John Rex

John Rex is a British sociologist born in Port Elizabeth (South Africa) in 1925.

In general

Rex is well known for his studies of race and ethnic relations and also and especially respected for his analysis of the classic tradition of sociology. This tradition included Karl Marx, Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim amongst others, as his book "Discovering Sociology" (1973) shows. But the life of John Rex was also a life that has been aptly described by one Oxford University academic writer as a life where both "passion" and "knowledge" intertwined. [Herminio Martins 1993] Theory and practice was, for Rex, always a dynamic issue and it was this dynamic that worked through his own demands for "objective" research and comment while at the same time being attached to a politics of the UK which included the "Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament" (CND) and the "New Left Review". Yet Rex remained, mainly, on the edges or at least struggling to remain "objective".

Life

John Rex was born in Port Elizabeth and gained his first BA degree from Rhodes University. After a war time attachment to the Royal Navy he came to the United Kingdom as a scholar and then became renowned through his work firstly at the Universities of Birmingham and Leeds (1949-1964) before moving to the University of Durham (as professor of social theory and institutions 1964-1970) and then later as professor at the University of Warwick where he stayed until his retirement with the status of Professor Emeritus. He was one of the few sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s to be seen as both radical and scientific. Later in the 1990s he was awarded the title of "Distinguished Professor" by the international community. He has honorary degrees to his name and various visiting professorships including Toronto, Canada 1974-75; Cape Town, South Africa 1991 and New York, United States 1996.

In the late 1960s, when Warwick University was involved with student protests, it was John Rex that was hailed as a valid radical replacement for the then departing historian E.P. Thompson. Anthony Sampson, in his book "The New Anatomy of Britain", wrote of Rex in this way during a period when the commercialisation of universities was contrasted to academic freedom and recorded by E.P. Thompson in his book "Warwick University Limited". Rex was seen to be a serious continuation of this radical tradition and many students and lecturers joined Warwick University and the department of Sociology with this in mind. Of renown, in this early period, was a vigorous and heated public debate between the behavioural psychologist Hans Eysenck and John Rex.

Rex ran as a candidate of the Labour Party in elections. This was not surprising as his academic work involved the analysis of conflict as a key problem of both society and sociological theory. His 1961 book, "Key Problems of Sociological Theory", was his first major work where conflict was claimed to be more realistic than the past British functionalist theories of social order and system-stability.

Professor Rex was also Chairman of the British Sociological Society and the editor of the International Library of Sociology (published by Routledge and Kegan Paul and first edited by Karl Mannheim in 1942). He has been a member of the UNESCO committee of international experts on race and racial prejudice. He was also the President of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Racial and Ethnic Minorities (1974-82).

Private Life

Professor Rex is married with Margaret Ellen Rex (nee Biggs)and with two children, Frederick and David. Previously, he was married to Pamela Rutherford (dissolved 1964), with two children, Kate and Helen. He lives in Warwickshire, United Kingdom.

Publications

Books

His book publications include
*"Key Problems of Sociological Theory", 1961
*"Discovering Sociology", 1973
*"Race, Colonialism, and the City", 1973
*"Approaches to Sociology", ed. 1974
*"Sociology and the Demystification of the Modern World", 1974
*"Apartheid and Social Research, ed., Paris: UNESCO 1981
*"Social Conflict - A Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis", 1981
*"The Ghetto and the Underclass", Aldershot, 1987
*"Ethnic Minorities and the Modern Nation State" London 1996

Articles

His articles include
*"Ethnic and Race Issues", 1996 (in: "Youth and Social Work on the Move", ed. by Amesberger, Schörghuber and Krehan, in: European Union Congress Report, published by the Institute of Sports Sciences of the University of Vienna, Austria.

On John Rex

*Martins, Herminio (ed.); "Knowledge and Passion: Essays in Honour of John Rex", 1993

*Abbas, Tahir and Frank Reeves (eds.); "Immigration and Race Relations: Sociological Theory and John Rex", 2007

External links

Personal home page [http://www.john-rex.com]

Notes