Thompson, John Brookshire

He studied at Kiel ( Staffordshire ) and Cambridge . He wrote a doctoral dissertation under the leadership of Anthony Giddens . He taught at universities in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa. He is currently a professor of sociology at Cambridge University.

Thompson is the author of works on social theory, the sociology of politics and ideology. The predominant sphere of his interests after 1990 is the sociology of communications , the place of mass media in the political life of modern societies. His approach developed under the strong influence of the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer , the ideas of Habermas and Ricoeur . John Thompson is known as an ideology theoretician, the creator of the theory of critical hermeneutics, combining the theory of late Wittgenstein and the philosophy of natural language with continental critical theory and hermeneutics. He is also known as a theorist of political scandal and new appearances. The theory of new appearances is used as a theoretical basis in surveillance studies. In recent years, he has been engaged in the sociology of book affairs in connection with the study of higher education systems and science institutes in the UK and the USA. He translated into English the works of Pierre Bourdieu , Jürgen Habermas , Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur .

• Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 1981.
• Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Cambridge: Polity; Berkeley: University of California Press , 1984.
• Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication Cambridge: Polity; Stanford: Stanford University Press , 1990.
• The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media.Cambridge: Polity; Stanford: Stanford University Press , 1995.
• Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. ( European Amalfi Award for Sociology and Social Sciences )
• Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
• Thompson, JB 2005. 'The New Visibility'. Theory, Culture & amp; Society 22 (6): 31-51. doi: 10.1177 / 0263276405059413.
• Merchants of culture: the publishing business in the twenty-first century. Cambridge Malden: Polity, 2010.

• Ricoeur, Paul, John B. Thompson. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 1981.
• Lefort, Claude, John B. Thompson. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Cambridge: Polity; Boston: MIT Press, 1986.
• Bourdieu, Pierre, John B. Thompson. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity; Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University Press , 1991.

• Held, David, and John B. Thompson. Habermas: Critical Debates . Macmillan 1982.
• Held, David, and John B. Thompson. Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and His Critics . Cambridge University Press. 1989.

Proceedings of J.B. Thompson has been translated into most European languages, into Chinese and Japanese. Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2000 received the European Amalfi Award for Sociology and Social Sciences .

• On the site of the University of Cambridge