The Structure of a University a Karatanian Interrogation Into Instrumentalism, Idealism and Community in Postwar British Higher Education, 1945-2015
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Birkbeck Institutional Research Online The Structure of a University A Karatanian Interrogation into Instrumentalism, Idealism and Community in Postwar British Higher Education, 1945-2015 Lee Soo Tian School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Spring 2017 Declaration I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Lee Soo Tian 2 Abstract In this thesis, I endeavour to rethink the history of higher education in the United Kingdom after the Second World War through a framework generated using the work of Kojin Karatani. It explores three distinct perspectives – instrumentalism, idealism and community – which I argue form a triadic structure which, when grasped, opens the way to a heterodox reading of the postwar British university. This tripartite formulation draws from Karatani's work on the “triad of concepts” he locates in different spheres of philosophy, and is developed through a “trans-genealogical” methodology inspired by the historical-philosophical approaches of Michel Foucault and Karatani himself. The thesis can be divided into three parts. In the first part the thesis' methodology is elucidated from the aforementioned work of Foucault and Karatani. In the second part, I trace the development of each of the three perspectives or “questions” in the British university in order to present a counter-narrative to popular accounts which generally divide it into two phases, each characterised by a rupture: first, a social democratic rupture oriented by a principled, idealist vision, and, second, a neoliberal rupture characterised by an economistic and instrumentalist mentality.
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