ABSTRACT
The multi-faceted appeal of Lawrence Stenhouse, both to contemporaries and to new generations, is testified to in the wide range of lectures and testimonies that have sought to represent and characterise his work. For me, the central element in his appeal was that in both his writing and his action, he spoke as a public intellectual; as one who expected his ideas to form the basis of influence and action in the public sphere. Moreover, his central concern was with education for empowerment and social justice. In an early draft manifesto for the Centre for Applied Research he stressed its role as a ‘public service’. As we shall see, in some senses the times in which he lived brought aid and sustenance to this view of an educational researcher’s social and political purpose, but we should also be aware that he also existed in vigorously contested terrains. Towards the end of his life, he must have begun to glimpse the ‘dark night’ into which much of his vernacular humanism would be cast in the new order, where there was to be ‘no such thing as society’.
