In memoriam: Barry Hindess (1939–2018)

Barry Hindess, who died on 19 May 2018 at the age of 78, was a leading figure in the early years of Economy and Society and – in more than one sense – a critical voice in some of the key intellectual debates with which the journal has been associated since its foundation. His piece on ‘The “phenomenological” sociology of Alfred Schutz’ opened the journal’s inaugural issue and fired a salvo against the precepts of ‘a humanistic social science and history which are nothing but special kinds of story-telling’ (Hindess, 1972, p. 1). Hindess had also co-founded, in 1971, the journal Theoretical Practice; together with Tony Cutler, Paul Hirst and Athar Hussain, his work was central to the development of British Althusserianism at this time, to its stringently theoretical analysis of both social formations and political problems and to its dissension from the Marxian orthodoxies of the day.

Hindess’s early writing in Economy and Society showed something of the range of his interests, engagements and intellectual targets: introducing the work in translation of the French Marxist economist Charles Bettelheim (Hindess, 1973c); interrogating empiricism as a condition for social scientific knowledge (Hindess, 1973a); and ‘forestall[ing]’, as he put it, ‘any attempt at an Husserlian social theory’, based on his reading of Husserl’s The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (Hindess, 1973b). In 1975, the journal published a letter in which Hindess and Hirst outlined the reasons for their resignation from its editorial board, together with a response from the remaining board-members. The former’s valediction ended by noting that ‘a journal’, not least one – as they saw it – of a primarily ‘educational’ orientation, was ‘neither a necessary nor a suitable form’ for the kind of theoretical and practical work which they sought to undertake (Hindess & Hirst, 1975a, p. 244). There followed a series of works during the 1970s – Pre-capitalist modes of production (Hindess & Hirst, 1975b), Mode of production and social formation: An auto-critique of Pre-capitalist modes of production (Hindess & Hirst, 1977), and the two-volume Marx’s Capital and capitalism today (Cutler et al., 1977–1978) – in which Hindess and his co-authors advanced their critique of Marxist theory and analysis from ‘within’; a critique which progressively jettisoned basic tenets of Marxian thought and, eventually, their Althusserian correctives as well.

In spite of the editorial – and (one might say) epistemological – break with Economy and Society, the influence of the work of Hindess and his colleagues remained very evident in contributions to the journal throughout its first decade and continued to animate debates in this forum over both the broad sweep and the fine detail of that work. Hindess himself returned to the journal’s pages in the 1980s, including a critical piece on the use of rational choice theory for the analysis of political action which presaged his book-length study on the subject (Hindess, 1984, 1988). By the time of the latter’s publication, Hindess had left his post at the University of Liverpool and moved to the Australian National University (ANU), where he would remain for the next three decades. The period following his move to Canberra saw the emergence of a new set of concerns in Hindess’s work, a move paralleled by a shift in the journal’s critical agenda that would come to define its own post-Althusserian moment.

A number of articles published in Economy and Society during the 1990s trace these directions in Hindess’s thinking, as his disciplinary move from sociology to politics at the ANU coincided with a developing analytical engagement with questions of democracy and socialism, power and discourse, liberalism and neoliberalism, and – taking up the work of Michel Foucault – political reason or ‘governmentality’ (Hindess, 1991a, 1991b, 1993, 1997). In this connection, Hindess was to play a significant part in the Anglophone reception of Foucault’s later thought, as he had some two decades earlier in respect of Althusser. His Discourses of power: From Hobbes to Foucault was published in 1996, and he co-edited with Mitchell Dean a volume on contemporary rationalities of government in the Australian context (Dean & Hindess, 1998). Hindess’s time in Australia saw a more pronounced emphasis on post-colonial approaches to politics, power and theory, including in a number of works with Christine Helliwell (inter alia, Helliwell & Hindess, 2002, 2005, 2011, 2015). In one of his last contributions to Economy and Society, he argued that the concept of ‘uneven development’ which had been so prominent within Marxist historiography, and in the work of Althusser, might be ‘seen as an early product of modern imperialism’ (Hindess, 2007, p. 17).

That reflection concludes a piece in which Hindess returned to the critical battles of the 1970s – not simply to rehearse them, much less to re-stage them, but to consider how this ‘moment of theory’ both involved a conception of historical time in which certain conjunctures could become objects of enquiry (‘the moment of the French Revolution, the moment of the invasion of the Americas’) and might in turn be read in such terms (Hindess, 2007, p. 2). The Althusserian moment appeared ‘as a moment in the disintegration of European Marxism, which was itself an element in the broader decline of European socialism’ (2007, p. 12). While, viewed in that larger frame, ‘debates between Marxist academics were of relatively little consequence’, the piece underlines what was held to be – politically, as well as intellectually – at stake. A strongly-held ‘commitment to the political significance of establishing the correct understanding of Marx’, Hindess writes, ‘accounts for much of the vicious and destructive character of conflicts within British academic Marxism around this time. Those who survived this period well enough to write another day – and there were many who did not – learned a lesson in the academic virtue of toleration’ (Hindess, 2007, p. 13).

Those who knew, worked with and were taught by Barry Hindess experienced his intellectual depth and generosity; his clarity, rigour and persistence in reading and thinking through texts and arguments; his penetrating mode of critique; his readiness for debate and his openness to self-criticism. The journal has lost one of its founding members, a pivotal intellectual figure in the re-thinking of the politics of the left and a long-time friend.