APPENDIX II OBITUARY FOR PROFESSOR IAN CRAIB (1945-2002)[*]

Ian Craib, who has died at the tragically early age of 57, 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 well beyond the academy.

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.

(Radical Philosophy 10, Spring 1975: 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 had become a trainee psychotherapist, but still had not abandoned his commitment to social theorizing. The first synthesis of these twin engagements was his Psychoanalysis and Social Theory (1989). It was the sub-title 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 on human possibilities.

The 1980s again 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 Ian's 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.

At the same time, the 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 counselling skills and devotion were also much valued in his role as senior adviser within the university. 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 and original contributions both to the specialist psychoanalytic literature, and to the critical interconnections between the two disciplines. Written through the first diagnosis and operation for cancer, The Importance of Disappointment (1994) was and remains Ian's deepest and most personal statement.

But this more 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!).

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 pre-determined aims, objects and outcomes. In a recent discussion of Weber's typologies of rational action, Ian contrasts this instrumental approach to its humanist alternative:

For some people education is a value in itself, something to be sought after because the more educated we are, the more civilized we become. Through education we become better people, more sensitive, able to appreciate the true and the beautiful, able to find sophisticated pleasures in the world; we become better citizens.

It is impossible to put into words the unique place he has occupied in his department and university, but also in the wider world of radical social thought. His combination of complete integrity, and loving commitment to his students and his colleagues is such that his wife, Fiona, refers to the department as ‘the in-laws’. 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. He remains in my memory the same party-goer, leaping to the beat of the Rolling Stones' ‘I can't get no satisfaction’ That was in happier times, when his libertarian spirit was more widely shared, and its political vision seemed possible. Of course, he did get satisfaction (if never complacency) in the love of his son, Ben (of whom he was immensely proud) and his wife, Fiona.

Ian Craib, born on 12 December 1945, died on Sunday 22 December 2002.