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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | From Liberation to Reconstruction: Theory and Practice in the Life of Harold Wolpe |
Author: | Burawoy, Michael |
Year: | 2004 |
Periodical: | Review of African Political Economy |
Volume: | 31 |
Issue: | 102 |
Period: | December |
Pages: | 657-675 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | nation building intellectuals national liberation movements biographies (form) History and Exploration Bibliography/Research Politics and Government |
About person: | Harold Wolpe (1925-1996) |
External links: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0305624042000327813 http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=U8FQLXNYYBHE22FNWWYU |
Abstract: | Harold Wolpe (1925-1996) was an anti-apartheid activist and academic in South Africa, and in exile in the UK. Ten years after the inauguration of the Government of National Unity, the present author assesses the fate of Harold Wolpe's vision for a new South Africa, examining his texts not only to hold up Wolpe as an exemplary theorist, but also to demonstrate their contemporary relevance. Starting from Wolpe's 1985 statement of the relation between intellectuals and politics, the author interrogates Wolpe's three propositions: that social research should take as its point of departure the priority of the liberation movement; that the study of social consciousness should be left to political organs; and the equivalent position of politically committed intellectuals under liberation and reconstruction. He examines the first two propositions in relation to Wolpe's own 'theoretical practice', first in England and then in South Africa. This serves as the basis for assessing his third proposition - the political equivalence of liberation struggle and national reconstruction. The author argues that in the last years of his life Wolpe was groping toward an alternative vision of the intellectual as interpreter rather than as legislator. Notes, ref., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract] |