Tony Bennett

Frederick Anthony Bennett (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 in Manchester, England. He earned a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University in 1968 and a PhD in sociology at Sussex University in 1972 that was focussed on the relations between the concepts of realism and class consciousness in the work of György Lukács.

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. 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. while 1995's The Birth of the Museum was unambiguously indebted to Foucault.

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 a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cultural studies conference in 1990. 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. 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, and with a survey of Australian cultural policy in Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics, Programs (2001).

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).

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, He has also been a visiting professor at universities in the United States, China, and Canada. He is an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1997). Outside Literature (1990), on Marxist literary criticism and postmodernism The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995), a Foucauldian study of the origins and cultural function of the modern museum Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998), a reexamination of cultural policy studies Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics, Programs (ed., with David Carter, 2001) Understanding Everyday Life (ed., with Diane Watson, 2002), textbook for their Open University core course in sociology Pasts Beyond Memories: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004) Making Culture, Changing Society (2013) Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays (2018)