New Left Review I/125, January-February 1981
Eric Hobsbawm
Looking Forward: History and the Future
The annual lectures of which this is the first are intended to commemorate David Glass. [*] First Annual David Glass Lecture on Social Trends, 8 October 1980, London School of Economics and Political Science. He was my friend, and the friend of others in this room who don’t need this occasion to recall him in the presence of his inseparable partner, Ruth Glass. He was also one of the most distinguished scholars to teach at the LSE, with which he was so long associated and whose reputation owes much to his presence there. I might add that he represented its finest traditions at a time when not everyone there did so: the traditions of understanding society in order to make it better, of an instinctive radicalism, of an institution whose students, like himself, were not born with silver spoons in their mouths. It is typical that he concluded his very first book on demography—of which he was in his lifetime the most eminent practitioner in Britain—with the call to ‘provide conditions in which the working class is able to bring up children without thereby suffering from economic and social hardship’. He was proud to be the first social scientist to be elected to the Royal Society since the great Dr William Farr in 1855, because he saw himself (like Farr) as a social scientist in and for society, and not just about society.
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