Beyond Metaphysics and Nihilism

Abstract

Steve Crook was well respected in the sociological communities of the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia. He had longstanding interests in social theory, the sociology of culture and political sociology. Steve came from a middle-class family and milieu; he was brought up and educated in the small manufacturing city of Leicester. He followed a not untypical early education that led to the study of philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of York in the early 1970s and to sociology as a postgraduate student. Steve remained a lifelong sceptic about the claims of what he called ‘foundationalism’ in social theory and of any attempt to initiate programmes of research that failed to take into account the complex mediations of existing critical discourses and the complex entanglement of social research, ideology and ethical questions.