RIP Geoff Hawthorn
It has not been a good couple of months for people who have inspired me and influenced my intellectual development, to the point where I’ve been wondering about whether I should send out cautionary messages to others on the list (although receiving a “Better watch your step” from me might be open to misconstruction). In early November, one of my school classics teachers, Aubrey Scrase, died, albeit having reached the age of ninety; any idea of writing a blog post at the time was buried by the avalanche of other commitments that month, but I do say something about his role in my early encounters with Thucydides in the preface to my book on Thucydides and the Idea of History. At the close of the old year, on December 27th, Christopher Brooke died, as discussed in my last post – and in the early hours of New Year’s Eve we lost Geoff Hawthorn. I have no idea what the status of his work within political theory or international studies may be – at any rate the TLS review of his and my books on Thucydides seems distinctly equivocal – but I would certainly argue that he ought to be a significant figure for anyone thinking about the relationship between history and the social sciences. (more…)
