Derek Sayer
University of Alberta, Sociology, Emeritus
- History, Cultural History, Gender, Surrealism, Social Theory, Czech & Slovak Studies, and 16 moreQueer Theory, Sexuality, Media, Popular Culture, Film, Literature, Poststructuralist Theory, Feminist Theory, Gender Studies, Modern Art, Modernism, Photography, Avant-Garde, Art History, Higher Education, and Gender and Sexualityedit
- I am a British/Canadian writer and academic—British by birth, Canadian by choice. If pushed to define my field, I wo... moreI am a British/Canadian writer and academic—British by birth, Canadian by choice. If pushed to define my field, I would say on the edges between social theory, historical sociology, and cultural history.
Educated in the UK at the Universities of Essex and Durham, I began my academic career writing on the historical experience of socialist construction in the USSR and China (Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory, 1978, and For Mao, 1979, both with Philip Corrigan and Harvie Ramsay), social theory (Marx’s Method, 1979; Society, with David Frisby, 1986; The Violence of Abstraction, 1987; Capitalism and Modernity, 1990), and state formation (The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, with Philip Corrigan, 1985).
I taught sociology at the University of Glasgow from 1979 before moving to the University of Alberta, Canada in 1986. I chaired the U of A Sociology Department from 1996-2000 and held a Canada Research Chair in Social Theory and Cultural Studies from 2000-2005, with an honorary cross-appointment in the History Department.
I co-founded the Journal of Historical Sociology (Wiley-Blackwell), which I continued to co-edit until 2022, with Philip Corrigan in 1988, and have been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1994.
Since the 1990s the core of my work has been a trilogy of books published by Princeton University Press that take the city of Prague as an alternative vantage point from which to excavate what Walter Benjamin called the dreamworlds of modernity. These are The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998); Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013); and Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (2022).
I moved back to the UK in 2006 to take up a Chair in Cultural History at Lancaster University, where I served as head of the History Department from 2009-12. Increasingly dismayed by developments in UK higher education, I got diverted by the UK’s comically misnamed Research Excellence Framework (REF) into writing Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF (2015), after which I retired from Lancaster and returned to Canada.
Retirement has given me not only more time to write, but freedom to do so in a way that is not driven by the targets of “impact” and income generation set by the philistines that currently run UK universities. As well as Postcards from Absurdistan, my recent publications include a short book, Making Trouble: Surrealism and the Human Sciences, in the Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlets series (2017), and a popular history-cum-travel guide, Prague: Crossroads of Europe, which was published in Reaktion Books’ Cityscopes series in 2018.
Future publication plans include a trio of books for Brill in Europe and Haymarket Press in North America in the Historical Materialism series, comprising (1) a reissue of The Great Arch, together with eight other texts by Philip Corrigan and/or I on aspects of state formation; (2) a reissue of Marx’s Method and The Violence of Abstraction in a single volume; and (3) a selection of my essays over the years in social theory and cultural history, provisionally entitled Undisciplined.
I publish less academic writings and comments on current affairs at https://dereksayer.substack.com/publish/postsedit
This is the Introduction and Chapter 1 of my 2013 book Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press). These "deep cuts" are taken from New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central &... more
This is the Introduction and Chapter 1 of my 2013 book Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press). These "deep cuts" are taken from New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central & East European Politics and International Relations (Vol. 26,No. 2(S)/2018) that was devoted to my work.
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This is the introduction ("Bearings") to my 1998 book The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, together with the closing two sections of Ch. 5 "Modernisms and Modernities" discussing the arts in interwar Prague. The book was published by... more
This is the introduction ("Bearings") to my 1998 book The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, together with the closing two sections of Ch. 5 "Modernisms and Modernities" discussing the arts in interwar Prague. The book was published by Princeton University Press. These "deep cuts" are taken from New Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central & East European Politics and International Relations (Vol. 26,No. 2(S)/2018) that was devoted to my work.
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This is a brief extract from my book Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF (Sage, 2015, pp. 38-46), dealing with the competence or otherwise of the UK's REF disciplinary sub-panels to undertake meaningful peer review of research... more
This is a brief extract from my book Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF (Sage, 2015, pp. 38-46), dealing with the competence or otherwise of the UK's REF disciplinary sub-panels to undertake meaningful peer review of research outputs. After some introductory remarks I exemplify the range of expertise on the History sub-panel in the last REF, relative to the range of outputs the panelists were required to assess.
I am posting it as a contribution to the debate on Twitter between Dorothy Bishop and Peter Mandler, and in particular in response to Mandler's tweet of 26 November 2018: "I would defend the quality of peer review in REF - both because it is one of the last redoubts of academic self-governance in the funding system - and because the job is just about manageable and I believe generally done well." Professor Mandler was President of the Royal Historical Society from 2012-2016.
I am posting it as a contribution to the debate on Twitter between Dorothy Bishop and Peter Mandler, and in particular in response to Mandler's tweet of 26 November 2018: "I would defend the quality of peer review in REF - both because it is one of the last redoubts of academic self-governance in the funding system - and because the job is just about manageable and I believe generally done well." Professor Mandler was President of the Royal Historical Society from 2012-2016.
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Blackwell issued a 2nd edition of The Great Arch in 1991, six years after the original publication, for which Philip Corrigan and I wrote a postscript responding to various reviews of the book and clarifying and extending its arguments.... more
Blackwell issued a 2nd edition of The Great Arch in 1991, six years after the original publication, for which Philip Corrigan and I wrote a postscript responding to various reviews of the book and clarifying and extending its arguments. The 2nd edition had a very small print-run and soon went out of print, so this text is little known. I'm posting a downloadable scan here for anyone interested.
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As promised. In this brief afterword to the 2nd ed. of Marx's Method, published in 1983, I took up a number of criticisms of the book and developed my position on two key issues: (1) the relationship between what I had characterized as... more
As promised. In this brief afterword to the 2nd ed. of Marx's Method, published in 1983, I took up a number of criticisms of the book and developed my position on two key issues: (1) the relationship between what I had characterized as Marx's method of critique and empirical historical inquiry, as championed by E. P. Thompson, and (2) the ontology of the social, both in Marx's work and in the social sciences in general. Among others I discuss Thompson, John Urry, Perry Anderson, Hindess and Hirst, and Roy Bhaskar - a nostalgic glimpse of debates in British Marxism at the turn of the '80s.
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My first book, long out of print. This is the first edition (1979). A second edition was published in 1983, with a new Afterword. I intend to post the latter separately when I have it scanned.
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Surrealism was not merely an artistic movement to its adherents but an “instrument of knowledge,” an attempt to transform the way we see the world by unleashing the unconscious as a radical, new means of constructing reality. Born out of... more
Surrealism was not merely an artistic movement to its adherents but an “instrument of knowledge,” an attempt to transform the way we see the world by unleashing the unconscious as a radical, new means of constructing reality. Born out of the crisis of civilization brought about by World War I, it presented a sustained challenge to scientific rationalism as a privileged mode of knowing. In certain ways, surrealism’s critique of white, Western civilization anticipated many later attempts at producing alternate non-Eurocentric epistemologies.
With MAKING TROUBLE, sociologist and cultural historian Derek Sayer explores what it might mean to take surrealism’s critique of civilization seriously. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, Sayer first establishes surrealism as an important intellectual antecedent to the study of the human sciences today. He then makes a compelling and well-written argument for rethinking surrealism as a contemporary methodological resource for all those who still look to the human sciences not only as a way to interpret the world, but also to change it.
Note: this is a (much) expanded version of my 2015 Goldsmiths Annual Method Lab Lecture "Surrealism and Sociology," previously posted on this site.
With MAKING TROUBLE, sociologist and cultural historian Derek Sayer explores what it might mean to take surrealism’s critique of civilization seriously. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, Sayer first establishes surrealism as an important intellectual antecedent to the study of the human sciences today. He then makes a compelling and well-written argument for rethinking surrealism as a contemporary methodological resource for all those who still look to the human sciences not only as a way to interpret the world, but also to change it.
Note: this is a (much) expanded version of my 2015 Goldsmiths Annual Method Lab Lecture "Surrealism and Sociology," previously posted on this site.
Research Interests:
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My 1987 book The Violence of Abstraction seems still to be cited in debates about historical materialism and Marxist theory. Since it is long out of print, and used copies are listed on amazon at prices ranging from £400 to £999, I... more
My 1987 book The Violence of Abstraction seems still to be cited in debates about historical materialism and Marxist theory. Since it is long out of print, and used copies are listed on amazon at prices ranging from £400 to £999, I thought it might be helpful to make it freely available for download (in three separate files) here.
The two texts included here, written in Canada, New Zealand and Italy between 1999 and 2001, formed the core of my book Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject, published by Paradigm Press of Boulder, Colorado in 2004. I... more
The two texts included here, written in Canada, New Zealand and Italy between 1999 and 2001, formed the core of my book Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject, published by Paradigm Press of Boulder, Colorado in 2004. I remain grateful to Paradigm for taking on so unconventional a work. For the book I added—somewhat reluctantly—an introduction, titled "Walter Benjamin's Cabinet," a set of notes that elucidated many of the literary and artistic allusions in "A Memoir," and a number of family photographs and more recent images taken during the time the texts were being written that seemed, albeit obscurely, to connect with their themes. A shorter version of "In Search of a Subject," shorn of its connections with "A Memoir," was published independently the same year in Theory, Culture and Society under the title " Incognito Ergo Sum: Language, Memory and the Subject."
What I present here is the first, unvarnished version of the two core texts in Going Down for Air. The book, which was neither widely publicized nor reviewed, remains largely unknown to those who are familiar with my other writings, whether in social theory and historical sociology or on Prague and Czech history. Given the content of "A Memoir," whose search for a subject rambles sometimes graphically through sexuality as well as language and memory, some might think this no bad thing. But I regard "In Search of a Subject" as my most sustained—and in its implications, most profound—theoretical meditation of the last two decades. It connects closely with my preoccupations in The Coasts of Bohemia and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, works in which I have deliberately kept explicit theorizing to a minimum. It is also indissolubly bound up with what one commentator described as my "autobiographie surréaliste" (a description I took as a compliment). The two texts should stand together, bouncing off one another, as they were originally written.
What I present here is the first, unvarnished version of the two core texts in Going Down for Air. The book, which was neither widely publicized nor reviewed, remains largely unknown to those who are familiar with my other writings, whether in social theory and historical sociology or on Prague and Czech history. Given the content of "A Memoir," whose search for a subject rambles sometimes graphically through sexuality as well as language and memory, some might think this no bad thing. But I regard "In Search of a Subject" as my most sustained—and in its implications, most profound—theoretical meditation of the last two decades. It connects closely with my preoccupations in The Coasts of Bohemia and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, works in which I have deliberately kept explicit theorizing to a minimum. It is also indissolubly bound up with what one commentator described as my "autobiographie surréaliste" (a description I took as a compliment). The two texts should stand together, bouncing off one another, as they were originally written.
Research Interests:
Philip Corrigan and I published The Great Arch in 1985. It was an iconoclastic book, which met with decidedly mixed reviews. The core of the argument, developed through a narrative of English history spanning the tenth to the early... more
Philip Corrigan and I published The Great Arch in 1985. It was an iconoclastic book, which met with decidedly mixed reviews. The core of the argument, developed through a narrative of English history spanning the tenth to the early twentieth centuries, was this:
"Moral regulation is coextensive with state formation, and state forms are always animated and legitimated by a particular moral ethos. Centrally, state agencies seek to give unitary and unifying expression to what are in reality multifaceted and differential historical experiences of groups within society, denying their particularity. The reality is that bourgeois society is systematically unequal, it is structured along lines of class, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, occupation, locality. States act to erase the recognition and expression of these differences through what should properly be conceived of as a double disruption.
On the one hand, state formation is a totalizing project, representing people as members of a particular community—an “illusory community,” as Marx described it. This community is epitomized as the nation, which claims people’s primary social identification and loyalty (and to which, as is most graphically illustrated in wartime, all other ties are subordinated). Nationality, conversely, allows categorization of “others”—within as well as without (consider the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthyite era in the United States, or Margaret Thatcher’s identification in 1984 of striking miners as “the enemy within”)—as “alien.” This is a hugely powerful repertoire and rhetoric of rule. On the other hand, as Foucault has observed, state formation equally (and no less powerfully) individualizes people in quite definite and specific ways. We are registered within the state community as citizens, voters, taxpayers, ratepayers, jurors, parents, consumers, homeowners—individuals. In both aspects of this representation alternative modes of collective and individual identification (and comprehension), and the social, political and personal practices they could sustain, are denied legitimacy. One thing we hope to show in this book is the immense material weight given to such cultural forms by the very routines and rituals of state.
"Moral regulation is coextensive with state formation, and state forms are always animated and legitimated by a particular moral ethos. Centrally, state agencies seek to give unitary and unifying expression to what are in reality multifaceted and differential historical experiences of groups within society, denying their particularity. The reality is that bourgeois society is systematically unequal, it is structured along lines of class, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, occupation, locality. States act to erase the recognition and expression of these differences through what should properly be conceived of as a double disruption.
On the one hand, state formation is a totalizing project, representing people as members of a particular community—an “illusory community,” as Marx described it. This community is epitomized as the nation, which claims people’s primary social identification and loyalty (and to which, as is most graphically illustrated in wartime, all other ties are subordinated). Nationality, conversely, allows categorization of “others”—within as well as without (consider the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthyite era in the United States, or Margaret Thatcher’s identification in 1984 of striking miners as “the enemy within”)—as “alien.” This is a hugely powerful repertoire and rhetoric of rule. On the other hand, as Foucault has observed, state formation equally (and no less powerfully) individualizes people in quite definite and specific ways. We are registered within the state community as citizens, voters, taxpayers, ratepayers, jurors, parents, consumers, homeowners—individuals. In both aspects of this representation alternative modes of collective and individual identification (and comprehension), and the social, political and personal practices they could sustain, are denied legitimacy. One thing we hope to show in this book is the immense material weight given to such cultural forms by the very routines and rituals of state.
The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender, Israel's software for identifying human targets for bombing strikes in Gaza, suggests... more
The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender, Israel's software for identifying human targets for bombing strikes in Gaza, suggests on the contrary that the real danger arises when the awesome data-crunching capacities of AI are put in the hands of human beings.
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Hamas undoubtedly committed war crimes during its attack on Israel on October 7. Nevertheless, the narrative that Israel mobilized to cement global support for its retaliation in Gaza rested less on the war crimes that actually were... more
Hamas undoubtedly committed war crimes during its attack on Israel on October 7. Nevertheless, the narrative that Israel mobilized to cement global support for its retaliation in Gaza rested less on the war crimes that actually were committed than on ones that weren’t. The comparison that needs to be made by the international community is not with ISIS or the Holocaust, but rather with the infinitely greater horrors Israel has inflicted on Gaza since October 7, which its Black Sabbath narrative has played an inordinate part in legitimating and enabling.
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The impending famine in Gaza is the result of deliberate, conscious, informed choices, and nobody in the Israeli or American governments can be in any doubt as to where they are leading. We are on the threshold of a ‘final solution’ to... more
The impending famine in Gaza is the result of deliberate, conscious, informed choices, and nobody in the Israeli or American governments can be in any doubt as to where they are leading. We are on the threshold of a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem. Ladies and gentlemen, this way for your ambient genocide.
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A short piece on the life and times of the “Czech writer, publicist, dramatist, painter, illustrator, scenographer, caricaturist, translator, diplomat, lawyer, professor, and traveler” (Czech Wikipedia) Adolf Hoffmeister.
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A contribution to a series in Britské listy titled "The Benefits and Burdens of the 'Invisible Suitcase': Writing Contemporary History as an Outsider.
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This contribution to the special section "100s for Katie" attempts to communicate the depth and breadth of the hatred infecting contemporary America in one hundred words.
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Western leaders seem finally to be waking up to the monstrosity of the horrors Israel has unleashed upon Gaza. A discussion of apparent recent shifts in perspectives on the Gaza War.
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This is a revised and updated version of an article published earlier on my Substack (and also posted on academia.edu). The article argues the importance of contextualizing Hamas’s attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 and attempts to do... more
This is a revised and updated version of an article published earlier on my Substack (and also posted on academia.edu). The article argues the importance of contextualizing Hamas’s attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 and attempts to do so in relation to both Palestinian and Israeli historical “memories.” The war goes on, with no sign of any imminent ending. I hope my piece will be a useful contribution to debate—though it is unlikely to satisfy believers in simple dichotomies of good and evil on either side.
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A discussion of the self-immolation of serving US senior airman Aaron Bushnell as a case of altruistic suicide as extreme protest, reminiscent of the suicide of Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc in Prague in 1969. I conclude that Bushnell's... more
A discussion of the self-immolation of serving US senior airman Aaron Bushnell as a case of altruistic suicide as extreme protest, reminiscent of the suicide of Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc in Prague in 1969. I conclude that Bushnell's "supreme sacrifice cuts like a knife through the Orwellian doublethink—mass slaughter of innocent civilians is 'self-defense,' the IDF is 'the most moral army in the world'—that allows us to continue to live with what the highest court in the world has described as a plausible genocide.
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A discussion of the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell as the latest in a long history of extreme protests, recalling those of Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc in Prague in 1969. I conclude that Bushnell's "supreme sacrifice cuts like a knife... more
A discussion of the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell as the latest in a long history of extreme protests, recalling those of Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc in Prague in 1969. I conclude that Bushnell's "supreme sacrifice cuts like a knife through the Orwellian doublethink—mass slaughter of innocent civilians is 'self-defense,' the IDF is 'the most moral army in the world'—that allows us to continue to live with what the highest court in the world, the ICJ, has described as a plausible genocide.
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On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an interim ruling in response to South Africa’s charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This ruling required Israel to stop its military from engaging in actions... more
On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an interim ruling in response to South Africa’s charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This ruling required Israel to stop its military from engaging in actions contrary to international law, and to take immediate steps to ensure humanitarian aid reaches Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Within 48 hours Canada and other “Western democracies” cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the organization upon which effective provision of aid to Gaza depends.
This is a clarifying moment in modern history—the day the “rules-based international order” that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War was given the coup de grâce, not by its enemies but by its authors. The gloves were off and so were the masks.
This is a clarifying moment in modern history—the day the “rules-based international order” that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War was given the coup de grâce, not by its enemies but by its authors. The gloves were off and so were the masks.
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A discussion of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs in relation to his Salome and Der Rosenkavalier. Originally published in four parts on my Substack, at https://dereksayer.substack.com/p/how-middlebrow-triumphs-over-death
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I have been working on this article, which argues the importance of contextualizing Hamas’s attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 and attempts to do so in relation to both Palestinian and Israeli historical “memories,” for the last three... more
I have been working on this article, which argues the importance of contextualizing Hamas’s attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 and attempts to do so in relation to both Palestinian and Israeli historical “memories,” for the last three months. The war goes on, with no sign of any imminent ending. I thought the day before Israel is brought before the International Court of Justice to defend a charge of genocide in Gaza an appropriate moment to publish what I hope will be a useful contribution to debate—though it is unlikely to satisfy believers in simple dichotomies of good and evil on either side.
Update. A revised version of this article has been published in Canadian Dimension.
Update. A revised version of this article has been published in Canadian Dimension.
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My first published paper, in which Philip Corrigan and I first advanced some of the ideas that were to culminate in our collaboration in The Great Arch.
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This is the text of the Annual Masaryk Lecture I gave at the Czech Embassy in London on November 24, 2011. It deals with a group of Czechoslovak exiles in New York and Paris in 1938–1940, focusing in particular on the triangle of... more
This is the text of the Annual Masaryk Lecture I gave at the Czech Embassy in London on November 24, 2011. It deals with a group of Czechoslovak exiles in New York and Paris in 1938–1940, focusing in particular on the triangle of Vítězslava Kaprálová, Bohuslav Martinů, and Jiří Mucha.
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A polemic masquerading as a review article on three publications on prewar Czech photography and/or book design, this paper was intended as a modest contribution to decolonizing art history. This is the preprint version.
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I HAVE UPLOADED THE PREPRINT MS HERE. CLICK ON DOI LINK ABOVE TO READ FINAL PUBLISHED VERSION OF THE ARTICLE Previously unpublished, “From the Body Politic to the National Interest” was presented at the Mellon Symposium in Historical... more
I HAVE UPLOADED THE PREPRINT MS HERE. CLICK ON DOI LINK ABOVE TO READ FINAL PUBLISHED VERSION OF THE ARTICLE
Previously unpublished, “From the Body Politic to the National Interest” was presented at the Mellon Symposium in Historical Anthropology at California Institute of Technology in May 1987. We are publishing it in the Journal of Historical Sociology for the first time to honor Philip Corrigan's memory. The essay was an attempt to expand upon arguments in Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (1985) under two main rubrics: (1) “routines and rituals of rule” and (2) “regulated representations and the making of ‘the’ public.” In both cases we went beyond our treatment of these topics in The Great Arch, to which this paper should be seen as a supplement.
Previously unpublished, “From the Body Politic to the National Interest” was presented at the Mellon Symposium in Historical Anthropology at California Institute of Technology in May 1987. We are publishing it in the Journal of Historical Sociology for the first time to honor Philip Corrigan's memory. The essay was an attempt to expand upon arguments in Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (1985) under two main rubrics: (1) “routines and rituals of rule” and (2) “regulated representations and the making of ‘the’ public.” In both cases we went beyond our treatment of these topics in The Great Arch, to which this paper should be seen as a supplement.
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From Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). This short essay is based on a transcription of my... more
From Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). This short essay is based on a transcription of my closing remarks at a conference at the University of California--San Diego in 1991 that brought together historians and anthropologists of Mexico with theorists of state formation (myself, William Roseberry, and James C. Scott). In it I draw on Václav Havel's "Power of the Powerless" to critique conventional concepts of hegemony.
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This was part of an exhibition (and eventual photobook) convened and edited by Craig Campbell and Yoke-Sum Wong that required participants to couple six images with six texts, each of no more than 100 words. I shot the photographs in... more
This was part of an exhibition (and eventual photobook) convened and edited by Craig Campbell and Yoke-Sum Wong that required participants to couple six images with six texts, each of no more than 100 words. I shot the photographs in Greece in the spring of 2016. I found the form an interesting one to work with. My intent was to set up layers of resonance and signification between a group of texts and images rather than have the images simply illustrate the texts or the texts caption the images.
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The Prague Address, for the European International Studies Association (EISA) 12th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Prague, September 12, 2018. An early version of what became the introduction to my book Postcards... more
The Prague Address, for the European International Studies Association (EISA) 12th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Prague, September 12, 2018.
An early version of what became the introduction to my book Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (Princeton University Press, 2022).
An early version of what became the introduction to my book Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (Princeton University Press, 2022).
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This text started life as one of several short essays written for my forthcoming history-cum-travel guide Prague: Crossroads of Europe (London: Reaktion, October 2018), but it was eventually omitted for lack of space. It argues that... more
This text started life as one of several short essays written for my forthcoming history-cum-travel guide Prague: Crossroads of Europe (London: Reaktion, October 2018), but it was eventually omitted for lack of space. It argues that while "Magic Prague is a figment of the nineteenth-century romantic imagination, surrealist Prague is an authentically twentieth-century black comedy." I am grateful to Benjamin Tallis for giving me the opportunity to publish it as a "Cultural Cut" in New Perspectives.
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Not so academic. My partner Yoke-Sum challenged me to play the 10 x 10 Facebook game. The idea is to post a record album every day for ten successive days that had significance in your life, with or without a gloss explaining why. Not... more
Not so academic. My partner Yoke-Sum challenged me to play the 10 x 10 Facebook game. The idea is to post a record album every day for ten successive days that had significance in your life, with or without a gloss explaining why. Not at all the same thing at all as your top 10 albums, musically speaking. I subsequently collected my posts, which grew into something more, and published them on my blog coastsofbohemia.
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Another paper from the vaults, for those who find my commentaries on Karl Marx of any value. In The Poverty of Theory E.P. Thompson makes the heretical claim that Marx's 'mature' writings, for all their grandeur, in some ways mark a... more
Another paper from the vaults, for those who find my commentaries on Karl Marx of any value.
In The Poverty of Theory E.P. Thompson makes the heretical claim
that Marx's 'mature' writings, for all their grandeur, in some ways
mark a retreat from his pathbreaking works of the 1840s. The
Grundrisse in particular, and to a lesser but still significant extent
Capital, are trapped within the analytic and conceptual framework of
the very political economy Marx was criticising. Two features of this
framework particularly concern Thompson. First, the notion that it is
possible to isolate 'the economic' from political, religious, legal, moral
or cultural activities as an independent or first order object of study;
second, the static and ahistorical character of political economy's
propositions and methodology. These, he charges, are substantially
reproduced in Grundrisse and only partially overcome in Capital.
I do not wholly endorse Thompson's view. But I do think his
argument important, if at times overstated. Marx did, in the 1840s -
and not just in overtly 'philosophical' works like the 1844 Manuscripts,
but above all in The German ldeology - initiate an extremely wideranging
critique of bourgeois civilisation as a whole, which went far
beyond the obvious concerns of Grundrisse and Capital. He did not
return to these themes again in anything like the same detail. And part
of what Marx showed in these works was precisely the impossibility of
abstracting 'the economic' in the way Thompson objects to - in Marx's
writings of the 1840s, the development of capitalism is apprehended as
intimately bound up with wider social changes, in politics, law, culture,
morality. Moreover, Marx exhibited an eminently historical grasp of
these interlinked changes. In sum, his writings of this period provide
the basis of a panoramic historical sociology.
Commentary has tended to neglect this: the 1840s writings have been
extensively discussed, but it has usually been for their philosophical or
ethical content (the 1844 MSS) or as methodological tracts (Part I of
The German ldeology). Part II of The German ldeology must be one of
the most understudied texts in the whole of the Marxist canon, though
it is rich in insights as to Marx's views of, for instance, the
economy/polity relation. Part of my reason for writing this paper is to
redress that balance: to sketch the outlines of the coherent - if often
unelaborated - historical sociology of bourgeois society, as opposed to
capitalist economy, to be found in Marx's writings of the mid-1840s. I
focus in particular on what Marx has to say about the relation between
capitalist economy and the modern nation state.
In The Poverty of Theory E.P. Thompson makes the heretical claim
that Marx's 'mature' writings, for all their grandeur, in some ways
mark a retreat from his pathbreaking works of the 1840s. The
Grundrisse in particular, and to a lesser but still significant extent
Capital, are trapped within the analytic and conceptual framework of
the very political economy Marx was criticising. Two features of this
framework particularly concern Thompson. First, the notion that it is
possible to isolate 'the economic' from political, religious, legal, moral
or cultural activities as an independent or first order object of study;
second, the static and ahistorical character of political economy's
propositions and methodology. These, he charges, are substantially
reproduced in Grundrisse and only partially overcome in Capital.
I do not wholly endorse Thompson's view. But I do think his
argument important, if at times overstated. Marx did, in the 1840s -
and not just in overtly 'philosophical' works like the 1844 Manuscripts,
but above all in The German ldeology - initiate an extremely wideranging
critique of bourgeois civilisation as a whole, which went far
beyond the obvious concerns of Grundrisse and Capital. He did not
return to these themes again in anything like the same detail. And part
of what Marx showed in these works was precisely the impossibility of
abstracting 'the economic' in the way Thompson objects to - in Marx's
writings of the 1840s, the development of capitalism is apprehended as
intimately bound up with wider social changes, in politics, law, culture,
morality. Moreover, Marx exhibited an eminently historical grasp of
these interlinked changes. In sum, his writings of this period provide
the basis of a panoramic historical sociology.
Commentary has tended to neglect this: the 1840s writings have been
extensively discussed, but it has usually been for their philosophical or
ethical content (the 1844 MSS) or as methodological tracts (Part I of
The German ldeology). Part II of The German ldeology must be one of
the most understudied texts in the whole of the Marxist canon, though
it is rich in insights as to Marx's views of, for instance, the
economy/polity relation. Part of my reason for writing this paper is to
redress that balance: to sketch the outlines of the coherent - if often
unelaborated - historical sociology of bourgeois society, as opposed to
capitalist economy, to be found in Marx's writings of the mid-1840s. I
focus in particular on what Marx has to say about the relation between
capitalist economy and the modern nation state.
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Another old essay from a long out of print book. A critique of Louis Althusser's interpretation of Marx as developed in his books For Marx and Reading Capital, this is also probably the most succinct summary I have given anywhere of the... more
Another old essay from a long out of print book. A critique of Louis Althusser's interpretation of Marx as developed in his books For Marx and Reading Capital, this is also probably the most succinct summary I have given anywhere of the main arguments of my own book Marx's Method.
Originally published in J. Mepham and J-H. Ruben (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. 3, Brighton: Harvester Press, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979, 27-54.
Originally published in J. Mepham and J-H. Ruben (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. 3, Brighton: Harvester Press, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979, 27-54.
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Today’s Anglo-American world is ruled by the most privileged members of an entitled and narcissistic generation, the baby boomers, that will not consider sharing its wealth or its power. My generation (as the rock group The Who defined... more
Today’s Anglo-American world is ruled by the most privileged members of an entitled and narcissistic generation, the baby boomers, that will not consider sharing its wealth or its power. My generation (as the rock group The Who defined the baby boomers in their 1965 “immortal fuck-off to the elders” anthem "My Generation") played a large part in voting them into office. The new gerontocratic order is epitomized in Donald Trump’s cabinet, the oldest in US history. But it is no less strikingly reflected in Rolling Stone magazine’s exclusionary list of the top twenty "greatest albums of all time," which are disproportionately old, white, and male. An analysis of the importance of generational factors in the 2016 victories of Brexit and Trump.
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The final, printed version of my paper whose first incarnation was published in CEE New Perspectives blog under the title "Between Karel Čapek and a Hard Brexit." I reflect on Trump, Brexit, and the processes through which societies... more
The final, printed version of my paper whose first incarnation was published in CEE New Perspectives blog under the title "Between Karel Čapek and a Hard Brexit." I reflect on Trump, Brexit, and the processes through which societies establish the boundaries of the human, by way of Mary Shelley and Karel Čapek.
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"STOP immigrants and Drahoš. This land is ours! Vote Zeman!" A reminder of the ugly historical precedents for Miloš Zeman's recent (narrow) victory in the 2018 Czech presidential election.
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One of my earliest attempts to formulate the argument developed in my books The Coasts of Bohemia and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century was in a keynote lecture I wrote for the conference New Directions in Writing European History... more
One of my earliest attempts to formulate the argument developed in my books The Coasts of Bohemia and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century was in a keynote lecture I wrote for the conference New Directions in Writing European History at the Middle Eastern Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, on October 25-6, 1994. I was one of three keynote speakers, along with Paul Langford and John Hall. My lecture was titled “Prague as a Vantage Point on Modern European History. ”
The conference proceedings were published in English in METU Studies in Development, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995. I reproduce my paper together with Fuat Keyman's comments and the transcript of the discussion here.
My lecture, along with those of John Hall and Paul Langford, has now appeared in Turkish translation in Huri Islamoglu (ed.), Neden Avrupa Tarihi (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayincilik, 2014).
The conference proceedings were published in English in METU Studies in Development, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995. I reproduce my paper together with Fuat Keyman's comments and the transcript of the discussion here.
My lecture, along with those of John Hall and Paul Langford, has now appeared in Turkish translation in Huri Islamoglu (ed.), Neden Avrupa Tarihi (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayincilik, 2014).
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Inspired by the methodology Milan Kundera has described as the "density of unexpected encounters," this essay attempts "to reach out ... to ... distant realities and bring them together to create a spark" (André Breton). The distant... more
Inspired by the methodology Milan Kundera has described as the "density of unexpected encounters," this essay attempts "to reach out ... to ... distant realities and bring them together to create a spark" (André Breton). The distant realities involved are three historical moments (Northern England during the industrial revolution; Czechoslovakia between the two world wars; and Britain and America in 2016) and associated literary texts (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Karel Čapek's R.U.R., and journalistic narratives making "sense" of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election). The aim is to use these apparently unconnected materials to shed light on the shifting and fragile boundaries of what societies consider human and the processes of exclusion through which these boundaries are sustained.
This is a companion piece to my paper "White Riot: Brexit, Trump, and post-factual politics" which is also available on academia.edu. It is more literary and associative, less social-scientific, less rigorous but more speculative and wide-ranging.
This is a companion piece to my paper "White Riot: Brexit, Trump, and post-factual politics" which is also available on academia.edu. It is more literary and associative, less social-scientific, less rigorous but more speculative and wide-ranging.
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Final published version of the "White Riot" article, available free for on/line viewing for a year from the Journal of Historical Sociology. Please cite this version if you want to refer to the piece. Not an abstract, but captures the... more
Final published version of the "White Riot" article, available free for on/line viewing for a year from the Journal of Historical Sociology. Please cite this version if you want to refer to the piece.
Not an abstract, but captures the gist of the argument:
It does not feel good, least of all to those who think of themselves as progressives, to admit the centrality of white supremacism and xenophobia to the Trump and Brexit victories, least of all when many of those for whom racial identity outweighs class or gender loyalties come from the working class. The facts nonetheless suggest that far from being John Harris's "misshapen class struggle" that has sometimes unfortunately assumed racist or xenophobic forms, this is centrally a race war—a war on the ethnic Other, be it a Black (lives matter), Syrian (refugee), Mexican, Polish, Chinese, or Muslim Other—that has successfully managed to pass itself off as a revolt of the deprived and the dispossessed. The Leave Campaign in Britain and Trump's presidential campaign in the US articulated a coherent political agenda, whose core is a militant and entitled nativism. Since we are talking of the two leading world powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this nativism is bound up with assumptions of national exceptionalism and racial superiority. The nostalgia is for an imperial past, which is why race remains so salient an axis of difference."
Not an abstract, but captures the gist of the argument:
It does not feel good, least of all to those who think of themselves as progressives, to admit the centrality of white supremacism and xenophobia to the Trump and Brexit victories, least of all when many of those for whom racial identity outweighs class or gender loyalties come from the working class. The facts nonetheless suggest that far from being John Harris's "misshapen class struggle" that has sometimes unfortunately assumed racist or xenophobic forms, this is centrally a race war—a war on the ethnic Other, be it a Black (lives matter), Syrian (refugee), Mexican, Polish, Chinese, or Muslim Other—that has successfully managed to pass itself off as a revolt of the deprived and the dispossessed. The Leave Campaign in Britain and Trump's presidential campaign in the US articulated a coherent political agenda, whose core is a militant and entitled nativism. Since we are talking of the two leading world powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this nativism is bound up with assumptions of national exceptionalism and racial superiority. The nostalgia is for an imperial past, which is why race remains so salient an axis of difference."
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Following the victories of the "Brexit" camp in the UK's 2016 referendum and Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, a new explanatory narrative rapidly established itself. According to this view, which has been widely... more
Following the victories of the "Brexit" camp in the UK's 2016 referendum and Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, a new explanatory narrative rapidly established itself. According to this view, which has been widely accepted on both the political left and right, we are witnessing a popular revolt against "elites" spearheaded by white working-class "victims of globalization." Drawing on extensive polling and census data, this paper debunks this new consensus as an artifact of post-factual politics driven by feeling rather than evidence. These were not instances of a "misshapen class struggle" that sometimes assumed racist or xenophobic forms, but centrally a race war on the non-native Other that has successfully managed to pass itself off as a revolt of the (white) deprived and dispossessed.
The final version of this paper will be published in The Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 1, in March 2017 (where it will be openly available to read for free for a year). What is posted here is the submitted and accepted text, before editing and proofreading by the journal.
The final version of this paper will be published in The Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 1, in March 2017 (where it will be openly available to read for free for a year). What is posted here is the submitted and accepted text, before editing and proofreading by the journal.
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Considering the differences between the superficial orderliness of the English/British table of royal succession and the apparent anarchy of its Bohemian counterpart, this essay questions aspects of the analysis of English state formation... more
Considering the differences between the superficial orderliness of the English/British table of royal succession and the apparent anarchy of its Bohemian counterpart, this essay questions aspects of the analysis of English state formation offered in Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer’s 1985 study The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Rather than providing a contrast to England’s institutional political continuities over centuries, Bohemia’s manifestly fractured history furnishes a vantage point from which the ideological character of such claimed historical continuities becomes clear. E. P. Thompson’s image of
a “great arch” of state formation attributes far too much shape, solidity, and coherence to a process that was always, whether in England or Bohemia, a matter of flux and fluidity – a landscape in constant erosion, upon which coherence is only ever imposed in momentary retrospect.
a “great arch” of state formation attributes far too much shape, solidity, and coherence to a process that was always, whether in England or Bohemia, a matter of flux and fluidity – a landscape in constant erosion, upon which coherence is only ever imposed in momentary retrospect.
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Short piece on the Café Slavia in Prague, haunt of actors, dissidents, and avant-gardes.
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A discussion of the "parallel erasures" of communist and western art history induced by the Cold War and their implications for our contemporary understandings of the history of modernism, which uses the interwar Prague avant-garde... more
A discussion of the "parallel erasures" of communist and western art history induced by the Cold War and their implications for our contemporary understandings of the history of modernism, which uses the interwar Prague avant-garde (primarily Devětsil and the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group) as a case study. This is the final pre-publications version of the text eventually published in Dariusz Gafijczuk and Derek Sayer (eds), The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe: Re-imagining Space, History and Memory (New York: Palgrave, 2013).
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A reflection on Veryl Goodnight's Memorial to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library on the Texas A & M University campus at College Station, TX that considers the semiotics of intertwining "wests" and... more
A reflection on Veryl Goodnight's Memorial to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library on the Texas A & M University campus at College Station, TX that considers the semiotics of intertwining "wests" and the usurping of historical memory. This is the last pre-publication version of the text eventually published as the "Prologue" to Dariusz Gafijczuk and Derek Sayer (eds), The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe: Reimagining Space, History and Memory (New York: Palgrave, 2013).
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David Frisby’s work was a career-long engagement with modernity, informed by a tradition of classical social theory whose neglect in Anglo-American sociology David did much to remedy through his translations as well as his writings: the... more
David Frisby’s work was a career-long engagement with modernity, informed by a tradition of classical social theory whose neglect in Anglo-American sociology David did much to remedy
through his translations as well as his writings: the ‘sociological impressionism’ that seeks to grasp totalities through ‘snapshots’ and ‘fragments’ whose representatives included Georg Simmel,
Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Conceived as a homage to David’s legacy (and his personal influence on my own intellectual development) rather than a commentary on his work, this essay is a Benjaminian dérive through twentieth-century Prague, which complements and counterpoints David’s beloved Vienna and Berlin. Prague’s modern history, I argue, gives Baudelaire’s celebrated definition of modernity as ‘le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent’ surreally new dimensions. Indeed, the city might well be regarded as a ‘capital of the twentieth century’ in whose ‘ruins’ we can begin to excavate the ‘prehistory of postmodernity.’
through his translations as well as his writings: the ‘sociological impressionism’ that seeks to grasp totalities through ‘snapshots’ and ‘fragments’ whose representatives included Georg Simmel,
Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Conceived as a homage to David’s legacy (and his personal influence on my own intellectual development) rather than a commentary on his work, this essay is a Benjaminian dérive through twentieth-century Prague, which complements and counterpoints David’s beloved Vienna and Berlin. Prague’s modern history, I argue, gives Baudelaire’s celebrated definition of modernity as ‘le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent’ surreally new dimensions. Indeed, the city might well be regarded as a ‘capital of the twentieth century’ in whose ‘ruins’ we can begin to excavate the ‘prehistory of postmodernity.’
UPDATE JUNE 2017. I have subsequently expanded this lecture into a short book titled MAKING TROUBLE: SURREALISM AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press/Chicago UP, 2017). Details here:... more
UPDATE JUNE 2017. I have subsequently expanded this lecture into a short book titled MAKING TROUBLE: SURREALISM AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press/Chicago UP, 2017).
Details here: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo26613964.html
In the spirit of Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and against the background of the apparatus of disciplinary regulation that was REF2014 (Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF, 2014), I ask: What might an undisciplined sociology look like?
A lifetime's engagement with social theory (Marx's Method, 1978; The Violence of Abstraction, 1987; Capitalism and Modernity, 1990) and historical exploration (The Great Arch, 1985; The Coasts of Bohemia, 1998; Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 2013) suggests to an aging sociologist who is increasingly disrespectful of the orders of the academy that an important part of the answer lies in surrealism.
Details here: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo26613964.html
In the spirit of Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and against the background of the apparatus of disciplinary regulation that was REF2014 (Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF, 2014), I ask: What might an undisciplined sociology look like?
A lifetime's engagement with social theory (Marx's Method, 1978; The Violence of Abstraction, 1987; Capitalism and Modernity, 1990) and historical exploration (The Great Arch, 1985; The Coasts of Bohemia, 1998; Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 2013) suggests to an aging sociologist who is increasingly disrespectful of the orders of the academy that an important part of the answer lies in surrealism.
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The REF2014 results are set to be published next month. Alongside ongoing reviews of research assessment, Derek Sayer points to the many contradictions of the REF. Metrics may have problems, but a process that gives such extraordinary... more
The REF2014 results are set to be published next month. Alongside ongoing reviews of research assessment, Derek Sayer points to the many contradictions of the REF. Metrics may have problems, but a process that gives such extraordinary gatekeeping power to individual panel members is far worse. Ultimately, measuring research quality is fraught with difficulty. Perhaps we should instead be asking which features of the research environment (a mere 15% of the assessment) are most conducive to a vibrant research culture and focus funding accordingly.
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Focusing on André Breton's tortured love affair with what he called "the magic capital of Old Europe," this article maps the complex and shifting relations between the Paris and Prague surrealist groups in the interwar period, the... more
Focusing on André Breton's tortured love affair with what he called "the magic capital of Old Europe," this article maps the complex and shifting relations between the Paris and Prague surrealist groups in the interwar period, the Stalinist years after WW2, and in the "Prague Spring" 1968. I conclude that "In this case, it would appear, surrealists cannot bear too much surreality."
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Focusing on the period 1890-1939, this paper explores exchanges between three generations of Prague artists and international—especially Parisian—avant-gardes. Documenting the extraordinary receptiveness of Prague to modernism,... more
Focusing on the period 1890-1939, this paper explores exchanges between three generations of Prague artists and international—especially Parisian—avant-gardes. Documenting the extraordinary receptiveness of Prague to modernism, particularly in the applied arts, it argues for a thorough rethink of the conceptual geographies of art
history.
history.
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Response to a questionnaire in Alienist II (Prague, 2018)
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Sometimes I prefer images to arguments. The longer story is told in my paper "White Riot-Brexit, Trump, and Post-Truth Politics."
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An interview with Amanda Swain for the website New Books in History (July 24, 2015) on my book Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century.
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Interview with Lisette Allen for expats.cz on Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century