Tony Bennett (sociologist)

Tony Bennett
FAcSS FAHA
Born
Frederick Anthony Bennett

(1947-02-12) February 12, 1947
Manchester, England
OccupationSociologist
Known for"Putting Policy into Cultural Studies" (1992)
Academic background
Education
Academic work
Institutions

Frederick Anthony Bennett FAcSS FAHA (born 12 February 1947) is a British and Australian sociologist who has held academic positions in the United Kingdom and Australia. His work focusses on cultural studies, cultural policy, and cultural history.

Early life and education

Tony Bennett was born Frederick Anthony Bennett on 12 February 1947[1] in Manchester, England.[2] He earned a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University in 1968 and a PhD in sociology at Sussex University in 1972[3] that was focussed on the relations between the concepts of realism and class consciousness in the work of György Lukács.[4]

Career

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Bennett taught sociology at the Open University in the United Kingdom, as a staff tutor and then as chair of the Popular Culture course.[5] In this period he produced his first major book, Formalism and Marxism, published 1979, which argued for the compatibility of Russian formalism with Marxism while criticizing Althusserian Marxism.[6][7]

He moved to Griffith University in Brisbane in 1983,[4] where he became Professor of Cultural Studies, Dean of Humanities, and director of the ARC Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy until 1998.[3][5] During this time, he turned towards the work of Michel Foucault and away from the Marxism of Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci.[4] His 1990 book Outside Literature demonstrated an early stage of this postmodern turn,[8][9] while 1995's The Birth of the Museum was unambiguously indebted to Foucault.[10][11]

In this phase of his career he began to work specifically on cultural policy: he set up an Institute for Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith in the late 1980s, and prepared the paper "Putting Policy into Cultural Studies" for an University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cultural studies conference in 1990.[4] This paper was widely regarded as seminal,[12][13][14] though it had markedly more limited impact in the US than elsewhere and though it came in for sharp criticism from leading US scholars, particularly by Marxists including Fredric Jameson.[15] It was published in 1992 as a chapter in the book Cultural Studies edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. He continued this work with further essays collected in Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998), which again championed a Foucauldian approach against "resistance" theories of culture from Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams to Michel de Certeau,[16][17] and with a survey of Australian cultural policy in Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics, Programs (2001).[18]

In 1998 he returned to the Open University, where he became Professor of Sociology and a founding director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC).[3][5] Here he produced the sociology course textbook Understanding Everyday Life (2002) with Diane Watson.[19]

In 2009 he returned to Australia as research professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University,[3] while remaining a visiting research professor at the Open University and an associate member of CRESC.[5] By this time his key post-structuralist influences had also expanded to include Pierre Bourdieu, Nikolas Rose, and Bruno Latour.[4][17] He became emeritus in 2020.[20] He has also been a visiting professor at universities in the United States, China, and Canada.[3][5]

His work has been important in literary and popular culture studies, especially as a founder of the Australian school of cultural policy studies.[3][12][13][14][21] He is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1997).[3][5] He was the founding editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy.[20]

Selected publications

Chapters and articles

  • Bennett, Tony (1992). "Putting Policy into Cultural Studies". In Grossberg, Lawrence; Nelson, Cary; Treichler, Paula A. (eds.). Cultural Studies. doi:10.4324/9780203699140.

Books

  • Formalism and Marxism (1979), on Marxist literary criticism and Russian formalism[6][7]
  • Outside Literature (1990), on Marxist literary criticism and postmodernism[8][9]
  • The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995), a Foucauldian study of the origins and cultural function of the modern museum[10][11]
  • Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998), a reexamination of cultural policy studies[16][17]
  • Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics, Programs (ed., with David Carter, 2001)[18]
  • Understanding Everyday Life (ed., with Diane Watson, 2002), textbook for their Open University core course in sociology[19]
  • Pasts Beyond Memories: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004)[3]
  • Making Culture, Changing Society (2013)[3]
  • Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays (2018)[3]

References

  1. ^ "Bennett, Tony, 1947-". Library of Congress. 4 August 2025. Retrieved 16 February 2026.
  2. ^ "Profile - Asia in Transition: Representation and Identity: The Japan Foundation 30th Anniversary International Symposium 2002", retrieved 4 October 2020.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j "Professor Tony Bennett", Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, retrieved 4 October 2020.
  4. ^ a b c d e Bennett, Tony; Hay, James (2013). "Interview with Tony Bennett". Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. 10 (1): 98–123. doi:10.1080/14791420.2013.766377.
  5. ^ a b c d e f "Prof Tony Bennett: Visiting Research Professor, Sociology", The Open University, archived from the original on 23 June 2011.
  6. ^ a b Foley, Barbara (May 1983). "Reviewed Work: Formalism and Marxism, by Tony Bennett". Modern Philology. 80 (4): 443–446. doi:10.1086/391261.
  7. ^ a b Pechey, Graham (1980). "Formalism and Marxism". Oxford Literary Review. 4 (2): 72–81. JSTOR 43973621.
  8. ^ a b Cain, William E. (October 1991). "Reviews: Outside Literature". Philosophy and Literature. 15 (2): 343–344. doi:10.1353/phl.1991.0043.
  9. ^ a b Simpson, David (1993). "Reviewed Work: Outside Literature by Tony Bennett". Comparative Literature Studies. 30 (3): 315–321. JSTOR 40246897.
  10. ^ a b Prasch, Thomas (Spring 1997). "Reviewed Work: The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics Tony Bennett". Victorian Studies. 40 (3): 509–511. JSTOR 3829306.
  11. ^ a b Soapes, Thomas F. (January 1997). "The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Tony Bennett". The Library Quarterly. 67 (1): 78–79. doi:10.1086/629913.
  12. ^ a b Ian Robert Lamond, "Putting policy at the centre of cultural policy studies", conference paper, ICCPR 2010, University of Jyväskylä, July 2010.
  13. ^ a b Woolf, Brandon (2015). "Putting Policy into Performance Studies?" (PDF). Performance Research. 20 (4): 104–111. doi:10.1080/13528165.2015.1071047.
  14. ^ a b Yúdice, George (Summer 1999). "Introduction". Social Text. 59: 1–4. JSTOR 466692.
  15. ^ Yúdice, George (Summer 1999). "Introduction". Social Text. 59: 1–4. JSTOR 466692. Cultural policy studies has never managed to crash the party of theory and cultural studies trends in the United States. The first attempt to crash the fete—Tony Bennett's "Putting Policy into Cultural Studies," the lead article in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler's canon-making Cultural Studies—did not get past the foyer. The bouncer, in the guise of Fredric Jameson, saw to that in these very pages. Punch-drunk on anti-intellectualism and bent on discrediting Marxism, cultural studies icons like Raymond Williams, and other "grand names," Bennett, according to Jameson, dared to suggest that leftists work with rather than criticize "what used to be called the ISAs [ideological state apparatuses]."' By hitching cultural studies to the drive of cultural policy, Bennett offered a corrective to outdated critiques of high culture, to a romantic investment in culture derived from Williams's definition of it as a "whole way of life," and to a voluntarist Gramscian perspective that "commits us to too automatic a politics ... bound ... [to] a struggle for hegemony." Jameson took offense at Bennett's obliviousness: he suggested that Bennett did not "realize how obscene American left readers [were] likely to find his proposals." To be sure, such a crank had to come from somewhere beyond left field—from the "idiosyncratic and anarchist roots of Australian radicalism."
  16. ^ a b Jacka, Liz (November 1998). "Review: Culture: A Reformer's Science". Media International Australia. 89 (1): 138–140. doi:10.1177/1329878X9808900114.
  17. ^ a b c Gibson, Lisanne (2010). "Review Essay: Tony Bennett, Culture: a reformer's science". International Journal of Cultural Policy. 16 (1): 29–31. doi:10.1080/10286630902785631.
  18. ^ a b Burvill, Tom (March 2002). "Review of Culture in Australia – Policies, Publics, and Programs, edited by Tony Bennett and David Carter". Australian Humanities Review (25).
  19. ^ a b Desougi, Maria (November 2005). "Book Review: Understanding Everyday Life". Sociological Research Online. 10 (3): 204. doi:10.1177/13607804050100030.
  20. ^ a b "Emeritus Professor Tony Bennett". Western Sydney University. Retrieved 13 February 2026.
  21. ^ Sterne, Jonathan (2002). "Cultural Policy Studies and the Problem of Political Representation" (PDF). The Communication Review. 5: 59–89. doi:10.1080/10714420212351.
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