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Ian Craib, 1945-2002
Ian Craib, who has died at the age of fifty-seven, had a long association
with Radical Philosophy. He wrote extensively for the journal in the early
years, especially through his reviews, and was a member of the editorial group
in those days. He was appointed as a lecturer in sociology at Essex University
in 1973, and was promoted to a chair in 1997. Despite his personal modesty, the
continuous stream of books, articles and reviews which he authored over more
than twenty-five years earned great respect both in and beyond the academy. A
mark of his originality was his commitment to asking the large and important
questions which necessarily transgress disciplinary boundaries. In Ian's case,
philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and social theory were all called upon in
the making of his contribution. He considered himself to be at the margins of
sociology, but perhaps because of this he had a deeper understanding than most
of both its indispensability and its limitations. His early work - most notably
his first book, Existentialism and Sociology - explored the relationships
between philosophy and sociology, a connection to which he remained committed
throughout his career. Through the 1970s his advocacy of a humanist Marxism,
inspired by Sartre's existentialism, sustained his political activism, first in
the International Socialists, and then (uncomfortably) within the Labour Party.
In his work as a sociology teacher and writer, he resisted the tide of
structuralist thought which swept the humanities and social science disciplines
at that time. In a characteristic critique of one T. Benton, he argued:
The power of theory is its ability to transform consciousness, to change
people not necessarily by intellectual conviction but by enabling them to grasp
their own world and their own experience in a radically new way and to become
aware of ways of changing the world. If Marxist theory is to do this, then it
must be able to live inside everyday representations of the world, to take them
as the starting point of its argument, and it must be able to transform those
representations into an adequate understanding of the world. (RP 10, Spring
1975, p. 29)
By the end of the 1970s, a combination of personal difficulties and political
despair had provoked a retreat from organized politics into a prolonged personal
and intellectual engagement with psychoanalysis. In the mid-1980s Ian became a
trainee psychotherapist, but he still did not abandon his commitment to social
theorizing. The first synthesis of these twin engagements was his Psychoanalysis
and Social Theory (1989). It was the subtitle of this work - 'The Limits of
Sociology' - that signalled Ian's most abiding sociological argument. The shift
from existentialism to psychoanalysis turned out to be a way of bringing new
intellectual resources to maintain the central concern of his earlier humanism:
the claim of the inner life of individuals to be respected and defended from
reductive simplifications. Using an image offered by one of his patients, he
acknowledged that we might eventually be able, as sociologists, to explain the
'hand of cards' each of us is dealt in life. But much depends on how that hand
is played, and there is something imponderable and wonderful about the
creativity individuals show in surviving against the odds. Intellectual
approaches which fail to recognize this are to be opposed because they threaten
to close down human possibilities.
The 1980s saw Ian swimming against powerful currents of thought. In the face
of fashionable denunciations of large-scale theorizing and avant-garde
dismissals of the sociological classics, he published extensively on
sociological theory. His Modern Social Theory (1984) was an outstanding example
of his ability to communicate complex and difficult ideas in a direct and
accessible way, but still conveying the sense of excitement and bewilderment of
never quite grasping them. Intended as student texts, they were immensely
successful and valued as such, but they were also more than is commonly
understood by that. Ian both demonstrated and argued for the importance of
engaging with the major thinkers of the past if we are to understand both the
present and its thought. His Classical Social Theory (1997) made this case
eloquently. But these were more than just textbooks in another important sense:
they were an extension of Ian's central commitment to his role as a teacher. In
them one gets a glimpse of his distinctive, challenging but still empathic
educational philosophy.
At the same time, Ian's interest in
psychoanalysis deepened. He trained as a group psychotherapist, qualifying in
1986, and continuing to work as a psychotherapist in the local NHS alongside his
job as university teacher. His therapeutic practice was also a source of
inspiration for his thinking about the relationship between psychoanalysis and
social thought, and he began to make distinctive contributions both to the
specialist psychoanalytic literature, and to the understanding of critical
interconnections between the two disciplines. Written through his first
diagnosis and operation for cancer, The Importance of Disappointment (1994) was
and remains Ian's deepest and most personal statement.
But this public presence, significant as it has been, is perhaps not what Ian
would most wish to have recalled. He came to Essex University in the mid-1970s
and could hardly have found a more stimulating or congenial environment. He
latterly paid tribute to the policy of a department unafraid to recruit staff
from its 'fringes' and from other disciplines. He engaged passionately in the
political and theoretical debates of the time, and the subsequent retreat from
organized politics was not an abandonment of politics as such. He recently
recognized that while trying to be a 'serious Marxist' he had always been a
'very unserious Marxist': closer, perhaps, to anarcho-syndicalism (though,
typically Ian, he added that he wasn't quite sure what this meant!). True to his
early humanism, his politics expressed itself in his later years in his devotion
to teaching and to his therapeutic work, as well as in his writing. For him, the
insistence on 'opposition, argument and thought' were what had given us such
limited freedoms as we enjoy, and it was in evoking and educating these
capacities in himself and others that his political values continued to express
themselves.
He stressed the importance, in therapy, as well as in the process of becoming
a sociologist, of learning to 'tolerate anxiety, contradiction, paradox and
uncertainty and inner conflict and to make something of it all'. His teaching
was a process of challenging, sometimes disconcerting, exploration of
possibilities. He could not have been more at odds with the prevailing ethos of
higher education under New Labour, according to which its value is defined in
terms of enhanced lifetime earnings, and every course must have its
predetermined aims, objects and outcomes. Paradoxically, for one who insisted on
the unachievability of 'identity', Ian was always and inimitably himself, a
colleague of unfaltering integrity: implacably rigorous, usually iconoclastic,
wickedly insightful, but uniquely honourable, generous and forgiving. His
characteristically impish, subversive chuckle never left him, even in the dark
days of his final illness.
Ted Benton
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