middle-class youth.

In 1963 he won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, but the institution was hardly a congenial fit for the young idealist inclined to the study of culture and society. The university’s classical scholars had long considered the ‘new’ disciplines of sociology (which only gained department status in 2004) and criminology, as heretical, and in the early sixties they were not available for undergraduate study, and so Cohen read archaeology. The Cambridge Institute of Criminology (CIC) had been established in 1959, but its brief was to produce research for public policy and was very much concerned with the functionalism of deviance theory, the ‘management’ of resistance, and what has become known as ‘administrative criminology’. Nevertheless, Cohen got to know the CIC people and was commissioned to edit an issue of Cambridge Opinion on prisons. He contributed a paper – his first published academic work – based on an interview with a career criminal and long-term inmate.

This early experience sparked his interest in working class ethnography. Cohen’s rather emotionally austere upbringing had given him a romantic view of working class gemeinschaft, and a curiosity to chart the terrain of everyday life. He hung out with duffle-coat-wearing radicals and beatniks: ‘Some friends were revolutionaries’, he wrote, but he was more interested in the working class for their traditions of ‘kinship, mutual aid, and vibrant popular culture’ than as a political force (Cohen, 2013b: 75). The idea that the working class would imminently form a revolutionary ‘class-for-itself’ was beloved of young lefties, but Cohen was also aware that the actual contribution of these well-meaning activities to class struggle was only to sell radical newspapers. Facing the likelihood of failure, because he had neglected his studies, Cohen dropped out of Cambridge before his finals in 1965 and so, in common with several contemporaries who became academics, subsequently had to chart an unorthodox route back to universities.

Like many middle class kids who joined the sixties counterculture, he abandoned the norms and expectations of the parent culture and chased adventures. He ran off to sea and worked as an exploited cabin boy on a fishing trawler, then in a church-run hostel for recently released young offenders, where he furthered his interest in youth culture at a time when novelists and film makers were, in Cohen’s (2013b, p. 79) words, starting to portray ‘the young delinquent as working class hero’. In the late 1960s, when, like now, homelessness was a major problem in London, Cohen became involved in the radical squatting movement. Adopting the nom de guerre Dr John, he led a group of young people to occupy an expansive property off Piccadilly, owned by the Queen Mother, and established a commune. Dr John, the archetypal anarchic squatter, epitomising the hippy folk devil at a time when Cohen (1972) was researching his classic study, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Vilified in the popular press and strong-armed by the police, the spotlight upon the activities of Dr John (Phil) was such that his parents were forced to leave London for a time, to escape media intrusions on their lives. Cohen’s (2013b) reflections on these heady events were written up in his memoir Reading Room Only. In it, he describes the subcultural admixture of bourgeois hippies coexisting with rough working class kids, dreamers and wannabe gangsters. This was a very London staging of the counterculture that contrasted starkly with California’s 1967 Summer of Love.

Magical (re)solutions: Youth, class and space in the post-industrial city

Cohen’s re-entry to academia came via his work with homeless youth while running a shelter in London’s Kings Cross and surrounds. He was curious about their youthful and often spectacular resistance, and the way this connected to the broader politics of class and community. This was at the time of the nascent radical criminology movement led by figures like Becker (1963), Cohen (1972) and Young (1971), whose work challenged the functionalism of much mainstream sociology and criminology and demanded closer attention to the politics of youth/working class resistance. By the late 1960s, the postwar social contract had begun to unravel, and Britain was in the throes of de-industrialisation that led to the widespread unemployment a collapse of the social ecology of working-class communities.

In 1972, Cohen wrote an Occasional Paper for the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham entitled ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community’ where he argued youth subcultures provide only ‘magical resolutions’ not real solutions to structural social problems. That paper was original and influential in theorising a possible relationship between the series of working class youth subcultural styles and the underlying changes that were affecting the ‘respectable’ working class modes of their parent culture. The paper had some forgivable flaws; it was sometimes speculative and necessarily empirically underdeveloped. Nevertheless, its impressive syncretism, prefigures much of his more rigorous later work. It deserves its place in the canon of youth theorising as one of the most influential agenda-setting papers for those writing in the neo-Gramscian tradition of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, and particularly for those exploring youth’s symbolic creativity and resistance. The paper is frequently acknowledged by other theorists for its influential laying out of core issues, including those canvassed in Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 2006 [1976]).

Equally crucially, the paper’s discussion of the local economy, and adaptations within new fractions of the working class, provided a sort of labour history understanding to otherwise free-floating ideas about youth. Studies of the working class in relation to changes in post war capitalism had been current in sociology at the time (Goldthorpe and Lockwood, 1963), but thinking about youth and youth choices in their specificity was still an emergent perspective. Young people were increasingly pulling away. The stable lines of occupational and cultural inheritance were fraying, and new cultural forms were emerging on the streets. Cohen (1972) argued that the subcultural style of working class youth was however grounded in a material context, speaking of, and to, class relations and trajectories, even where it drew on mainstream fashions. The subcultural career seemed the only (magical) ‘remedy’ to their plight: creative expression based for the most part on ‘making do’, through bricolage and stylistic improvisations, resisting rather than following trends.

The dislocations in the labour markets and their intergenerational dimensions were key ingredients. Cohen identified the double-bind faced by working class youth. Fordist mass production had undermined trade skills and the incomes and the community power of the aristocrats of labour. While the postwar working class had shared some of the material benefits of the economic boom of the fifties and sixties, the changing nature of work meant that by the early 1970s young people had only two options: either pursue social mobility – and potentially class estrangement – into the technical managerial class or accept the low-paid drudgery of the dwindling number of unskilled factory jobs.

This was also a time of political reckoning and intellectual ferment in the European Left that uprooted political and intellectual orthodoxies. Two world wars and the Great Depression had failed to boost the cause of socialism but instead yielded social democracy: a politics of civilising capitalism with job security, increased real wages, affordable consumer goods and social welfare. After Stalin’s suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the Russian revolution lost its sheen as a source of inspiration. The academic Left sought an alternative to economistic Marxism which had informed politics in the first half of the 20th century and it turned its attention to the complex relations of culture and politics. Social historians, radical literary critics and sociologists all became more concerned with the lived cultural dimensions of change because the macro-tectonics of the class-in-itself had failed to deliver.

Cultural studies emerged both as an agent provocateur in academia, moving in on disciplines, critiquing and plundering, and correcting bland external deployments of class in Marxist theory with a more granular neo-Gramscian view of the process by which consent is achieved. Cohen’s work was always informed by this ambitious synthesis of many intellectual currents and represented a complex portrait of working class youth of the day. However, he also believed in decentring the purely cultural studies approach to youth. A mixed approach is also present in parts of Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson (2006 [1976]). Accordingly, the chapters in that compendium publication contain several writings on youth cultural style, as well as acknowledging a debt to the sociology of deviance and radical criminology – as exemplified in the work of Becker (1963) and Stanley Cohen (1972) – but they also take a cue from Phil Cohen (2007 [1972]) in striving to combine an understanding of material, social and economic forces (Hall and Jefferson, 2006 [1976]: 32).

Cohen’s book, Knuckle Sandwich (Robins and Cohen, 1978), written with friend and fellow youth worker, Dave Robins, focused on territoriality showing how kids stake out their claims to ‘ownership’ (of their council estate) and fight to demarcate their space and construct their geography of local knowledge, boundaries and customs. Their ownership was inscribed within a larger economy, so while it may feel phenomenologically real, it is fictional in a legal and economic sense. The book was an important contribution to an emerging ethnographic literature on working class youth, which included Paul Willis’ (1977) Learning to Labour and Corrigan’s (1979) Schooling the Smash Street Kids, but it focused more on leisure and local life than formal schooling. Knuckle Sandwich was published with Penguin with the aim of reaching a readership beyond academia in an era when mainstream publishers were more open to well-written scholarly manuscripts than is common today. It followed in the intellectual footsteps of Young and Willmott (2013 [1957]) Family and Kinship in East London, about which Cohen (2019) wrote a critical appreciation in Waypoints, which was directed towards politicians, state bureaucrats, and journalists, at a time of rapid social policy reform, as well as to general readers.

Cohen’s later writings on youth shifted focus from resistant subcultures towards the psycho-social investigation of transitions to adulthood, including school to work transitions. He was particularly critical of the ‘new vocationalism’, a pedagogical trend popular in the late 20th century, that emphasised the importance of teaching vocational and entrepreneurial skills given the high probability they would result in neither jobs nor viable enterprises (Cohen et al., 1984). The approach, he argued, was culture-blind paying little heed to inherited working class traditions of learning and labour. Instead, his research sought to identify the cultural raw material through which working class youth could build ‘narratives of aspiration’ (effectively autobiographical momentum) to help them pick their way through Fordism’s industrial ruins. Cohen identified a series of ‘narrative templates’ – inheritance, apprenticeship, vocation and career – each with its own values, embodied habits, and dispositions towards both education and work (Cohen, 1999b). The model of apprenticeship, for example, valued the non-hierarchical pedagogies of workplace communities of practice. You learned by watching and emulating skilled workers (Wenger, 1999) and you derive occupational esteem from the informal recognition of peers rather than external gatekeepers. Richard Sennett identified similar occupational values in his book The Craftsman (2008) and lamented their erosion in another book The Culture of the New Capitalism (2007). By contrast, the idea of career is much more hierarchical, based on formal pedagogy, credentials, and line management. For Cohen, it was the growing importance of career individualism in the new economy, and the displacement of occupational collectivism, that partly explained working class youthful resistance, particularly among young men.

In common with some urban ethnographers and radical criminologists, such as Young (1971), Dick Hobbs (1988), Hobbs (2021), Cohen’s youth research was intrepid and took him out of his comfort zone. The desire to really listen to young people foreshadows Cohen’s interest in innovative research methods. He had an activist’s openness, and readiness to experiment with different ways to amplify youth voice. In later work done in conjunction with Adrian Chappell, (e.g. Chappell, 1984), Cohen strove to get working class kids involved in recording their own lives. This project was sponsored by the Inner London Education Authority, and the ‘Cockpit Cultural Studies Department’. It was an action research project using mixed media methods to allow young people to broach their cultural interests from comics to youth-generated fanzines. Some of this approach fed into the Youth Questions series published by Macmillan which was conceived and co-edited by Cohen and Angela McRobbie (cf McRobbie and Nava, 1984). Cohen approached research almost as part of a project anarcho-syndicalist organising from below here, rather than treating youth culture as a source of ‘data’.

Cohen’s earlier work was partly an intervention into the impasse that youth cultural theory had reached in the 1970s, which lacked a sufficiently radical consideration of the deeper issues and the conjunctural conditions and structural forces at play. Similarly, his later work sets out a comprehensive and deeply engaged account of postwar youth theorising with a view to really ‘rethinking the youth question’ (Cohen, 1999b). That later work sets out with some clarity and concision the various branching off points and tendencies in the field and is a vital resource. Along with the extensive consideration of race theorising in Multi-Racist Britain (Cohen and Bains, 1988), which is discussed in the next section, Rethinking the Youth Question represents perhaps Cohen’s most significant contribution to social science.

Theorising gender and race in Cohen’s work

Despite the creativity and flexibility of Cohen’s earlier work on youth, there is little consideration of gender dynamics beyond mention of the role of marriage and family as structural dimensions in communities. This is surprising considering the seismic impact of feminism and the women’s movement at the time. As feminist cultural theorist Angela McRobbie (1991) – a long-term friend and sometime collaborator – said, youth cultural theorising in the 1970s, including the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, was too often drawn towards the ‘male and spectacular’. Although Cohen was not, in a simple sense, a full-time member of the ‘Birmingham School’, his work then did little to counter the accusations of male bias and it is not well defended against such charges.

Cohen was from an Eastern European Jewish background, and his writings had always squarely addressed the issue of race/ethnicity particularly in relation to youth. He was a qualified admirer of Wilhelm Reich, a theorist who also combined youth studies with historical and psychoanalytic understandings. Reich’s (1970) insights from Germany in the pre-WWII period could be drawn upon to show how marginalised youth were vulnerable to both emotional conditioning and toxic ‘theorising’ about supposed racial hierarchies. In Knuckle Sandwich, Robins and Cohen (1978) gave significant weight to the inter-racial dimensions of youth cultural forms, both at the level of lived cultural tensions and as inscribed within background ideologies of race. They showed how some white working class boys could become preoccupied with power, territoriality, and fantasy ‘solutions’ to racial conflict. They also innovatively included in their analysis elements of popular media here too.

For example, they noted the way some of the boys they worked with were drawn to Bruce Lee films (Lee was an iconic figure whose image adorned many teenage bedroom walls at that time). In Lee’s films, the physical prowess of the Bruce Lee character, his mastery of fighting technique and the way he stands his ground against often impossible odds, could be symbolically invested by the boys with a beleaguered sense of having to assert control over their own locality/territory. The irony that Bruce Lee is a non-white hero figure is not lost in the analysis. The discussions of working class subjects and race relations in Knuckle Sandwich in 1978 foreshadow Cohen’s later work, including his collaboration with Harwant Bains (Cohen and Bains, 1988), which speaks to the structuring power of racism and its links to discourses and practices of imagined dispossession and symbolic repossession; both in terms of ‘territory’ (their immediate locality) and ‘their’ country itself imagined ideologically in terms of pre-immigration ‘purity’.

The initial thinking about race and racism deepens as Cohen’s work progresses. Accumulatively his oeuvre offers very nuanced and combinatory theorising about different levels of lived experience and their articulations. Cohen (1988) is writing in the British context, and that is central to some of the historical connections he makes – for example, in consideration of the myth of the Island nation and the British Imperial legacy – but the problems, and the need to really think deeply about them, goes beyond one country. Cohen does not lose sight of the importance of the local (where the tensions and youth cultural forms are lived out as it were), but he characteristically wants to combine insights from various perspectives, including youth sociology and psychoanalysis and historical studies to produce a more complicated picture.

Cohen is not writing in a vacuum in terms of the fields he works within of course. Other people writing about youth culture at the time had argued for the need to think about phenomena such as emergent forms of hybridity (Hall, 1989) and also the cross fertilisation between black and white styles (Hebdige, 1979). Both these theorists show how indispensable it is to consider race relations as part of an understanding of the new postcolonial scene. However, Hebdige, in particular, takes the analysis much further towards issues of style and semiotics and signification, and is less interested in any considerations of (post) colonialism per se. Although Cohen notes the styles and cultural forms of the youth he studies, he does not make style his primary focus. He is less concerned with the epiphenomena of appearances, but rather more with the deeper forces and histories that create the arenas within which ‘structures of feeling’ (to borrow Raymond Williams (1977) coinage) might take hold. Crucially, this must include the long formative history of British colonialism which created particular diasporas in the UK – a popular anti-racist graffiti at the time stated, ‘We are here because you were there’.

It is against this background that the functional nature of racist myths about the sovereign Isle can become part of a group misrecognition of common class interests. The mythologised idea of ‘pure’ Anglo-Saxon origins does ideological work in legitimising the proto-fascist call for racial purity as well as holding in place the racial imaginary of the civilising mission. As Cohen (1988) suggests though, racial narratives may run through working class lives in different ways. He reminds us that dominant and subordinate ideologies are not just floating in some unanchored ‘open space’; there is a pyscho-dynamic aspect to be considered. There is racism on the inside as well as on the outside. The racist imagination is ‘productive’ as people make history and constitute new meanings. Racism circulates in popular culture through rumour gossip, jokes, racist epithets, etc., which themselves can condense racist beliefs and myths. Myths may encode unconscious patterns of relation between self and others via idealised fantasy images of the body and its ‘monstrous’ negation (the despised black other), which then operate ongoing ‘rituals of misrecognition’. Projection onto others is part of the circulation of racist ideology.

As Cohen notes further, racism can be characterised as a perverse ‘inheritance’. For many of the white working class kids he came to know it is a taken-for-granted division that comes with their inhabitation of changing inner city scene. He tries to think through the intergenerational dimensions of the problem as well. He writes, ‘The racist problematics of breeding involve a specific perversion of inheritance’ (Cohen, 1988: 75). For this model, the popular racism of the post war period (a period of relative economic decline as previously noted) produces a sharpening contradiction between ‘map and territory’. As with the work on the ‘rituals’ of working youth resistance and rebellion, the overarching (declining) economic developments shape the logic of the scene. Cohen suggests that the job prospects for many members of the white working class are diminishing in a way which morphs into blaming those in similar circumstances ‘because’ of their skin colour. He writes: ‘The white working class is being motivated to assume imaginary positions of mastery at a time, and in places, where its real forms of subjection are being forced ever closer to the material domains Black experience in terms of unemployment’ (Cohen and Bains, 1988: 79). Hence, racism ‘works’ partly because it simplifies complex and contradictory realities into a scapegoating logic. It is not unitary, far less some ‘natural’ atavistic form, but it is not simply superficial or easily dispensed with either.

Keeping the theorisation of class and ethic relations linked was a long-term commitment for Cohen going forward. In 1992, he became the founding director of the Centre for New Ethnicities Research (CNER) at the University of East London. This university is located in the borough of Newham, a poor ethnically diverse district which then, as now, was a flashpoint for struggles between the Left and the populist Right. Following the work of Stuart Hall (who gave the founding lecture at CNER), Cohen recognised that post-imperial Britain revolves around ‘race’ in a way that should never be ignored. Again, aligning with Hall and with Cohen (1999a agrees that new ethnicities as well as old racisms are lived out within a partially hybridised scene. Identities are always complex and cannot be simplistically anchored in fixed and ossified cultural traditions. New times bring new forms. There is parallel with the previously mentioned work of Hebdige, 1979, 1988, [2003]) who was alert to the cross fertilisation between black and white youth styles and fashions. This also had a ‘glocal’ dimension in an evolving multicultural Britain exposed to diasporic overseas styles and influences. That was true, for example, of arenas such as sport, (e.g. the increasing numbers of black and overseas football players), and music (e.g. the huge popularity of Reggae, and the deliberately hybridised Two-Tone genre that grew out of it).

Critical cartography – the uses of mapping and counter mapping for social analysis

One of the original strands within Cohen’s work was the creative use of cartography as a metaphor and method. This could be applied to subcultures, as demonstrated in parts of Knuckle Sandwich (1978), which featured commentary upon the in-situ imaginary/real maps of the ‘working class city’. It could also relate to mental maps whereby people organise categories in their mind, such as the ideas around what a ‘race’ is. Maps can also be ‘living maps’, describing how people build, live and interact. Mapping generally can be a way to see ‘the pattern that connects’, a key idea seen in the work of Gregory Bateson (2000, 1979) who Cohen admired as a multi-disciplinary thinker.

As noted, Knuckle Sandwich was an early to mid-career publication. The ‘fieldwork’ for this was Cohen’s practical youth work engagement with a particular London locality. The ‘wilder’ suburbs of central London, around Kings Cross and Somerstown and lower Holloway were close to where Cohen spent his childhood and the boundaries between suburbs had biographical resonance. Like any city, London had its zones and no-go zones. The affluent and the down-at-heel areas are often cheek-by-jowl. It was not possible to grow up in London without absorbing/constructing a mental map, including the coded classed meanings that imbue named suburbs with a related imaginary of ‘purity and danger’ (to borrow Mary Douglas (1966 phrase). The propinquities invoke invisible and informal borderlands. The University of East London, for example, was located in a patchily gentrified part of London, a liminal space between rich and poor, the possessors of wealth and cultural capital and those relatively dispossessed. Cohen told a story about a launch of a school within this institution. To get to the site one had to cross a bridge. At one end of this there was a place where many working-class youths were wont to hang out. Some of the middle class visitors were slightly afraid of using that route as it meant braving the gauntlet of young ‘guardians’.

Maps can also tell us about the past both in real and imaginary terms. In stories, maps can tell us where treasure is buried. In relation to the overlays of history, they can reveal other forgotten narratives. For example, they can tell us how previous generations thought about things, about how territories and entities were labelled and marked with the assumptions of the age. There is a politics to what is recorded and what is allowed to be ‘grown over’ or what is renamed. Thus, old maps can be read symptomatically, and they reveal both by omission and inclusion. In this sense, there is also the possibility of ‘political cartography’ as in the example of ‘countermapping’, evident, for instance in the website, ‘Living Maps Review’ (Cohen and Duggan, 2021). In particular, this work calls attention to the ways a map can reveal hidden and unrecorded sites, and how different transactions can be brought to light in a way that discloses a suppressed story. An example of this is Black Atlas: The Politics of Counter-mapping in Waypoints (Cohen, 2019:353-359), which is an illustration of the countermapping idea, highlighting how Black performance poetry can challenge conventional ‘maps’ of the history of Britain with a counter-narrative about the travails of the Caribbean diaspora.

Cohen’s later work employs an imaginative cartographic angle when re-examining the upheavals of state urban renewal programmes. He wrote, with collaborators, in this vein. One of the big events of relevance here was the preparations for the 2000 London Olympics. Obviously, this had a huge impact on the area where the University of East London is based, and upon the local inhabitants of that part of East London (Calcutt, 2007; Cohen, 2013a). Big business (and public and private partnerships) combined with the state to redraw, or rezone, whole areas and relegate many residents to ‘the wrong side of the track’. As was the case in other host cities, the promise of the Olympics to hosting cities, and its halo of tourism revenue and national pride, concealed the human cost of redevelopment. Cohen (2013a) called it ‘the beautifying lie’. The book on the Olympics and its impact has ethnographic touches, seeking to honour local people and give them a voice. In part, the book asks, what were the dreams for the regeneration of the whole area where the Olympics was situated? Cohen’s work around that moment acknowledges the grand scale of the project (it was the biggest building development in the UK for that decade) but does not spare the planning failures and the empty promises as the working class were once again ‘sold down the river’ as it were. The book is also a narrative, a story of East London in transition which Cohen (2013a: 5) calls, ‘an everyday story of “race”, class and imagined community’. That framing resonates with his previous work going right back to the 1970s and 1980s and demonstrates, in a different era and context, his syncretic and combinatory approach considering the sociological and historical processes to try and understand the formation of a conjuncture and the forces at play.

Signing up and signing off – Resources of hope

In later life Cohen took stock. He dabbled in memoir (Cohen, 2013b) and scholarly accounts of how we reflect on legacies and record the past (Cohen, 2018). However, he was wary of the temptation to impose too strict a narrative order and reminded us that there is no reason why all the threads of his theorising should ‘line up’ (as we cite in our epigraph at the top of the article).

In this brief critical assessment, we have concentrated largely on his contributions to youth theorising. This itself took various forms in his writing and comes in and out of focus according to his evolving interests over time. We argue for a thread though not a fixed pattern. If his later work is less explicitly focused on youth or youth culture, it still informs our view of his style of writing and the approaches that made his oeuvre valuable. It is in the spirit of his thinking to be aware that all theorising always takes place in a determinant socio-historic and political (and psychoanalytic) context. Cohen was on the whole not prone to publishing polemical or political prescriptive writing; nor was he effacing his leftist stance. In that sense, to situate his writing is also to situate him as a writer on the Left.

A leftist stance, however articulated or acted upon, is (usually) a lifelong thing. He was always aware of issues around power and voice and dis/enfranchisement. His last collection of essays, Waypoints (2019), is subtitled Towards an Ecology of Political Mindfulness and deals, among other things, with taking stock of our gains (and losses) in a woke and anti-woke era. This is of ongoing relevance. Socialism was a lifelong concern for Cohen, not as the precious accoutrement for the virtue-signalling middle classes, but as a precondition for a rational and caring society. Towards the end of his life, he wrote (‘tendence Groucho’ as his beloved situationists would say), that he would never belong to any party that would have him as a member (Cohen, 2019: 46). However, he held out some hope for the Corbynite Left in the UK. Whatever the setbacks, there remain what Raymond Williams (2016 [1989]) called ‘resources of hope’. As has been plain for a while, young people are losing out in the generation game (the unaffordability of housing and services, the likelihood of inheriting a spoiled planet and so on). At this point the researcher and the activist (re)combine. As Cohen argued on more than one occasion, young voters/citizens are entitled to have their voices heard and to demand a living wage, as well as democratically organised institutions that serve and preserve the common good. That much never can be obsolete.