What do you think?
Rate this book
Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience
Charlesworth examines themes of poverty and class by focusing on a particular town--Rotherham--in South Yorkshire, England, and using the personal testimony of disadvantaged people who live there, acquired through recorded interviews and conversations. He applies to their life stories the interpretative tools of philosophy and social theory, drawing in particular on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty. Charlesworth argues the culture described in this book is not unique to Rotherham and the problems identified in this book will be familiar to economically powerless and politically dispossessed people everywhere.
- GenresPhilosophyAcademic
326 pages, Paperback
First published December 8, 1995
1 person is currently reading
193 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 3, 2025
Identity crisis alert. This is an attempt to describe not merely 'What is it like to be thrown into life as a working class English person?', but 'What is it like to be destined to be thrown into that life, but denied it?' And for the author himself, `What is it like to be destined to that life, but to be thrown into English academia?` A full third of the book is a rumination on the task ahead.
He surrounds verbatim dialogue wi' 'is Rother'm near'bers with dense, dense, dense verbiage from French structuralist philosophers, It's an odd and laboured mix, sometimes comic. I don't know if he's written a companion volume with the roles reversed - it could be a winner.
It's a difficult book, bound to fail. It can't be a singular project. He's trying to integrate 2 classes with no resource-base in common. Nation-building, actually. As he describes it, academia barely deigns to study the English underclass and is predatory the times it does so. And Rotherham's people, lacking a conceptual toolkit for their situation, slip helplessly into sadness and communal disfunction. Their lack of agency I think appeals to Charlesworth as an academic (and he's disgusted that it does appeal) and distresses him as a Rotherhamite. Group and class are everywhere.
The book is from pre-internet 2000. What general theories of society were on offer to the underclass at that time: liberal ones, I suppose! Consumer-society lies, free market economics, Freud, Marx.. Charlesworth in turn offers them Merleau-Ponty - very handy in the nightclub. 25 years on there exists, as well as more lies yet more cleverly delivered, a post-postmodern post-liberal frame, delivered in speech, on the internet by non-academics, some of them of the very class he talked to.. What's winning up there, I wonder.
Rotherham is now famous for one thing - not even hinted at here. Although non-English voices are barely distinguishable from English ones in the book, a difference exists. What is that? North Europeans are very much altered, top to bottom, by the medieval Church's clan-busting social engineering, described in the book the Weirdest People.
Crudely put, we are obligate liberals and have been so since way before Locke. We can raid and steal still, but as part of liberal institutions, not as ethnic clans. Darwinian inclusive fitness works in favour of the institutions.
This is fine so long as the institutions are a proxy for kin, and are accessible via the sale of one’s labour. But when that’s all gone we are no longer equipped to fall back onto clan as a default institution per se, to sustain the sense of having been thrown into the right place, even if into poverty. Lacking the ethnic clan spirit to define a permanent status and a permanent liturgy, and a permanent external enemy against which to organise, Rotherham's English underclass preys on itself, excludes and sells itself.
The liberal institution that is the Yookay managerial state, that squats upon the nation, is actually a kind of clan - it knows its own, and exploits outsiders ruthlessly. It farms the underclass for its disfunction, exploiting their inate liberalism.
He surrounds verbatim dialogue wi' 'is Rother'm near'bers with dense, dense, dense verbiage from French structuralist philosophers, It's an odd and laboured mix, sometimes comic. I don't know if he's written a companion volume with the roles reversed - it could be a winner.
It's a difficult book, bound to fail. It can't be a singular project. He's trying to integrate 2 classes with no resource-base in common. Nation-building, actually. As he describes it, academia barely deigns to study the English underclass and is predatory the times it does so. And Rotherham's people, lacking a conceptual toolkit for their situation, slip helplessly into sadness and communal disfunction. Their lack of agency I think appeals to Charlesworth as an academic (and he's disgusted that it does appeal) and distresses him as a Rotherhamite. Group and class are everywhere.
The book is from pre-internet 2000. What general theories of society were on offer to the underclass at that time: liberal ones, I suppose! Consumer-society lies, free market economics, Freud, Marx.. Charlesworth in turn offers them Merleau-Ponty - very handy in the nightclub. 25 years on there exists, as well as more lies yet more cleverly delivered, a post-postmodern post-liberal frame, delivered in speech, on the internet by non-academics, some of them of the very class he talked to.. What's winning up there, I wonder.
Rotherham is now famous for one thing - not even hinted at here. Although non-English voices are barely distinguishable from English ones in the book, a difference exists. What is that? North Europeans are very much altered, top to bottom, by the medieval Church's clan-busting social engineering, described in the book the Weirdest People.
Crudely put, we are obligate liberals and have been so since way before Locke. We can raid and steal still, but as part of liberal institutions, not as ethnic clans. Darwinian inclusive fitness works in favour of the institutions.
This is fine so long as the institutions are a proxy for kin, and are accessible via the sale of one’s labour. But when that’s all gone we are no longer equipped to fall back onto clan as a default institution per se, to sustain the sense of having been thrown into the right place, even if into poverty. Lacking the ethnic clan spirit to define a permanent status and a permanent liturgy, and a permanent external enemy against which to organise, Rotherham's English underclass preys on itself, excludes and sells itself.
The liberal institution that is the Yookay managerial state, that squats upon the nation, is actually a kind of clan - it knows its own, and exploits outsiders ruthlessly. It farms the underclass for its disfunction, exploiting their inate liberalism.
Displaying 1 of 1 review