Ian Craib, 1945-2002.

A moving commemoration at the University of Essex on 7th March of Ian Craib, Professor of Sociology, began with an affectionate address by his son, Ben. Ian Craib died at the age of 57 years on 22nd December, 2002 from a massive heart-attack, induced by an inoperable cancer in his lungs. 'Remembering Ian Craib' lasted nearly three hours. This was not because of the string quartet playing favourite pieces of Ian's nor because of the past and present colleagues, both academic and administrative, who also paid him generous tribute. It was principally because of the students who queued up to praise and appreciate what one of them described as 'the most inspiring teacher that I have ever known.'

Ian was brought up in considerable poverty in the London Borough of Croydon. He was a student at South Bank Polytechnic, graduating with an upper second in sociology in 1970, and was awarded his Ph.D by Manchester University in 1973. In the same year he began teaching at the University of Essex where, with the exception of a year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he taught right up until a few days before his death. In the seventies, Ian Craib was politically active on the left in the Cuts Campaigns, his union and the Anti-Nazi-League. This was a reflection of his early commitment to Marxism. In the late seventies a combination of factors, including deep depression, took him in another direction and eventually he qualified and also practised as a psychotherapist employed in the National Health Service. However, his sympathy for Marxism and left wing politics never left him and it is essential to the stream of books and articles that he produced. There are nine books in total, one jointly authored wi th Ted Benton. What is remarkable about this fertility is that five of the books were produced during his illness. Ian Craib was first diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1993 and then two years later with the primary cancer in his lungs that was eventually to kill him.

His first book, Existentialism and Sociology (1976) was based on his PhD thesis which, as the preface ruefully admits, was a difficult star to steer by. There are many concerns in that first book, the necessity of rigour in theory, the centrality of individuality and experience, the unavoidable physicality of the body, etc, which find differently emphasised expression in the subsequent books. Readers of this journal are most likely to know of Modern Social Theory: From Parson to Habermas (1984 and 1992), Anthony Giddens (1992), Classical Social Theory: An introduction to the work of Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Simmel, (1997) and The Philosophy of Social Science (2001). (The last of these was jointly written with Ted Benton and favourably reviewed in the previous issue of Capital & Class by Jonathan Joseph.) One of the oft-noted strengths of these books are their accessible, lucid prose style which at the same time does not slide over difficulties or problems of interpretation. In Modern Social Theory and Classi cal Social Theory, as Ted Benton has said, something much more than simple (!) text-book exegesis is achieved: two orthodoxies are confronted and questioned. One is that classical social theory has nothing to say about the modern world and the other is that there are no limits to the reach of sociological explanations. One of his most famous articles was 'Social Constructionism as Social Psychosis' (Sociology, vol 31, no 1, 1997), a witty and biting castigation of overweening sociological attempts to explain human emotion and experience in its entirety.

Thus, an equally important part of his work is shown in his books Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The limits of sociology (1989)--clearly the subtitle is crucial, The Importance of Disappointment (1994), Experiencing Identity (1998), and Psychoanalysis: A critical introduction (2001). Ian began as a zealous convert to Freudian psychoanalysis, which, as Ian quickly recognised, for Freud himself offered nothing more in terms of success than a 'return to ordinary human misery.' Ian became, therefore, a fierce critic of those modern therapies, including some versions of psycho-analysis, that falsely promised boundless self-transformation. He also recognised the limits to theory. It seems to me that his most typical remark in Experiencing Identity is his critical comment on an author writing about his masculinity. Jackson's book is condemned because it is 'an ordering of experience rather than a questioning of experience.'

There is much to disagree with in Ian Craib's work, particularly in those books listed immediately above. He would be the first to welcome that, for Ian Craib was very different from the average modern career academic. He loathed the bureaucratisation of universities and the New Labour perception of education as some kind of 'salary inflator'. He refused to bow to bureaucratic requirements such as writing a research plan, he never had an external research grant, and valuing education for its own sake, he despised courses with so-called learning outcomes. Once, when pushed hard by his head of department, he eventually responded to a question from an external examiner about how he dealt with overlap between examination and essay questions by writing, 'I deal with overlap by asking different questions.' Ted Benton, his closest colleague, describes Ian as a person with absolute integrity.

I knew Ian Craib first from 1973-80 and then we were in some contact again over the last few years. This was through his reviews (his last review is in this issue) and refereeing for this journal, some e-mail correspondence and visits to Essex. Nothing much straddles the nearly two decades in between. I knew him better before than I did latterly. Nevertheless, I share those recent fond memories of a man who was quirky, modest, generous in his support, loveable, sometimes wilfully provocative, occasionally just plain silly or maddening, but always brave and truthful. He taught a course on death and dying and knew that he was likely to 'take the practical' soon. He was known and rightly loved for his chuckle. None of this, however, could have been predicted about an awesomely brilliant young man whose normal expression thirty years ago often seemed to be an embarrassed sneer. His life is, therefore, a remarkable journey undertaken successfully in the most adverse circumstances. He came to inspire deep affection even amongst, perhaps particularly amongst, those who did not share any of his political beliefs. In his teaching, his writing and his person, his early radical politics were transubstantiated.

He leaves a son, Ben, and a wife, Fiona Grant.