The Sociologist and the Critic: Remembering Michael Burawoy
On February 3, 2025, Michael Burawoy was tragically killed in a hit-and-run. Zachary Levenson remembers his teacher and reflects on his intellectual generosity and political commitment.
It is often said that no one loved sociology as much as Michael Burawoy. In the wake of his tragic killing on Monday, at least, we’ve seen a comparable claim in many of the tributes from those who knew him. And, in many ways, it was true: no one loved sociology as much as Michael Burawoy. Michael’s students, colleagues, and interlocutors functioned as his chosen family. On multiple days each month — and sometimes each week — he would invite his students over to his apartment in Oakland, where entry was a ritual. We’d have to wait until everyone was there before buzzing him, and he’d come down with this ridiculous grin, shepherding us all into the elevator, where he’d have to insert a key to get it to work. That meant there was no leaving until he decided we were finished, and so we were frequently there until close to midnight, gathered in his dimly — no, barely — lit living room. There was one pole lamp he would sometimes turn on, but rarely. Whenever he did, the dust would begin to smoke immediately.
Once the discussion really got going, maybe an hour and a half in, he would suddenly arise, make a beeline to his balcony, where there was a little storage closet, which contained his white board. He would haul it awkwardly back into the living room, leaning it against a chair and moving the only light in the room right above it, proceeding to diagram the argument of whosever paper we were discussing that evening, breaking it into its component parts and rearranging it in multiple ways until it assumed a certain amount of coherence.
No one loved sociology as much as Michael Burawoy.
Yet, there was also a way in which sociology remained his life-long foil. Marx wasn’t a political economist but a critic of political economy; Gramsci wasn’t a political scientist but a critic of political science. Michael had much the same relationship with sociology. He notoriously refused to break his two-semester undergraduate social theory sequence into classical and contemporary, as everyone else did. For him, the two semesters were Marxist and bourgeois – and he was dead serious. Sociology, he used to argue, emerged as a response to Marxism. And, so, while it often appeared as if Michael loved sociology, I actually think it was the critique of sociology that he loved so much, though he’d always refuse such stark oppositions.
Just last week, I was emailing with him about an ongoing debate about the relationship between Marxism and Black radical thought. A new critique of his recent work on Du Bois had just been published, and he was convinced that this was sociology reacting to Marxism rather than substantively incorporating its insights, or as he put in his message,
Sociology can’t exist without a diatribe against Marxism. As I used to say to my undergraduates in justifying spending the first semester studying Marxism: there would be no sociology without Marxism, so as sociology majors you would have no major if you didn’t keep Marxism alive!
He went on to bemoan the fact that sociologists couldn’t distinguish what he called “sociological Marxism” from “Marxist sociology.” The task, for Michael, was never to embrace Marxism while kicking sociology to the curb; rather, it was to learn from both sociology’s critique of Marxism and the limits of sociological thought. I learned this lesson from him well. “You haven’t a shred of evidence for that claim!” he would often shout, leaping up from his musty couch, or else spinning around in a squeaky desk chair in his office. Michael couldn’t stand theoreticism, and he used to chide me for wanting to be a theorist first and a sociologist second. This was the brilliance of his approach: theory was only meaningful insofar as it helped us to make sense of the social world. And, more importantly, it was never something to be “confirmed.” The entire point of his approach was to reconstruct theory, beginning from theory and bringing it to bear upon the empirical world, using it to abstract from the overwhelming mess of that world, and construct an argument. But the point was simultaneously to identify the limits of that theory, of one’s hypothesis really, and figure out how to draw lessons from empirical observations that helped the sociologist to reconstruct that theory.
This back-and-forth movement tends to be associated with what he wound up calling the “extended case method,” and later “theory-driven ethnography.” In its published form, this was always a polemic with empiricist ethnographers and, in particular, grounded theorists. But I always associated the approach with a very different source: Marx’s famous 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse, where he insists that
the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.
Michael couldn’t stand empiricism, but he was equally repulsed by theoreticism. The task of sociological Marxism, he thought, was to carefully navigate between these twin pitfalls. Why do we begin from the abstract and only then descend to the concrete? For Michael, this was never about projecting abstractions onto the empirical world, nor was he interested in discovering perfectly confirmed hypotheses in the wild, cases that substantiated what we already thought. Rather, he was convinced, as am I, that this is the core of any serious critique of empiricism. There is no empirical world that objectively exists as “data”; what appear as “data” to the sociologist have already been mediated by one’s theoretical apparatus, which is to say, one’s worldview. This is why reflexivity is at the core of the enterprise. Without being conscious of the ways in which theory constitutes empirical observation, and actively so, sociologists remain willfully ignorant of the conditions under which their own knowledge is produced. And, so, we begin from the abstract, descend to the concrete, and move back to the abstract again, empirics modifying our theories, but theories in turn determining what it is that comes into focus as data in the first place.
There are not many self-proclaimed Marxist ethnographers out there, and, not counting Michael’s students, we could probably count them on one hand. As a Marxist ethnographer myself, I was always so grateful to find someone who understood what I was up to. Ethnography allows us one way to capture the social logic of the present, but this is a present that is simultaneously the product of various historically sedimented forces and relations. One response to this conundrum would be to pair archival work and deep immersion in the secondary literature with participant-observation fieldwork, as was common among his students. But he went far beyond this simplistic solution, which risks separating historical forces from the present. Instead, Michael was interested in recovering historical traces in the present, though he never formalized this terminology as far as I know. The point though is that it was never about imagining how the state, or capital, or any other set of structuring forces might overdetermine the present. It was, instead, about recovering traces of these forces in the present and then recuperating their origins and genesis. This is how ethnography and sociological Marxism could co-exist in productive symbiosis, and, indeed, he was certain that this method was sociological Marxism.
He might have loved reading about abstract formulations, but he couldn’t stand such high levels of abstraction in the work he advised. And that was the thing about Michael, who chaired over 80 dissertation committees in his nearly 50 years teaching in Berkeley Sociology: the work he advised became his true legacy. I could rehearse his contributions to labor process theory, and, indeed, his first pair of major monographs were groundbreaking contributions to the sociology of work for which he is most commonly celebrated, Manufacturing Consent and The Politics of Production. Or, even earlier, before he ever set foot at the University of Chicago, where he wrote his PhD under the supervision of William Julius Wilson, his work on race, class, and colonialism in both South Africa and Zambia transformed insights from Fanon, early Arrighi, and others into an entire research program — a program he put to the side during his fieldwork in a Chicago factory during grad school and to which he only returned in his final years. This early work, whether he knew it or not, formed the theoretical backdrop to his more recent work on racial capitalism and Du Bois’ Black Marxism.
When I received the news of Michael’s senseless death, I had just opened my laptop to get back to work on a piece I was writing with another of his former students, Marcel Paret, on precisely this body of work, from roughly 1972 through 1981, for an edited volume commemorating his retirement. Michael’s return to this early work occurred at just the moment I began to study racial capitalism in southern Africa, and so we were in frequent communication again. A few years ago, I emailed him about a discovery I had made rereading the work of the South African Marxist Bernard Magubane. “That chap never liked me much,” Michael joked. When he was at the University of Zambia writing what would become his first (but rarely actually read) book, Magubane was a constant fixture in the department. (This eventually led to a spat between them in the pages of the American Journal of Sociology in which Michael accused Magubane of “dogmatism,” “distortion and fabrication” after the latter wrote a vicious review of Michael’s first book.) Michael worked with the anthropologist Jaap van Velsen, a student of the South African anthropologist Max Gluckman, founder of the Manchester School of Anthropology. Both Gluckman and van Velsen had relocated to the Rhodes-Livingston Institute in what was then Northern Rhodesia, today Zambia, and Michael encountered van Velsen at the University of Zambia, which was established only a few years before he began his MA there, just a few years after Zambia achieved independence in 1964. Together, Gluckman and van Velsen advocated an approach to ethnography they termed the “extended case method.” It was Michael who would popularize the method among sociologists, though he also modified it a bit, emphasizing the central role of reflexivity in understanding our own perception of the structures mediating the observable world, and framing the entire enterprise as one about the relationship between theory and empirics.
When typically asked how he first came to Marxism, Michael’s answer was always about taking a seminar with Adam Przeworski while a PhD student at Chicago, in which he was first exposed to Poulantzas, Althusser, and Gramsci, among others. But this narrative is not quite right. First, Michael’s published writings before this seminar reveal a deep familiarity with Marxist theory. Second, he only took that class, he later told me, because Poulantzas was so central to the debates he encountered in South Africa in that period, piquing his interest in state theory. And, third, as he mentioned in an aside during a dinner in his apartment one evening about a decade ago, his other advisor while in Zambia was Jack Simons, an exiled leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP), whose coauthored book on race and class in South Africa had a formative influence on Michael. (Over forty years later, just before my first trip to South Africa, I asked him what I needed to read. He recommended one book: Jack and Ray Simons’ Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950.) It was through Simons that Michael became immersed in some of the debates then raging in the SACP — debates he would return to over the following decades when debating his long-time friend and interlocutor Harold Wolpe, another exiled SACP intellectual.
And, so, Michael moved from this earliest period, in which he was interested in the relationship between race and class in a postcolonial context, through labor ethnography on multiple continents, from Zambian miners to factory workers in Chicago, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. I won’t rehearse his contributions to labor studies here, though for those wanting a more comprehensive overview of his trajectory, I highly recommend his inaptly titled final book, Public Sociology, which is a sort of memoir masquerading as a volume about something else. It was during this later period that he became obsessed with the fall of the Soviet Union, growing close to a number of key intellectuals in that context, including the Russian sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, who was incarcerated in a Russian penal colony after being designated a “foreign agent” by Putin’s regime. Michael campaigned tirelessly for his friend and comrade’s release until the very end.
Despite the massive geographical scope and topical range of his research, I actually think his primary legacy is rooted in his approach to teaching and mentorship. Just after the fall of the USSR, he co-edited a volume with his students called Ethnography Unbound, and, just under a decade later, a sequel with another round of students called Global Ethnography. In these two works, as well as his writings and speeches from the period on public sociology and the extended case method, a few things become immediately evident. First, Michael was above all else a shepherd cultivating his flock, as Foucault might’ve described him, attentive to each student’s individual needs. I can’t tell you how many of his former students have described him to me as the sweetest man on the planet, whereas I often found him intensely serious and direct. He calibrated his relationship to each one of us quite differently, and there was no singular Michael. Every one of his students knew a different advisor.
Ultimately, though, what really struck me about him is that he was completely resistant to the idea of reproducing carbon copies of himself, or even proteges in the typical sense. I know I deliberately avoided invoking the extended case method (ECM) in my first book, save for a methodological afterword, probably because I wanted to distinguish myself from him. So, imagine my surprise when C.K. Lee, another of his former students, told me my book was a solid example of the ECM in action. I certainly hadn’t intended this to be the case. I barely cite Michael’s work at all in that book, yet his imprints are all over it — and that’s exactly how he would’ve wanted it. He never taught us what to think, but only how to think, as clichéd as that may sound.
Second, Michael’s approach was deliberately collective. He strove to create community with his pedagogy. His entire approach to advising revolved around regular dissertation group meetings in his apartment in Oakland. While he would, of course, always chime in, his primary contribution was nurturing a space for mutual critique in which we all offered such substantial criticism on each other’s papers that his work was often already done before he opened his mouth. But he, of course, never refrained from opening his mouth.
The sheer generosity of his willingness to regularly offer feedback was unmatched. Even years after finishing my PhD, he would still offer to read papers in progress, send me bits of writing for feedback, and, far more importantly, he did this for more people than I could possibly count. When news of his death spread, I received multiple messages from South African scholars who commiserated with me. He was offering feedback on their book manuscripts. I received another note from a historian who told me Michael had convinced him to write a political memoir a few months ago and had offered to read a draft. There were dozens, if not hundreds of people, with whom he was in contact, and, for Michael, contact was a substantive relationship, never about merely exchanging niceties. I don’t know how he had the time, but he always made it work. How could he mentor not only his dozen or so grad students, but dozens and dozens and dozens of others? He established an entire network.
Third, and finally, there is the matter of Michael’s politics. He wasn’t the sort to assume the identity of an activist, nor did he know the first thing about the left sectariana with which I was obsessed. Occasionally I’d try to fill him in, but he had no interest. Michael was a serious political actor in the most practical way imaginable. He was there on every single picket line for the entire decade I was at UC Berkeley, always agreeing to speak if we thought it would be helpful. He led the Berkeley Faculty Association in a period of intense austerity following the 2008 crisis, openly condemning the administrative compradors whom he used to deride as “spiralists,” opportunists who would leverage their role in dismantling public education to jump ship and find lucrative employment elsewhere, leaving the university’s ruins in their wake. He actively mobilized during Occupy, and once, when a number of our undergraduate students had occupied a building in protest of fee hikes, he led the entire class — a class of over 200 — onto the steps of the building and, bullhorn in hand, proceeded to finish his lecture there. (It was on Discipline and Punish, in case you’re wondering.) He was also among the only sociology faculty members of his stature who spoke loudly and clearly about the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and he played an outsized role in our organizing efforts with Sociologists 4 Palestine.
I could go on about his politics all day, but I’ll leave that for somebody else to chronicle. For now, I’ll simply say that as much as (if not more than) any other faculty member I’ve encountered across multiple campuses, no one was as willing to put it all on the line as Michael. And it wasn’t just about his current stature. His colleagues now joke about some of the battles he picked as an untenured assistant professor in the late 1970s. For Michael, politics were everything, but they were deeply connected to sociology. For him, sociology really could change the world, though in a very particular way.
No one loved sociology as much as Michael Burawoy? Perhaps. But, much like Du Bois, Michael settled on the view that sociology was only a starting point. Science alone was never sufficient to effect political change, let alone social transformation. But it was the root of a worldview that had to inform our practical politics. If you read his writing on public sociology carefully, you’ll notice that it’s quite different from the way in which the concept originated in the late 1980s, which was about making sociology accessible, writing op/ed columns, and so forth. For Michael, by contrast, public sociology was about — is about — creating a “mirror and conscience of society.” Teaching, he argued, was a central component of this project. Ultimately, what he meant by the concept was central to his Gramscian project of cultivating common sense into good sense. Public sociology was an orientation to the world. It wasn’t about dropping scientific findings and just leaving them there, hoping that research alone could change the world. No, for Michael, research was certainly part of the approach, but it was equally about all of things I have described in this essay. It was about sharpening our collective thinking and understanding the power of working in the institutions in which we’re situated, but always going beyond them.
His astounding generosity is what I treasure most about Michael’s approach to sociology, and to his mentorship in particular. And it’s what I most attempt to emulate when I think about how I might preserve his memory, his legacy. He wouldn’t want his students reproducing his own research; he would want us assuming his comportment to the discipline, his pedagogical disposition, carrying it forth into the world. Every time I meet with a graduate student or deliver a lecture going forward, I won’t stop thinking about him.
And this is why I’ll remember Michael — my advisor, my harshest critic, my friend — above all as a mentor.
Zachary Levenson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida International University in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies and a Senior Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He was a graduate student of Michael Burawoy for a decade at UC Berkeley, writing the dissertation that became his first book, Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford UP, 2022). With another former Burawoy student, Marcel Paret, he is co-editor of The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism (Routledge, 2024).