10 November 2011
OBITUARIES - 26: FRANK PARKIN
The sociologist Frank Parkin, who has died at the age of 80, was my political sociology tutor at Oxford more than 30 years ago. I saw him for a couple of hours once a week for eight weeks in his room at Magdalen College and never got to know him socially, but he played a bigger role in shaping the way I think than any other teacher. He was a brilliant tutor: enthusiastic, sharp and above all extraordinarily rude about other sociologists. His Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (1981) is the funniest book of sociological theory I have ever read, a no-holds-barred polemic that opened a generation of students' eyes to the stupidities of academic Marxism. He followed it with two novels, Krippendorf's Tribe and The Mind and Body Shop, that are brilliant satires on academic life. Krishnan Kumar has an obituary in the Guardian here.
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2 comments:
Hi Paul
So pleased to read your comment about Frank Parkin. I was married to him in the 1970s and he was indeed, as many other students have said down the years, the most inspirational, witty insightful teacher and thinker. His bullshit detector was most acute, as was his piss taking of academic supposed marxism. I hope you have read Peter Rabbit andthe political economy of the cabbage patch. in Radical Philosphy - authored by our children Charley and Rosa then aged 6 and 7! When he died in his flat there were few books compared to his past library. But every work by Orwell was there!
Comradely Di Parkin
Hi Di
I met you, Charley and Rosa briefly via Graham Jimpson at the end of the 1970s (and have a vague memory of having seen the Pogues with Graham and Charley and Rosa 25 years ago at the Hammersmith Palais)... That Radical Philosophy piece was utterly brilliant. And you're right: Frank's bullshit detector was the best in the world. I'm sad he's gone.
Paul
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