This paper is a description and discussion of the author, a critical Social Foundations scholar-teacher, and the craft/intellectual/emotional/moral/identity sources that sustain his work. Opening paragraphs describe his family background in the Piedmont province of northern Italy, the Turin (Italy) working class and their attitudes toward work. The scholar-teacher argues that these antecedents give rise to his own commitment to the democratic principle that seeks to make private power answerable to the public good. Further paragraphs discuss the ideas and influence on the scholar-teacher of Cesare Pavese, Albert Camus, Nikos Kazantzakis, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Marx. A later section describes the scholar-teacher's scholarly career in the Social Foundations of Education which has included work on Dewey and capitalist education. A concluding paragraph returns to Marx and argues that Marx's translation of the abstract conceptions of 19th century political economy into concrete terms of human social relations allowed him to form a model of modern bourgeois society and the whole regime of capital that continues to be valuable today. (Contains 34 endnotes.) (JB)