Part I: Illustrating an Educator

Generosity. This word is among the first that comes to my mind when I think of Peter Beilharz. Also high on that list is passionate, caring, and inspiring, but given that among the various hats he wears is that of a teacher and that these are token and generic descriptors of many of those in the field, they are but notable givens. I might also add brilliant, thoughtful, and fascinating to the list of superlatives to which anyone who has picked up one of his books or articles, or who has gotten to know Peter in some capacity, could attest. To be clear, I have never had the pleasure of formally taking a class instructed by Peter. I also have never had the privilege of meeting Peter in person. In addition to Australia being a world away from both my home in the metro Detroit area and Eastern Michigan University where I completed my Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate degrees, my introduction to Peter came toward the end of my formal education. For my dissertation, I had chosen to engage in a study that put the writings and ideas of Zygmunt Bauman in conversation with both long-standing structural and contemporary cultural and political issues in U.S. public schooling. As I was populating my doctoral committee, the group of individuals who would guide me through and ultimately evaluate whether or not I was successful during the final stages of my Educational Studies program, my brilliant advisor Chris (and I am sure Peter would not mind me throwing this particular ‘thank you’ in here) suggested that I, out of the blue, email Peter to see if he would be keen to join the crew. (I was required to have at least one committee member external to the program, and we hoped that Peter would fill that role.) To our pleasure, even more so in retrospect given the different relationships we have both since formed with him, Peter agreed. He generously offered up time, expertise, and care to me, someone whom he had never met, and to say that my gratitude is eternal is an understatement. Meeting and learning from Peter was (is) an important coordinate on my plane of education. What is more, he exemplifies what it means to be an educator.

I have often wondered why Peter, an accomplished scholar in every sense of these words, would seemingly, without second thought, choose to accept and perform the role that he did in my learning. I had reached out to him because of his extensive grasp of and insight on Bauman’s work. I had read Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity (Beilharz 2000) and The Bauman Reader (Bauman 2001), which Peter introduced and edited, and both had become central to my study – selections from The Bauman Reader were peppered throughout my text and its introduction helped me formalize ideas and categories while Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity, not having been penned by Bauman himself, did not appear formally yet sat just below my work’s surface, hopefully visible to any keen observer, as an analytic reference point and a heuristic for how to engage a specific academic’s work. To use a descriptor with which I hope Peter would not take exception, given that there is clearly a Beilharz without Bauman, Peter was and is a Bauman scholar. Later, I was fortunate enough to read an early copy of Intimacy in Postmodern Times (Beilharz 2020a) that spoke to the depth of their relationship; this, of course, might point to a desire to jump on board such a project – to join so as to curate it in a specific direction – but my experience with him as a committee member showed that this was not the case. Never once did he grab the wheel; instead, he went along for the ride, interjecting himself where he thought necessary or helpful, yet allowing me space to engage with the project as my own. Peter’s work on Bauman was my first and, at that time, only entries into Peter’s world of writing/thinking. However, it is his other writings, ones that I have only begun to dive into since graduation, that have given me an answer, even if in fact that answer reflects my own positionality, as to why he jumped aboard. What I have come to believe brought Peter into my life and work had little to do with my topic, with my daring, or with me at all. Indeed, it is likely nothing unique to me. Instead, it has everything to do with who Peter is as a person and as an educator.

Reading the introduction to Peter’s book, Circling Marx (Beilharz 2020b), it quickly becomes apparent that Peter’s own teachers were important to him, and that they influenced him greatly. While this introduction chronicles his road to and his circling around Marx and Marxism, it is also a powerful artifact that shows how his road, how any such a road, is paved by relationships with others. We read about Doc Saffin, his year twelve teacher and mentor, the first person to call him mister (who was also the first to call him a socialist), who ‘bid [him] to read Edward Bellamy, and his local antipodean follower, William Lane’; who curated an ‘amazing’ year twelve curriculum: ‘Huxley and Orwell, Koestler and Camus, Wilde and Beckett, Shakespeare, Marx’s favourite, and then the Russians’ (Beilharz 2020b: 3). Saffin continued to guide Peter’s voracious, yet indiscriminate reading, even as he began secondary teacher training at Rusden College in the suburbs of Melbourne: ‘Marx in Easton and Guddat, Fromm, Marcuse, Mattick, Mandel, Dunayevskaya’ (Beilharz 2020b: 3). Peter chronicles how another revered teacher, Alastair Davidson, figured prominently in his intellectual development: ‘With Alastair [he] studied, and then taught Revolutionary Theories and Movements, from Marx to Althusser, and Comparative Communist Systems, Italy and France in the years of ascendant Eurocommunism’ (Beilharz 2020b: 6). It is also with Davidson, he read and learned ‘Gramsci but also Althusser or Lefebvre or Braudel, and [they] read widely in what [he] would now call historical sociology or historical materialism’ (Beilharz 2020b: 7). With Davidson, like Saffin, readings were wide ranging, yet discussion, conversation, and interpretation would start to pull them together. At this time, he also learned from Zawar Hanfi and Harry Redner, the former who ‘introduced [him] to Karl Loewith, whose essay on Weber and Marx together with Lukács’ Reification essay became fundamental points of [his] orientation’; he taught him ‘from Parmenides to Aristotle, to Hegel and Heidegger, and finally to Gadamer and Habermas’ (Beilharz 2020b: 6). Also figuring prominently into his education were ‘the Hungarians’ – the Budapest School – Agnes Heller, her husband Ferenc Feher, and György Markus, and there was also Johann Arnason. Then there was the Australian Marxist art historian, Bernard Smith, who Peter regards as his line out of the labyrinth that was new labourism in Australia. With Smith, learning took the form of explaining ‘culture, among other things, with reference to technology’, but also ‘the world system of imperialism, and in the flows of cultural traffic that ran both north and south as well as sideways’, and, of course, postmodernism (Beilharz 2020b: 10). Last, but not least, there is Zygmunt Bauman, whose closeness with Peter inspired some to identify the two as ‘a three legged man’, who steadfastly insisted to him that that their vocation, the vocation of the sociologist, ‘was to ask questions, rather than ourselves look to answering them on behalf of others’; that his job ‘was to put order into the chaos of his work’ (Beilharz 2020b: 10). Both Smith and Bauman, for whom Marx was a departure point, rather than an arrival point, were also Peter’s vital lines out, each in their own unique ways.

If such an introduction, one that chronicles relationships and shows gratitude to his teachers, only existed in Circling Marx (Beilharz 2020b), it would be a stretch to make such a sweeping generalization concerning Peter’s views on teaching and learning – on education in general. However, this is not the only case. Looking at, for example, Socialism and Modernity (Beilharz 2009), a book that he describes as tracking the ‘shifts from socialism to modernity talk or what [he] called “postmodern socialism”’, we see similar genealogies of teaching and learning with a host of familiar names: Feher and Heller – the Budapest School in exile, Davidson, Smith, Saffin, and Bauman (Beilharz 2009: ix). Recognition and gratitude are also present in Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity (Beilharz 2000), a book about Bauman, but one that also recognizes the contributions of Smith, Davidson, Heller, and others. Such repetition of names reflects both a reverence for and perhaps an indebtedness to these people. It is a humble ‘thank you’ postcard. Be they prefaces, prologues, or introductions, Peter always gives a nod to his teachers, either explicitly or through plotting them on the large and complex grid that is his scholarship. Yet these nods have another equally important function. They also serve to locate Peter within, or at least adjacent to, particular lines of thought and scholarship, lines that Peter himself has become a steward of and that he continues to teach into existence, an existence that his scholarship, and relationships, preserves. Indeed, they support an image of teaching and learning as a relationship; one learns from others, learns with others, teaches others, and learns from those whom one teaches. As thinkers as diverse as John Dewey and Paulo Freire have explained, education, good education, is nothing if it is not, at its core, a relationship. Teaching is a gift and vocation, as teachers are but one stop in a genealogy of thought, yet have become that stop through their relationships with others.

What we also learn of Peter’s philosophy of teaching and learning through these artifacts is that it requires space and latitude for exploration, for curiosity and educational risk-taking. As regular as acknowledgements of teachers are throughout the introductions to, say, Circling Marx (Beilharz 2020b) and Socialism and Modernity (Beilharz 2009), so too are lists of the authors and writings with which he engaged (and continues to engage) – one might say that texts were also his classrooms and their authors, even if he had never met (and in many cases could never meet) them, his teachers. In Circling Marx (Beilharz 2020b), Peter chronicles his reading of Marx, Gramsci and Lukács, Mandel, Poulantzas, Hindess, Hirst, Hall, Habermas, Thompson, Castoriadis, Hegel, Marcuse, Weber, and seemingly everyone adjacent to and in between. In Socialism and Modernity (Beilharz 2009), this familiar cast of characters is joined by a whole host more. Sure, he reads for information, for purpose, and for understanding, but also to challenge his own conceptions or preconceptions and those of the authors as well. So, while at times, he very well may have been reading indiscriminately (a descriptor that he, himself, used to characterize his reading at different junctures), such indiscriminate reading allowed him to meet and engage with new interlocutors, ones from distant places and from different times, new co-conversationalists to bring back to the solid, in the flesh, conversational partners through which he could further channel or distill what he was reading. These were, of course, his teachers, but also his peers, whether structured informally (think study groups to discuss Marx) or officially, as is the case with those who would work together to create the powerhouse journal: Thesis Eleven – and those who would join and maintain it as the years progressed. Such intellectual communities were and are aplenty for Peter. Indeed, growth happens when challenged by and with others, when one is not confined to the echo chamber that is one’s own head, or increasingly, the highly politicized echo chambers that prevent conversations with and across difference. Thus, teaching and learning take on new dimensions. Of course, teachers can direct their students to information and can even suggest filters through which it can be read and interpreted, but learning and interpretation is also generated through students’ interpretations of those filters or the unsolicited filters and interpretations that the rebellious student applies in their steads, let alone their indiscriminate search for and acquisition of outside texts – one does not have to squint too tightly to see Peter in this way. Teachers in this respect multiply and are seemingly limited only by the constraints of time and by learner’s abilities to seek them out, yet books, especially the types read – and written – by Peter, direct readers to others within their constellation, being a remedy for this (im)possible excuse. In time, the learner becomes a teacher (never the teacher), but never really relinquishes the role of learner, never gives up the role of student, for there is always more to explore and always others to explore with – here, with, and there.

Here we return to lineages and genealogies of thought and scholarship and what can be described, perhaps, as the stewardship of teaching. It is impossible to say whether, for example, Peter would have found his way to Sociology and Social Theory were it not for, say, his engaging year twelve curriculum and encouraging teacher, Doc Saffin. Perhaps he may have been an equally brilliant engineer under the tutelage of a brilliant engineering guru, or a career musician if inspired differently. Also, perhaps, we should breathe a sigh of relief that he did not. What we do have here, though, is a caring teacher who saw a spark in a student and who sought to see it grow into a full flame. We have a student primed, perhaps at the encouragement of his teacher, to continuously tend to that fire. A relationship, to be sure, and a generous one at that – in both directions. We also have various people, be they Saffin, Davidson, Smith, or others, seeing in Peter a fitting individual whom they trusted to continue to further their own scholarship (albeit without the need to see that he furthers it in ways that they prescribe) as well as an individual who, on the flipside of things and in due time, would do the same, who has done the same. To be sure, ours is a time in which schools of thought do not seem to exist as they once did: There is no longer a Frankfurt School or Budapest School, just as there never became a Bauman School, despite there being a richness and plethora of would-be attendees and teachers. There will never likely be a Beilharz or Antipodean school, one ushered into prominence by Peter, though this, too, would have ample attendees. Perhaps this is a good thing because as much as schools of thought deepen and enrich already existing knowledge, they can also restrict knowledge to that which is already in its canon. What we have now, rather, is a stewardship of teaching and learning, the boundaries of which are confined by the student/teacher, mentor/mentee relationship. True, when Peter agreed to join my committee, his objective was not formally or expressly to drive a particular lineage, genealogy, or school of thought. Instead, he did what any educator worth their weight in gold would do: He was a steward of learning, trusting that what he brought would be received well. Peter, like my mentor and friend Chris and Bauman (from books), offered me versions of a relationship to teaching and learning – a relationship between teachers and learners – that I can, and will, carry and pass on. This is a ‘how’ and ‘why’ I met Peter, and a glimpse at part of the ‘what’ that underpins my respect for Peter.

Part II: Being Educated by Peter Beilharz

The preceding illustration of Peter the educator, and Peter’s body of work in general, has more sweeping implications as it pertains to teaching, especially in the United States where I am a secondary teacher. Education, teaching, schooling, or whatever we Americans do in our K-12 schools, like in so many other fields, has its own rituals and customs, its own universe of language, and its own grand figure heads. As distinctly modern institutions, ones whose governance is guided by its own model of instrumental rationalization, schools, and even the training of teachers, are compartmentalized and specialized to the point that they appear as their own ecosystems yet cannot be uncoupled from the general socio-political culture of the society and world that surrounds them. They often cave to external pressures and edicts, yet equally often do so according to their own house rules and according to their own rulers. And it is within this somewhat tight ecosystem that one can imagine that many ideas, and many important thinkers who generate these ideas, are unknown within them, or actively excluded. Undoubtedly and for this reason, Peter Beilharz is likely not a household name within the circles that make up the educational – schooling –  community in the U.S. Similar to an argument that I made in my dissertation study – that Bauman’s work is essential when interrogating schooling yet is often absent; that critically interrogating schooling seldom happens at all – Peter’s works also can and should serve a similar purpose. True, his anonymity could be tied to the distance, both physical and in terms of field of study, that he and his works are from both schooling and the U.S., but his absence could also be intentional – that criticism, if allowed at all, can only happen within educational – schooling – channels and according to their own rules, outliers and rabble rousers be damned. In other words, education – normative education – must be made non-threatening, benign, an edict evident in the administration of schooling and, perhaps, undergraduate teacher preparation. U.S. education seems sometimes to be more about obfuscation than relation, much less transformation. As Aronowitz (2001) noted, U.S. schools and universities, in other words, have little interest in debunking disciplines.   

Educating students, contrary to what, say, Giroux (1988), Apple (2004), Freire (2000 [1970]), Anyon (1980), and others advocate, much to their dismay, is, or has become, a purely functional exercise in human capital production and allocation. Teaching is regularly reduced to technique – to discovering how to pry open students’ heads so as to deposit knowledge into them, stapling them back shut, and then evaluating the success of such depositing exercises by measuring how much did not escape through the gaps in the sutures. Freire (2000 [1970]) famously called this the banking method of education, where ‘expert’ teachers filled their students’ ‘empty’ heads and, in the process, reinscribed the hierarchy so central to capitalist order. Increasingly, policy mandates and the role performances they construct tend to figure the teacher as salesperson and clerk, peddling snake oil from global corporations and the student as mere consumer of yet another commodity, whose success at consuming these wares then gets plotted on rigid annual sales tables called ‘annual yearly progress’ reports, with progress as indicated by these metrics often providing a measure of how far U.S. schools have actually moved from providing education. The schools with the greatest sales get a gold star, or, critically, a boost in their public funding. Here, teaching and learning both get dangerously deskilled and become both highly competitive and individualistic. There are, of course, the big names, albeit ones selected for and/or reduced to fit within the functionalist narrative, one that certainly would make Talcott Parsons proud. Piaget – sure – it is important to recognize the cognitive stages experienced by young people and how these stages impact learning. While the formal operational stage may be the goal for all students, a flawed assumption is that students can get there by consuming more and more school. In practice, his cognitive stages have been replaced with standardized, inflexible learning dictated by standardized assessments, stages and science be damned. Howard Gardner – of course – after all, multiple intelligences allow for the recognition that all young people are brilliant, but may learn or show what they know differently, though this theory has been rightfully challenged in recent years. Here too, in practice, some modalities of showing brilliance are afforded higher amounts of educational capital or currency, often redeemable for greater amounts of economic capital, among others, while some are afforded none at all (the SAT, for instance, is designed to test – and dictate – high forms of knowledge – regurgitative knowledge, yet primarily is an indicator of family income). Sure, there was Dewey, but his scholarship has been cherrypicked – his contribution to education reduced to a truncated pragmatism, a technique rooted in the everyday, a learning by doing stripped from the rich theoretical framework that Dewey constructed in 37 books and more than 700 articles, leaving more than a few of his ideas inadequately explored (or never explored at all). And as for educational sociology, an exploration of the foundations of education, there are classes for that, ones that are powerful and potentially transformative, but when held up against the sink-or-swim-image of teaching, classroom management, curriculum and assessment, and other nuts-and-bolts aspects of schooling, it is hard to see it as a life preserver – it might more likely be thought of as concrete shoes. Learning to teach, whether actually portrayed as or simply interpreted along these lines by wide-eyed would-be teachers looking for how to most efficiently smash information into students’ heads, or, perhaps, how to simply survive their school days, is an exercise in the ‘how to’ rather than the ‘why’, of schooling – sort of (or the ‘why’ itself has been reduced to addressing the question: ‘what do students need to know to enter the world’ – of work; to question the world as it is seldom enters the fray, and even less the schools’ conspicuous absence in this questioning). Teaching as technique, or the banking model of education, appears to be a perfectly good, or at least adequate, screwdriver for a job that seems – is made to seem – to only require the use of screwdrivers. Why not use a torque drill, after all?

This idea of ‘teaching students what they need to know to enter the world’ is, itself, interesting, ambivalent, and given the hazy complexion of the world-as-it-is, frustrating. Schools, when viewed as apparatuses for capitalist reproduction, which they are, should provide students with that which will allow entry into the world of work, and increasingly, only information, or commodities, that are, or seem, directly applicable to students’ projected fields of work. Value is set externally by ‘the market’ and transposed onto the student/family, who along with the market, further transpose it onto schools, who themselves are left to absorb and regurgitate these valuations as they see fit (or increasingly, as their customers, or stakeholders, see fit). So, for example, a student who wants to be a welder feels they only need to know how to weld, certainly not how to think with math (or, rather, only ‘practical’ math, whatever that means), social studies, civics, language arts, let alone the arts in general. Yet, these determinations are often made without a recognition of the interconnectedness of knowledge, an isolated-ness of knowledge – a radical divorcing of conception and execution – often confirmed by management in the industries they want to enter. These corporate players then have the audacity to complain with a straight face, ‘The workforce is not prepared’. Such determinations are also made with little recognition that the economic sphere is just one out of many they will find themselves in or part of (and if neoliberal policies and policy makers have it their way, this will surely be the case). It is, of course, a myopic understanding of one’s relation to knowledge and forecloses human potential, as potential exists when possibilities are left or made open, not locked away, never to be seen again. Said differently, to know less than one otherwise could know is to forfeit one’s autonomy – barriers or walls blocking alternate paths, once erected, are difficult to tear down. This, however, is precisely what is reflected in comments like ‘where will I use this in life’, or ‘I will never need to know this for my future job’. They reflect a world defined by occupation, one where a different world becomes an impossibility because it has been made unimaginable, where spaces to imagine have been colonized by metrics. Consequently, this is what high stakes, standardized, vociferously tested curricula further inscribe onto and reinforce in schools. Yet this is the standard that schools, or rather schools serving underserved populations, feel the need to adhere to. It is also a standard that teacher preparation programs, ones focusing on the ‘how’ of education cannot address. Educators, the keen observers they are, recognize the shortcomings of schooling, but have been left without or have not been provided the critical capacity to imagine otherwise (and if, for example, conservative iterations of education, such as what is happening in Florida, Texas, etc., have anything to say about it, fostering critical capacities will be further hampered, prompting further un-learning and endangering other vital life spheres).

These are precisely the contexts in which making the argument that educators need to access and apply ‘divergent’ sources and knowledges must be made. If teacher education, or professional development, is (mostly) akin to choosing from an ever expanding, cycling, yet undifferentiated a la carte menu of technique, then the corresponding impoverished diet must be supplemented from the outside. True, education sociology does exist, but as is the case with any less-, non-, or anti-commodifiable field or discipline, it is under-supported and among the first back on which budgets are balanced, or the first head to roll since it sticks its neck out. The social foundations that underpin teaching and learning are present in teacher preparation; however, it is but a survey course at lower university levels and an area of specialization that individuals can choose as they go higher, yet must market itself against more technical foci – a tall order to be sure when technique is advertised as the tried and true silver bullet for reaching students (and earning positive evaluation marks) – the field of educational foundations, much like comparative religious studies, is figured institutionally as a luxury at best, and a perennial irritant for powers that be and policy makers, rather than a need. Thus, for every student who learned from and/or was inspired by their own Christopher G. Robbins and saw the value in theory for asking the ‘whys’ behind schooling and interpreting the answers they find to these ‘whys’, there is a host of others who were not inspired; who had their inspiration schooled out of them; who could not even see the reproductive aspects of schooling, its reproduction of an unequal, unjust world; who are unable to imagine differently, and who look for value exactly where they are told it should be. Questioning is seldom about how or what educators think (or this line of questioning has been schooled out of them), yet the ones that do often draw from outside the ecosystem of educational thought and text. They turn to Adorno, Arendt, Bauman, Butler, Greene, Angela Davis, Foucault, Marcuse, Marx, Weber, and Beilharz.

As I hopefully showed in my study, The (Dis)Order of U.S. Schooling: Zygmunt Bauman and Education for an Ambivalent World (Ferris 2023), sources outside of the small and polluted ecosystem of U.S. schooling proper offer important vantage points from which schools can be interrogated. I would argue that Peter provides another important critical vantage point. His Socialism and Modernity (Beilharz 2009) and Circling Marx (Beilharz 2020b) are exemplary examples of this, especially in the United States. As a country whose political right has, in part, essentialized or reduced the sins of the left to be that it is full of Marxists and socialists, and that these turncoats have infiltrated schooling and are poisoning the minds of young people, both Marxism and socialism have been and continue to be rendered one dimensional and, importantly, been projected as synonymous with the terrors of the twentieth century – the Nazi Party of Germany and the Soviets – this despite the former emerging from a democracy (and was fascist, not communist), while the latter being a violence-riddled turn for socialism, but not the only socialism available. This fatal reduction, however, is one perpetrated often by schools and reflects ideologies sympathetic to the red scare in the U.S., an optic that has never fully fallen out of vogue. Hence, for example, it’s still illegal in California to teach about communism, while capitalism is taught as the only viable economic model, one that allegedly does not have its own and continued bloody history. More generally, capitalism is taught as having emerged victorious on account of communism essentially being pre-modern (not an alternate modernity, or even an alternate form of capitalism, as argued by Beilharz (2009)), ignoring the impact that the two – American Capitalism and Soviet Communism – had on one another by sheer virtue of the other’s existence; by the symmetrical schismogensis in which they engaged. Indeed, despite the insistence by the U.S. right that schools are hotbeds of leftist teaching and havens for leftist educators who engage in indoctrination, they are very much governed by conservative ideologies, economically and increasingly politically, ones that glorify rugged individualism while glossing over the sins that have shredded human solidarity, instead privileging a fractured image of humanity and fueling the fires that, today, seem inexhaustible as they scorch the wasted lives as governed by racism, classism, sexism, trans- and homophobia, and ableism. And this is even before that very same right starts poking its own fingers in schools.

Peter’s Socialism and Modernity (Beilharz 2009) refreshingly re-complicates simplifications of socialism and decouples it from Marxism, especially Marxism’s transmogrification into Trotskyism and then Stalinism. It also poses for teachers, especially civics and civic-minded teachers, a critical basis for evaluating schools and more specifically, what an educated student could look, think, and act like. For one, Peter recognizes that socialism existed before Marx and his writings, and that it persists independent of Marx today. Indeed, once decoupled, Marxism and socialism become critical and even transformative frameworks, functions that are rendered non-existent when both are placed together in a box. In other words, Marxism, in part and because of how it has evolved and has been operationalized by others and across time has become a basis for criticism, and not just of the economy; socialism, once stripped of its totalizing ordering ambitions, ignites the fires of imagination, offering different backdrops against which people can imagine differently. In line with the U.S. context noted above, socialism has been reduced to an achievable state, a solid modern inflexible design, and this reduction is and has been its undoing. Once made into an actionable blueprint, it loses its transformative potential. However, for Beilharz (2009), the power of socialism lies in the fact that it is a counterculture to capitalism. Capitalism, and its invisible hand, the market, in a world void of such a counterculture, persists as, stealing a Thatcherism, TINA (There is No Alternative). Indeed, once stripped of collectives and their solidarities, capitalism very well makes another Thatcherism a reality – there’s no such thing as a society. Or, rather, there is nothing left to fill the void of togetherness, or society, that capitalism creates. Critical countercultures – socialism, here, for Beilharz – however, call into question such taken-for-granteds and generate alternatives where there otherwise appear to be none. Indeed, a perfect example of this exists in one of Beilharz’s (2009) critiques of the Australian Labor Party (ALP): While the politics of the ALP does hinge on a form of solidarity – worker solidarity – it does so while bowing to capitalist production as a gatekeeping activity. Here, what entitles individuals the status of human (although he doesn’t tease the imagery out to this degree, in this case), and thus deserving of rights, is whether they have a place in the productive apparatus. Productivity, or moving the productive apparatus forward, is what ‘entitles’ people to healthcare, affordable housing, education, childcare, etc., while not being productive – in far too many cases not being allowed to or able to produce – is the basis for exclusion. Such a critique questions the ‘goodness’ of that which, at least internally, has no alternative – here, that rights must be coupled with labor. What is more, it shares out a language of criticism, a language that becomes dead if not passed on from generation to generation.

One would not be wrong to interpret Peter’s socialism as the counterculture to capitalism as a utopian project. Beilharz (2009), however, writes of the tarnished image that utopia has incurred, especially in our present that is governed under the aesthetic tutelage of postmodernity. For Beilharz, utopia ceases to be utopian once it becomes static; once it becomes a program; once it becomes a measurable, achievable, and importantly, an unresponsive projection. Indeed, it takes on the complexion of, and favors, its designers, once made into a plan. Dystopia is the reality of those left without a seat in utopia made solid. Peter shares with Bauman this recognition and critique – that the path to modernity’s utopias has included various dystopian stops along the way, including the ghettos, the concentration camps, and the Gulags, to name a few, yet all were sold as, or rationalized as, techniques designed to manage redundancy enroute to a particular utopian program. Utopia in this context is attached to the state, to a people, and all who are not members or who are not allowed to be members are roadblocks to the actualization of such ‘utopian’ ‘good societies.’ Even postmodernity, and its recognition of the impossibility of solid modern utopias, falls into the same traps while toeing an eerily similar path. Postmodernity is not, and was not, the after of modernity, but rather modernity that was aware of its impossibility, or rather the evolution of modernity that recognized that its ordering ambitions could only be constructed – and maintained – on a less grand scale; that order is achievable so long as the scale or space in which order existed, or was to exist, was reduced to, to borrow one of Bauman’s metaphors, a garden that actually could be tended to. It did not erase totalitarian, and totalizing ambitions, but instead made them manageable and more realizable. It, instead, paved the way for communitarianisms, localisms, and even relativisms, all exclusionary in their own ways. Yet utopia in the spirit of Beilharz is an open, active, supple, cosmopolitan one. It grows out of the critical and is critically humanistic. Do modernity’s grand designs still exist? Sure, but Peter and the tradition that he carries on is quick to ask prodding questions: who does a grand design, or less grand design (but design all the same), leave out, coupled with the additional rider, what can be done to counter exclusion? What we learn from Beilharz is that modernity, even utopias, and their projections of ‘the good’ society are not inherently bad – criticism and building something different, better, must have a starting point – rather it is their reduction down to static, unquestionable, projects that makes them this way. Socialism as the counterculture to capitalism is one critique of modernity, one that necessarily should be coupled with others, that needs to exist, to re-emerge (if it has left at all), that can help evaluate designs, holding them and their designers to account and determining whether they are indeed good. Models of education should reflect such criticisms, such questioning, and must not be reduced to spoon feeding people answers.

Present in Beilharz’s works is the notion that ideas, when rendered inflexible, as ideology or doxa, are dangerous. This is made crystal clear in his book, Circling Marx (Beilharz 2020b). Beilharz notes that Marx’s writings were in no way uniform, and that his project, if one could even call it that, shifted considerably from its beginning to its end. In other words, the Marx who wrote Theses on Feuerbach (Marx and Engels 1998 [1932]), who wrote The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 2006 [1848]), and who wrote Capital (Marx 1992 [1867]) was different because he was writing each at a different time and with different ideas in mind. Also, contrary to what much of the right in the U.S., and even many in its left, may believe, he was not the architect of Communism, Soviet and Chinese style, and he even ardently supported democracy, as is evident in his and Engel’s correspondence, chronicled in The Civil War in the United States (Marx and Engels 2016 [1937]). Indeed, he was as complex and multifaceted as any thinker in his time and even now. Yet for ‘devout’ Marxists (and even those who oppose Marxism, whatever that may mean), Marxism appears as a canonized program – that there is the concrete object defined as Marxism and that there is a right and wrong way to practice it or to analyze the world Marxist-istically. Or, rather, that like the great religions of the world, there are disagreements over what should make up the canonized content within Marxism and as such, the church that Marx built (or that has been built in his name) has splintered off into different denominations, sects, or congregations many in disagreement with one another, striving toward different outcomes and using different tactics to achieve them. Yet Circling Marx (Beilharz 2020b), as much as it engages with Marx and his ideas, also attends to the ways that he has been brought forward in time, into the present, dare we say ‘modernized’. It outlines how his ideas have been modified, refuted, redirected, circled, placed into conversation with others, and ultimately made more rich, more meaningful, and more relevant when critically interrogating the present, riddled as it is with new, unforeseen (by Marx), challenges. Kautsky and Bernstein, Bellamy, Trotsky, Mandel, Bell, Poulantzas, Althusser, Hindess and Hirst, Gramsci, Castoriadis, Heller, Fehér, Habermas, Bauman, etc. … and, of course, Beilharz. Sure, Marx is there, but so too are others, thinkers thinking through Marx yet thinking for themselves, a conversation, so to speak, out of which more complex conversations have emerged; conversations richer than they otherwise would have been had one thought dominated their works. It is the tradition of Marxist thinkers, or, rather, thinkers thinking with Marx (and others), that must not be avoided because of the tragedies made in its – and his – name, but rather must be continued so as to expose the gaping cracks in the foundation of our social world, making room, or at least rising from a less wobbly foundation, for building better, stronger, together.

Beilharz has what might best be described as a healthy relationship to ambivalence. It is a relationship that is similar to that of and shared with Zygmunt Bauman; because of this, it is not surprising that the two thinkers’ paths converged as they did. It is out of this relationship that we get some exemplary examples on how to engage with the works of another thinker. Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity (Beilharz 2000) could very well be a case study as to how to do this form of scholarship. Peter describes this book as introducing, surveying, and interpreting Bauman; as a work for an audience living a postmodern pace who many only know Bauman’s works fleetingly or partially (and notably, he does this too with Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith (Beilharz 1997)). This, along with his introduction and editorial selections in The Bauman Reader (Bauman 2000), reveals his own interests in Bauman’s works, points of interest that include: an analysis of the twentieth century as moving from a system of production to one of consumption; of modernity being as a middle class project reflecting its own interests in how order appears, its own regime of order; that postmodernity does not so much change or challenge modernity’s project, but instead pluralizes it; that modernity is an interplay between the agency of its actors and the structural impediments that stand in the way of their exercising choice; that intolerance appears as the norm of modernity; that the project of modernity is unfulfilled because it is unfulfillable; and that sociology, itself animated by ambivalence, is the field of study that can best explain, or interpret, the world – that it can be the basis for challenging and changing the world. As educators, any one of these themes should tug at our interests. Most notably, however, they should make us question what our goal is in educating students. Like studying Bauman and others who engage critically with the world, Beilharz prompts us to question our worlds, ones that appear to be okay with inequality, with poverty, with general failures toward our fellow humans, among other things. This, of course, speaks to a challenge with education, especially education in the U.S.: How do we prepare students for a world that we recognize (that we should recognize), needs to be made differently? How do we get students to recognize that a just world can never be made at the expense of others, even that there is and never will be a world that is ‘just enough’? And how do we block out the white noise pumped in to quiet these concerns? Beilharz, and others, fortunately, offer up a model to emulate. Reductively, we might say that students would be well served to engage their worlds with a critical eye, much like Peter does, albeit in their own ways, that they should emulate his style of being with their own content. Yet this is incomplete without borrowing from Peter a general orientation toward others and his world – that given our relatively short stays here, we find our role as being stewards for others, for the planet, now and in the future, as (hopefully) others have been and will (also hopefully) continue to be. Contra modernity’s individualistic and instrumentalist ambitions, human proximity is not a problem to be overcome, but rather a remedy for the ills that such a world creates. Learning more about and with others is fundamental for making a different world for and with them, and for ‘us’ as well. Indeed, rather than embracing the chaos of the world as it is, individuals, together, should not so much abandon the project of modernity, but instead embrace ordering using an ethics of togetherness along with the ordinary materials of life that are at hand. It is a critical orientation, one that, true to Peter’s example as a steward and intellectual, continually moves toward a utopian vanishing point.

Part III: Passing Thoughts and Eternal Gratitude

Peter is, of course, a consummate educator, a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. Happily, this piece sits in a volume that recognizes Peter in these roles, and deservedly so. As suggested above, Peter played an important role in my growth as an educator and continues to do so – he is a model for any educator. His emails continue to be a source of joy and puzzlement: Unfamiliar colloquialisms and even more unfamiliar abbreviations – even telegrammatic messages – are a staple. In the cases that I have a question, he is quick to respond and, more importantly, makes me work for an answer – a question about Habermas, his teaching experiences in China – he suggests a book title or article to read that is ultimately more meaningful than a quick answer. There are the advance copies of things he has written, but that have not yet gone to press – opening them is a gift that I cannot help but wonder what I did to deserve. There are also connections that I have made with others elsewhere through Peter, ones that I deeply appreciate, in no small part, because he initiated them and knew they would be important for me. And despite maintaining a schedule that few could balance, he always has, or rather finds, time for a response, even if it is ‘in haste’. He believes in and gives me a push: Here is a book that I think you would do a nice job reviewing – how can one not put their best foot forward when presented with these acts of generosity? Above all else, every encounter I have had with Peter is closed with affection and care.

Then of course, there is the more specifically general – the how to be for others, the how to be a teacher, exemplified exquisitely by Peter, Peter the Exemplar. To teach, we have to believe in those we teach, even as we ourselves continue to learn. We, educators, are stewards of knowledge, of the tradition of the relationship between teaching and learning, and if we pass it on well, it will persist, perhaps not as it is, but hopefully in a way that is better. It is important to be humble, to be critical but to be so humbly for, while as a concept, ‘utopia’ may have fallen out of favor, we still need a just image, or rather orientation, to move toward, together. The key to preventing it from becoming a dystopia is to recognize that ‘good’ can only be temporary and what follows must be made, and remade time and again, with and for others. Peter, his person and his works, reflects this, and we are all the better and better off for it.

References

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Biographic Information

Eric Ferris is a high school math teacher in Michigan in the United States. He is a graduate from Eastern Michigan University’s Educational Studies Ph.D. Program. He is the author of The (Dis)Order of U.S. Schooling: Zygmunt Bauman and Education for an Ambivalent World (2023).