John O'Neill (sociologist) explained

John O'Neill
Birth Name:John O'Neill
Birth Date:17 July 1933
Birth Place:Hendon, London, England
Death Date: (aged 89)
Death Place:Toronto, Canada
Nationality:Canadian
Occupation:Sociologist, professor
Known For:Sociology, Philosophy, Phenomenology
Notable Works:Sociology as a Skin Trade: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (1972), The Communicative Body: Studies in Communicative Philosophy, Politics, and Sociology (1989), Five Bodies: Re-figuring Relationships (2004), The Domestic Economy of the Soul: Freud’s Five Case Histories (2011), Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader (2020)

John O'Neill (July 17, 1933 - September 7, 2022) was a Canadian sociologist, phenomenologist, and social theorist known for his writings on critical social theory, philosophy, political economy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and mass culture.[1] O’Neill was the author, editor, and translator of over 30 books and hundreds of articles, many of which have been translated into French, German, Japanese, and Mandarin. O’Neill's work focuses on the notion of corporeal knowledge and embodiment as mediated by familial relationships and social welfare. O’Neill was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at York University (Emeritus), where he also co-founded the Programme in Social and Political Thought in 1972.[2]

O'Neill was founder of the Communications and Culture Joint Programme at York and Ryerson University, Senior Scholar at the Laidlaw Foundations’ Children at Risk Programme and Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1985. He was also co-editor of the International Quarterly, Philosophy of the Social Sciences and The Journal of Classical Sociology, and associate editor of Body & Society.[3] Michel de Montaigne, Giambattista Vico, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault are among O’Neill’s many intellectual influences.[4]

Education and academic career

O’Neill was born and raised in northwest London by Irish Catholic parents of working-class background with his younger sister Joan. O’Neill received a BA in sociology from the London School of Economics in 1955 where he immersed himself in classics of social and political theory from Plato to L.T. Hobhouse. He received a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana where he completed his Master’s in political science in 1957. O’Neill then attended classes at Harvard for a semester where he was introduced to Paul Sweezy, an American Marxist and former Harvard professor.[5] Sweezy suggested he pursue his PhD at Stanford where Sweezy’s friend Paul Baran took on O’Neill as a student, and whose collected essays O'Neill would later edit and publish.[6]

After completing his PhD, O’Neill worked at York University in Toronto, where he had three children with his wife Maria (née Doerig). He dedicated several books to his children, Daniela, Gregory, and Brendan. In 1985, O’Neill married Susan Hallam with whom he hosted graduate classes and seminars in the dining room of their home for many years. His wife Susan was a support to O’Neill in his career, often typing and proofreading many of his manuscripts as he preferred to write by hand.[7] Under Baran’s mentorship and during the early days of his career, O’Neill developed his own approach to the critique of Marxist scientism and Hegelian Marxist social theory. O’Neill’s main study upon completing his PhD was French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.[8] Publishing several translations of his texts,[9] O'Neill extended Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the body and Marxist philosophy and politics into a sociology of the body and a critical theory of the body politic.

Sociological and theoretical writings

In an autobiographical note O’Neill wrote in the early 2000s, he describes his research as being focused on Frankfurt School critical social theory and Continental phenomenology.[10] In both areas, he considers the problem of the complementarity between causal explanation and hermeneutical interpretation in emancipatory social science. He writes that his research on the sociology of embodiment anticipated basic problems in current women’s, race, and colonial studies and contributes to the work of media researchers and other scholars in the social sciences.[11] O’Neill’s many books and essays address five main themes: the phenomenology and sociology of the body; the critique of Marxist scientism and postmodernism; a meta-psychoanalysis of textuality; a social theory of civic capitalism, child suffering and the welfare state; all these topics are informed by a critical theory of the body politic.

Phenomenology and sociology of the body

O’Neill’s study of the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty led him to develop ideas on the social, productive, and political body.[12] Inspired by the young Karl Marx’s ideas on estrangement and alienation between the worker and world, O’Neill’s Sociology as a Skin Trade in (1972) outlines his theory of how corporate capitalism operates through bodies which are transformed into objects, commodities, and machines and thus given monetary value.[13] O’Neill treats ‘skin trade’ as a dialectical concept to explore how, on the one hand, humans are connected through their physical contact in the world, and on the other hand, they are tied to systems of power that operate through capitalist violence.[14] In later works, such as The Communicative Body (1989), where he also develops a theory of childhood development through the work of Jacques Lacan, O’Neill grounds his phenomenological ideas by emphasizing the corporeal body as the medium through which we engage with the world.[15] By focusing on the body, and combining Continental and Anglo-American intellectual traditions, O’Neill critiques conceptions of sociology that interpret and explain actions in terms of abstract categories, including functionalist and postmodern theories.[16]

Critique of Marxist scientism and postmodernism

In his career-long writings on Hegelian Marxist critical theory, including the essays collected in For Marx Against Althusser (1982), The Poverty of Postmodernism (1995), Plato’s Cave (1991, revised and republished in 2002), and the edited collection On Critical Theory (1976), O’Neill critiques the scientism that underwrites both Marxism and postmodernism.[17] In advancing a conception of what he calls 'Orphic Marxism', and through a reading of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault, he argues that this ‘reformulation of Marxist humanism gives emphasis to its civility over its industrialism’.[18] In contrast to the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, and others, whom he treats as having reduced to the sensory register of fleeting simulacra of endless desire, the human body should be considered 'the figure of a great civilizing narrative that cannot be separated from the equally humanizing figure of work’.[19] By centring critical intelligence on the body, and by bridging emancipatory, analytical, and expressive ways of knowing, O’Neill examines how social alienation and inequality can be viewed as more or less a common experience.[20] This style of research also means that the sociologist can never be removed from the subject of study, and is therefore not an alien observer but always a carnal, embodied thinker engaged with others.[21]

Meta-psychoanalysis of textuality

Beginning with his book Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading (1982, revised and republished in 2001), O’Neill proposes a literary theory of writing and reading as corporeal conduct, here focusing on the textual practices and reception of Michel de Montaigne's Essays.[22] In the essays collected in Critical Conventions (1992) and Incorporating Cultural Theory (2002), which discuss such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida along with the fiction of Italo Svevo and James Joyce, among others, he broadens this approach to post-structuralist interpretation into a meta-psychoanalytic theory of what he calls 'homotextuality/gynesis' through a series of critical studies of the conventions of style and disciplinarity in the literary and social sciences.[23] In his edited anthology Freud and the Passions (1996), and The Domestic Economy of the Soul (2011), based on yearly seminars O’Neill taught to graduate students over more than two decades, he conducts a lyrical meditation on Sigmund Freud’s famous five case histories and other writings.[24] As Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple summarize O’Neill’s theory of the text in Writing the Body Politic (2020), the lessons students take away from these seminars is that 'we read and write books with our bodies in the course of a lifelong transaction, or semiosis’.[25]

Civic capitalism and defence of the civic state

In several essays and two shorter books, The Missing Child in Liberal Theory (1994) and Civic Capitalism (2004), O’Neill advances a defence of the welfare state against liberal, neoliberal, and neoconservative critics who neglect structural inequalities and institutional solutions while arguing that the state has become a symbol of potential totalitarianism.[26] Drawing on an alternative genealogy of social and political thought from Giambattista Vico to Marcel Mauss, and emphasizing a distinctively Canadian tradition of civic practice, O’Neill argues instead that the ‘civic state’ must foster giving, welfare, civic virtue, and collective care for the most vulnerable, especially children and future generations, as the core principles of any civilization committed to abandoning the barbaric ethics of individual greed.[27] Without ignoring the lessons of Marxist theory and in part by displacing Eurocentric thought through critiques of the work of Talcott Parsons, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, these later writings address urgent issues of childhood and family in the context of liberal-communitarianism by formulating a concept of what he calls ‘civic capitalism’.[28]

Critical theory of the body politic

In their edited collection of mid-career and later writings in the O’Neill Reader, O'Neill's former students Featherstone and Kemple note that he first formulated his theory of the body politic in response to the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, which he revisited throughout his career, culminating in the four-part scheme he proposed in the second edition of Five Bodies (revised and republished in 2004).[29] The figure of the body politic – articulated at the levels of the biological, productive, libidinal, and civic bodies – derives from the Christian, medieval, and Renaissance imagery of ‘the king’s two bodies’, one a physio-corporeal and the other a socio-institutional articulation of the polity itself. Extrapolating this scheme into our everyday experience of both the physical and communicative body, O’Neill's later work approaches the human sciences as the endless work of sense-making and critical reflection on current crises and contemporary problems.[30] For this reason, O’Neill’s focus on the body entails an effort to ground social theorists, readers, and sociologists in their experiences, perceptions, and embodied efforts to make sense of social life while remaking the cultural world.

Works

Books

Selected articles, book chapters, and edited collections

Notes and References

  1. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (2020). ‘Appendix B: Biographical Notes on John O’Neill, With an Autobiographical Postscript’. In Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader, Mark Featherstone, Thomas Kemple (eds). London: Routledge, pp. 242, 245.
  2. Web site: John O'NEILL Obituary . The Globe and Mail . 16 September 2023.
  3. Web site: York Professor Emeritus John O'Neill to be honoured today with a Festschrift – YFile. 2021-07-02. yfile.news.yorku.ca. 17 October 2013 .
  4. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (2020). ‘Editors’ Introduction: Reading the Writing the Body Politic’, in Featherstone and Kemple, eds, Writing the Body Politic: A John O'Neill Reader. London: Routledge, 2020, p. xii.
  5. Book: Featherstone. Mark. Writing the Body Politic. Kemple. Thomas. 2019-08-08. Routledge. 10.4324/9781315207827. 978-1-315-20782-7. 202528808 .
  6. Paul Baran. The Longer View: Essays Toward a Critique of Political Economy. Edited with an Introduction 'Marxism and the Sociological Imagination', by John O’Neill (ed.) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). John O’Neill, ‘Paul Baran in memoriam’. Monthly Review 16(1) March 1965: 120-123.
  7. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple,'Appendix B: Biographical Notes on John O'Neill, with an autobiographical postscript', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, pages 243-245.
  8. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple, 'Biographical Notes on John O'Neill, with an autobiographical postscript', inWriting the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, pages 243-245.
  9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, John O’Neill (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, John O’Neill (trans., ed.). (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970); Phenomenology, Language, and Society: Essays from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John O'Neill (trans., ed.) (London: Heinemann, 1970). John O'Neill. Perception, Expression and History: The Social Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
  10. John O'Neill, in Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple, inWriting the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page 245.
  11. John O'Neill, in Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple,'Biographical Notes on John O'Neill, with an autobiographical postscript', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page 246.
  12. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple,'Editors' Introduction: Writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page xvii.
  13. John O'Neill. Sociology as a Skin Trade: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. London, Heinemann, and New York: Harper & Row, 1972, especially 'Part IV: On Estrangement and Embodiment', pages 113-166.
  14. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple, 'Editors' Introduction: Writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page xviii.
  15. John O'Neill.The Communicative Body: Studies in Communicative Philosophy, Politics and Sociology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple,'Editors' Introduction: Writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. London: Routledge, 2020, page xxv. Arthur W. Frank, "Review of The Communicative Body: Studies in Communicative Philosophy, Politics, and Sociology." The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 1, 1991, pp. 136-138.
  16. Gregory Bird, ‘What is Phenomenological Sociology Again?’, Human Studies 32, 2009: 419-439. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple,'Editors' Introduction: Writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page xv.
  17. John O'Neill. For Marx Against Althusser, and Other Essays. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1982; The Poverty of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1995; Plato’s Cave: Television and Its Discontents. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press Inc., 2002 (revised from the 1991 edition with Ablex Publishing Corporation); On Critical Theory, edited by John O'Neill (New York: Seabury Press). Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple,'Editors' Introduction: Writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page x.
  18. John O'Neill. The Poverty of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1995, page 94; reprinted in Featherstone, Mark and Thomas Kemple (eds). Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader, London: Routledge, page 73.
  19. John O'Neill.The Poverty of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1995, page 94; reprinted in Featherstone, Mark and Thomas Kemple (eds). Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader, London: Routledge, page 73.
  20. Schroyer. Trent. January 1978. On Critical Theory.John O'Neill. American Journal of Sociology. 83. 4. 1033–1035. 10.1086/226654. 0002-9602.
  21. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple, 'Editors' Introduction: Writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader, Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds). London: Routledge, page xv-xiii.
  22. John O'Neill. Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading. Liverpool: The University of Liverpool Press, 2001 (revised from 1982 edition with Routledge & Kegan Paul). Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple, 'Biographical note on John O'Neill, with an autobiographical postscript, in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader, Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds). London: Routledge, page 246.
  23. John O'Neill. Critical Conventions: Interpretation in the Literary Arts and Sciences. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992; Incorporating Cultural Theory: Maternity at the Millennium. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2002.
  24. John O'Neill, The Domestic Economy of the Soul: Freud’s Five Case Histories. London: Sage Publications, 2011; Freud and the Passions, edited by John O’Neill. University Park: Penn State Press, 1996. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple, 'Biographical note on John O'Neill, with an autobiographical postscript, in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader, Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds). London: Routledge, page 246.
  25. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple,'Editors' Introduction: Writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page xx.
  26. O'Neill, John.The Missing Child in Liberal Theory: Towards a Covenant Theory of Family, Community, Welfare and the Civic State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994; O'Neill, John. ‘Is The Child A Political Subject?’. Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 4 (2), 1997: 241–50; O'Neill, John.‘Civic Capital: Education and the National Economy’, in The New Higher Education: Issues and Directions for the Post-Dearing University. David Jary and Martin Parker (eds.). Stoke-on-Trent: Staffordshire University Press, 1998, pages 303–18; O'Neill, John. ‘Children and the Civic State: A Covenant Model of Welfare’, in Counselling and the Therapeutic State. James J. Chriss (ed.). New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1999, pages 33–54; O'Neill, John. Civic Capitalism: The State of Childhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004; Featherstone, Mark and Thomas Kemple,'Editors' Introduction: Writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page xxiv
  27. Paul Kuntz, ‘Review Essay: John O’Neill, the Canadian Burkean and the Dialectic of Covenant and Contract’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 27 (1) 1997: 9-101. John O'Neill, 'Part IV: The Civic Body', in Featherstone, Mark and Thomas Kemple (eds), Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. London: Routledge, 2020, pages 175-230.
  28. Jay Goulding, ‘Phenomenology and Society’, John O'Neill, Civic Capitalism: The State of Childhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004; Featherstone, Mark and Thomas Kemple, 'Editors' Introduction: writing and reading the body politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page 246.
  29. John O'Neill. Five Bodies: Re-figuring Relationships. London: Sage Publications, 2004 (revised from 1985 edition with Cornell University Press), page 46; Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple, 'Editors' Introduction: Writing and Reading the Body Politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page xiv.
  30. Maurice Roche, ‘On the Political Sociology of the Lifeworld: A Review of John O’Neill’s Five Bodies’. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18 (2): 1988: 259-63. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple, 'Editors' Introduction: Writing and Reading the Body Politic', in Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader. Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple (eds.). London: Routledge, 2020, page xvi.