Simon Clarke (sociologist)
| Simon Clarke | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Simon Richard Curtis Clarke 26 March 1946 London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Title | Professor of Sociology |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater |
The Hall School Bryanston School Clare College, Cambridge University of Essex |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Sociologist |
| Institutions | University of Warwick |
Simon Clarke (born 26 March 1946) is a British sociologist specialising in social theory, political economy, labour relations, and the history of sociology. He has a particular interest in employment relations in China, Vietnam, and the former-Soviet nations. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Warwick.
Simon Clarke was born in London, the son of writer Tom Clarke. He was educated at The Hall and Bryanston School. He graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1967 with a first class degree in economics. After a year spent teaching economics in the Department of Political Economy at University College London, Clarke began studying for a PhD at the University of Essex under the supervision of Alasdair MacIntyre; his thesis was entitled The Structuralism of Claude Lévy-Strauss.
In 1972 Simon Clarke joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick where he remained until his retirement in 2009. He was head of the Russian Research Programme at Warwick and director of the Institute for Comparative Labour Relations in Moscow.
In the 1970s and 1980s Simon Clarke was best known for his work in the fields of social theory and political economy. His early work focused on the roots of modern sociology, critiquing structuralism and examining the history of the discipline from its origins in classical political economy through to its modern form.
During this period Clarke worked on crisis theory. In Marx's Theory of Crisis he argues that "Marx does not so much offer a theory of crisis as a fundamentally different foundation for the analysis of the capitalist economy from that on which bourgeois economics is built." He concludes:
The debate that has dominated Marxism between disproportionality theories, underconsumptionist theories, and falling rate of profit theories of crisis has really been a red herring. A crisis arises when capitalists face a fall in their realised profit which can arise for all manner of reasons, but the precipitating cause of any particular crisis is inconsequential. Although all three aspects of disproportionality, underconsumptionist and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall play a role in determining the vulnerability of capitalism to crisis, the underlying cause of all crises remains the fundamental contradiction on which the capitalist mode of production is based, the contradiction between the production of things and the production of value, and the subordination of the former to the latter.
Marx's Theory of Crisis was published in 1994.
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