Derek Sayer
I 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/posts
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/posts
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Books by Derek Sayer
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Articles and chapters by Derek Sayer
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.
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.
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.
"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.
But the true measure of our evil lies in the West’s complicity in maintaining Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and in particular, in the support it has offered Israel in its genocidal assault on Gaza in response to October 7.
Israel exists in a state of exception, to use the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s concept, in which the rule of law is suspended and the normal rules don’t apply.