Michael Banton

Michael Banton (born 1926) is a British social scientist known primarily for his publications on racial and ethnic relations. He was also the first editor of Sociology (1967-1970).

After graduating from the London School of Economics in 1950, Banton conducted research on the settlement of New Commonwealth immigrants in the East End of London for which he received the degree of PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He subsequently wrote books about the settlement of rural immigrants in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and on the behaviour of the white British towards New Commonwealth immigrants. His book The Policeman in the Community, a comparative study of policing in Scotland and the United States, was the first book-length sociological study of the police.

Banton became best known for his book Race Relations (1967), which summarised contemporary social science knowledge of that field. This phase of his writing concluded with a volume, The Idea of Race, in which he introduced into the English language the concept of racialization as a process by which the idea of race as a physical category was socially utilized to organise perceptions of the populations of the world. Up to this point his work reflected sociological orthodoxy.

Starting in 1976, Banton’s criticisms of that orthodoxy strengthened. In Racial and Ethnic Competition (1983) he advanced a rational choice theory. The book ended with a discussion of what constituted `good’ racial relations; it concluded that good racial relations would be ethnic relations. He has been critical of accounts of majority-minority relations in Europe that interpret them in the light of conceptions conventional in the USA.

Recalling Max Weber’s statement that he became a sociologist `in order to put an end to the mischievous enterprise which still operates with collectivist concepts’ Banton has observed that `ethnic group’ is a collectivist concept. There are ethnic categories; those who are assigned to an ethnic category may come to form a group, but do not necessarily do so. From this starting point he has developed a theory of social categories.

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