Abstract
Robert Fine died on 9 June 2018, following 15 months of illness. He was an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, where he had worked for nearly 40 years since 1973. In 1995, Robert co-founded the Warwick Social Theory Centre and was the chairperson of Warwick Sociology between 2002 and 2006. He was a teacher to over 100 MA students and most of his 30 doctoral students now hold academic positions all over the world from Hong Kong to Argentina, Japan, Canada, Portugal and the Netherlands. Robert also served two terms on the Executive Committee of the European Sociological Association (2011–2013 and 2013–2015) and was a founding member of its Research Network on Ethnic Relations, Racism and Antisemitism.
Fine was one of the most original critical social theorists in Britain of the past 30 years. His work includes 7 monographs, 9 edited volumes (including a special issue of EJST on Cosmopolitanism: Past and Future, in 2007), nearly 100 articles – many of which were produced in collaboration. He wrote on a great variety of themes, ranging from apartheid South Africa, trade unions, the Holocaust, to cosmopolitanism and human rights and also on a significant number of writers, both classical and contemporary: Hegel, Marx, Arendt, Adorno and Habermas.
His social theory systematically reflects on the relationships between theory and praxis that are seen as complex, dynamic, open and, above all, immanent (Fine, 2001). They are complex because, if given due consideration, these relations resist naive or reductionist formulations and are always required to handle the complexities of political life; they are dynamic because they evolve over time and old slogans can never just be applied in the present; they are open, because judgements on fairness and unfairness, progressive and conservative, can only be made case by case and while paying attention to the small details that make a difference; they are immanent, finally, because the link between theory and practice is constitutive of the historical formation of modernity itself.
Right from the beginning, Fine’s understanding of the canon of critical social theory departed from dogmatic or canonical versions that could only include writers who had paid tribute to Marx (Fine, 1984; 2002). Rather the opposite, Fine’s own canon is a conversation in which Marx surely has a pride of place but includes also Hobbes, Kant or Foucault (in fact, by the time he fell ill, Robert was working on a monograph on Hannah Arendt that was going to put together his 20-year-long engagement with her writings). All of these thinkers, and indeed many more, play a decisive role in the formation of the tradition of critical thought that is significant for our understanding of the most pressing problems and institutions of contemporary society: capitalism, the rule of law and its relationships with individual morality, the state’s resort to political violence, antisemitism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Interestingly, while he tended to focus on writers who produced rather ‘closed’ or self-contained systems of thought, a major feature of Fine’s writings is his ability to read them together. Without discounting or artificially minimizing their differences – his work has nothing of the integrative thrust of, say, Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action – Fine uses different writers for his own main purpose: to reflect on both the destructive and emancipatory trends that have shaped the modern world. He was interested in its promises of autonomy, self-realization and progress as much as he thought to comprehend and criticize its practices of exclusion and domination: above all, the aim was to capture its universalistic normative horizon as much as the multiplicity of its particulars.
Fine’s interest in critical social theory, moreover, has to do with how this term, always somewhat generic and with porous borders, allowed him to bring together history, sociology, law, philosophy and even literature. At its best, social theory remains that rare but much-needed genre that allows for an open dialogue between different traditions while at the same time allowing for systematic arguments on how exactly these connections are being made. In his case, it is a kind of intellectual work that is normatively inspired and explicit in its commitment to modernity’s promises of justice, fairness and self-realization.
Perhaps we can capture the main drive of Fine’s intellectual agenda through the notion of the ‘dialectical force of universalism’. There is no doubt for him that the universalistic normative horizon of modernity is a fundamental achievement that humanity can sacrifice only at our own peril. While it is always expressed imperfectly and contradictorily in modern institutions, practices, values and norms, this universalism remains modernity’s major normative regulative idea. This explains, for instance, his engagement with cosmopolitanism as a political and philosophical project (Fine, 2007): the fundamental equality of all human beings with independence of any of their constitutive particularities. To my mind, the dialectical force of this universalism finds expression in two, equally fundamental, tensions. First, because of its intrinsic malleability that always allows for one particular (man, the West, Christianity, whites) to be hypostatized as the only possibility of the universal and be turned into an ‘other’ that is despised, discriminated against or even killed (women, the Oriental, the Jew, blacks). This is a trend that can never be completely or satisfactorily overcome but which never captures fully the emancipatory potential of the universalistic maxim of the fundamental equality of all human beings. This was surely the main reason for his interest in antisemitism as such an invidious worldview (Fine and Spencer, 2017). Second, this dialectical force finds its dynamism in the fact that it is always a result of historically situated struggles whose outcome is contingent rather than necessary and whose normative elucidation is itself part of the political struggles. See, on this, his work on trade unions in apartheid South Africa (Fine and Davis, 1990). The dialectical force of Fine’s thinking lies precisely in his scepticism of any kind of teleology that would guarantee the success or progressiveness of ‘the movement’, his rejection of all essentialist thinking that treats human groups as entirely homogeneous and susceptible to generalizations; his suspicion of all dogmatisms that anticipate conclusions and repeat consecrated truths rather than constantly revising and questioning them.