Canadian sociologist (1933–2022)
John O'Neill (July 17, 1933 - September 7, 2022) was a Canadian sociologist, phenomenologist, and social theorist known for his writings on critical social theory, philosophy, political economy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and mass culture. O’Neill was the author, editor, and translator of over 30 books and hundreds of articles, many of which have been translated into French, German, Japanese, and Mandarin. O’Neill's work focuses on the notion of corporeal knowledge and embodiment as mediated by familial relationships and social welfare. O’Neill was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at York University (Emeritus), where he also co-founded the Programme in Social and Political Thought in 1972.
O'Neill was founder of the Communications and Culture Joint Programme at York and Ryerson University, Senior Scholar at the Laidlaw Foundations’ Children at Risk Programme and Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1985. He was also co-editor of the "International Quarterly, Philosophy of the Social Sciences" and "The Journal of Classical Sociology," and associate editor of "Body &amp; Society". Michel de Montaigne, Giambattista Vico, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault are among O’Neill’s many intellectual influences.
Education and academic career.
O’Neill was born and raised in northwest London by Irish Catholic parents of working-class background with his younger sister Joan. O’Neill received a BA in sociology from the London School of Economics in 1955 where he immersed himself in classics of social and political theory from Plato to L.T. Hobhouse. He received a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana where he completed his Master’s in political science in 1957. O’Neill then attended classes at Harvard for a semester where he was introduced to Paul Sweezy, an American Marxist and former Harvard professor. Sweezy suggested he pursue his PhD at Stanford where Sweezy’s friend Paul Baran took on O’Neill as a student, and whose collected essays O'Neill would later edit and publish.
After completing his PhD, O’Neill worked at York University in Toronto, where he had three children with his wife Maria (née Doerig). He dedicated several books to his children, Daniela, Gregory, and Brendan. In 1985, O’Neill married Susan Hallam with whom he hosted graduate classes and seminars in the dining room of their home for many years. His wife Susan was a support to O’Neill in his career, often typing and proofreading many of his manuscripts as he preferred to write by hand. Under Baran’s mentorship and during the early days of his career, O’Neill developed his own approach to the critique of Marxist scientism and Hegelian Marxist social theory. O’Neill’s main study upon completing his PhD was French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Publishing several translations of his texts, O'Neill extended Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the body and Marxist philosophy and politics into a sociology of the body and a critical theory of the body politic.
Sociological and theoretical writings.
In an autobiographical note O’Neill wrote in the early 2000s, he describes his research as being focused on Frankfurt School critical social theory and Continental phenomenology. In both areas, he considers the problem of the complementarity between causal explanation and hermeneutical interpretation in emancipatory social science. He writes that his research on the sociology of embodiment anticipated basic problems in current women’s, race, and colonial studies and contributes to the work of media researchers and other scholars in the social sciences. O’Neill’s many books and essays address five main themes: the phenomenology and sociology of the body; the critique of Marxist scientism and postmodernism; a meta-psychoanalysis of textuality; a social theory of civic capitalism, child suffering and the welfare state; all these topics are informed by a critical theory of the body politic.
Phenomenology and sociology of the body.
O’Neill’s study of the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty led him to develop ideas on the social, productive, and political body. Inspired by the young Karl Marx’s ideas on estrangement and alienation between the worker and world, O’Neill’s "Sociology as a Skin Trade" in (1972) outlines his theory of how corporate capitalism operates through bodies which are transformed into objects, commodities, and machines and thus given monetary value. O’Neill treats ‘skin trade’ as a dialectical concept to explore how, on the one hand, humans are connected through their physical contact in the world, and on the other hand, they are tied to systems of power that operate through capitalist violence. In later works, such as "The Communicative Body" (1989), where he also develops a theory of childhood development through the work of Jacques Lacan, O’Neill grounds his phenomenological ideas by emphasizing the corporeal body as the medium through which we engage with the world. By focusing on the body, and combining Continental and Anglo-American intellectual traditions, O’Neill critiques conceptions of sociology that interpret and explain actions in terms of abstract categories, including functionalist and postmodern theories.
Critique of Marxist scientism and postmodernism.
In his career-long writings on Hegelian Marxist critical theory, including the essays collected in "For Marx Against Althusser" (1982), "The Poverty of Postmodernism" (1995), "Plato’s Cave" (1991, revised and republished in 2002), and the edited collection "On Critical Theory" (1976), O’Neill critiques the scientism that underwrites both Marxism and postmodernism. In advancing a conception of what he calls 'Orphic Marxism', and through a reading of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault, he argues that this ‘reformulation of Marxist humanism gives emphasis to its civility over its industrialism’. In contrast to the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, and others, whom he treats as having reduced to the sensory register of fleeting simulacra of endless desire, the human body should be considered 'the figure of a great civilizing narrative that cannot be separated from the equally humanizing figure of work’. By centring critical intelligence on the body, and by bridging emancipatory, analytical, and expressive ways of knowing, O’Neill examines how social alienation and inequality can be viewed as more or less a common experience. This style of research also means that the sociologist can never be removed from the subject of study, and is therefore not an alien observer but always a carnal, embodied thinker engaged with others.
Meta-psychoanalysis of textuality.
Beginning with his book "Essaying Montaigne: A Study of the Renaissance Institution of Writing and Reading" (1982, revised and republished in 2001), O’Neill proposes a literary theory of writing and reading as corporeal conduct, here focusing on the textual practices and reception of Michel de Montaigne's "Essays". In the essays collected in "Critical Conventions" (1992) and "Incorporating Cultural Theory" (2002), which discuss such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida along with the fiction of Italo Svevo and James Joyce, among others, he broadens this approach to post-structuralist interpretation into a meta-psychoanalytic theory of what he calls 'homotextuality/gynesis' through a series of critical studies of the conventions of style and disciplinarity in the literary and social sciences. In his edited anthology "Freud and the Passions" (1996), and "The Domestic Economy of the Soul" (2011), based on yearly seminars O’Neill taught to graduate students over more than two decades, he conducts a lyrical meditation on Sigmund Freud’s famous five case histories and other writings. As Mark Featherstone and Thomas Kemple summarize O’Neill’s theory of the text in "Writing the Body Politic" (2020), the lessons students take away from these seminars is that 'we read and write books with our bodies in the course of a lifelong transaction, or semiosis’.
Civic capitalism and defence of the civic state.
In several essays and two shorter books, "The Missing Child in Liberal Theory" (1994) and "Civic Capitalism" (2004), O’Neill advances a defence of the welfare state against liberal, neoliberal, and neoconservative critics who neglect structural inequalities and institutional solutions while arguing that the state has become a symbol of potential totalitarianism. Drawing on an alternative genealogy of social and political thought from Giambattista Vico to Marcel Mauss, and emphasizing a distinctively Canadian tradition of civic practice, O’Neill argues instead that the ‘civic state’ must foster giving, welfare, civic virtue, and collective care for the most vulnerable, especially children and future generations, as the core principles of any civilization committed to abandoning the barbaric ethics of individual greed. Without ignoring the lessons of Marxist theory and in part by displacing Eurocentric thought through critiques of the work of Talcott Parsons, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, these later writings address urgent issues of childhood and family in the context of liberal-communitarianism by formulating a concept of what he calls ‘civic capitalism’.
Critical theory of the body politic.
 In their edited collection of mid-career and later writings in the "O’Neill Reader", O'Neill's former students Featherstone and Kemple note that he first formulated his theory of the body politic in response to the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, which he revisited throughout his career, culminating in the four-part scheme he proposed in the second edition of "Five Bodies" (revised and republished in 2004). The figure of the body politic – articulated at the levels of the biological, productive, libidinal, and civic bodies – derives from the Christian, medieval, and Renaissance imagery of ‘the king’s two bodies’, one a physio-corporeal and the other a socio-institutional articulation of the polity itself. Extrapolating this scheme into our everyday experience of both the physical and communicative body, O’Neill's later work approaches the human sciences as the endless work of sense-making and critical reflection on current crises and contemporary problems. For this reason, O’Neill’s focus on the body entails an effort to ground social theorists, readers, and sociologists in their experiences, perceptions, and embodied efforts to make sense of social life while remaking the cultural world.
References.
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