I have been dipping into the writings of Hannah Arendt recently, encouraged to do so by Richard Bernstein’s Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? She is not a writer I’d been attracted to, solely because I found her style uncongenial. But I have found a better acquaintance with her work helpful, as this blog betrays. I… Read More »
Much of my thinking/reading/writing since retirement has been focused on two longstanding areas of interest: health inequalities and the sociology of stigma. This has culminated in two single-authored volumes, Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account (Routledge, 2018) and A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders (Palgrave, 2020). To a… Read More »
Dear Jennie, It will not have escaped your attention that many members of the Labour Party are currently reconsidering their position. I confess that I am among them and I am writing this open letter to explain why this is so. I rejoined the Labour Party on the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership. … Read More »
For anyone who thinks Marx irrelevant to the contemporary world, this passage is from the Communist Manifesto: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the… Read More »
I have commented several times on the patterns in my reading and writing. These were not chosen but rather emerged over time. Only gradually did I become reflexive about them. Now I wonder if they are forces for good or ill. I remember little of the detail of what I read, though I can generally… Read More »
Shortly after my retirement from UCL in 2013 one of my daughters, Rebecca, suggested that I launch my own website, and maybe do a blog or two. ‘It will give you something to do’, she said. Given her expertise in website design this seemed a sensible option. And so, I think, it has proved. At… Read More »
This blog again draws on the excellent work of Erik Olin Wright, this time directly on concepts of social class. In his essay on ‘working class power, capitalist class interests’ in his Understanding Class, Wright acknowledges that class – together with related concepts like class structure, class struggle, class formation and class compromise – can… Read More »
In Notebook 10 I focused on ‘what next’. Among the options were further books on the fractured society and sport. In this follow-up note I reproduce two unsuccessful book proposals, one on each topic. They were ultimately ‘unsuccessful’ because I withdrew them both (from different publishers) in fits of pique. I withdrew them because I… Read More »
This second and no less contingent set of memories takes me through my years at university and their immediate sequelae. They are memories, it has to be said, of a very different era and set of student experiences. Nor is the difference merely material, dependent on the fact that we babyboomers were funded for our… Read More »
I can’t pretend that keeping a record of books read during any given year is a matter of much interest to others, but here we go with a commentary nonetheless. If there is a return it may perhaps be in terms of the odd recommendation. I find I have steadily increased the number of books… Read More »