When I was a student in the 1980s and 1990s, it was conventional to characterise the social sciences, especially sociology, anthropology and political science, as divided into two wings, those emphasising ‘consensus’ and those emphasising ‘conflict’. This framing goes back to the 1960s, and was well established as I was becoming an academic. The primeContinue reading “Rebalancing Consensus and Conflict”
Tag Archives: Marx
Foucault, Marx, and pervasive power
One frequently hears the complaint about ‘identity politics’ and ‘critical race theory’ that they are obsessed with power and reduce all social relationships to power, and that this is a fundamental error, and overgeneralisation of power (see for instance, Lindsay and Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories, 2020). On the contrary, I would argue that the thesis ofContinue reading “Foucault, Marx, and pervasive power”
Uneasy Essays 