Geoffrey Hawthorn

Geoffrey Hawthorn is the author of Thucydides on Politics, among other books.

Letter

Counterfactuals

13 February 1992

Rosalind Mitchison (Letters, 12 March) shoots each of her feet. I wrote the book she scorns in order to show the risk in the attitude she so nicely reveals: to try to know too much is to risk understanding less. How does a historian know when she knows enough? By considering the counterfactual implications of what she thinks she does know. What’s involved in doing that? Testing her explanations against...
Letter

Sociology in Cambridge

6 November 1986

SIR: I understand Aidan Foster-Carter’s puzzle (Letters, 4 December). Perhaps I ran too many arguments too closely together. There is, as Foster-Carter says, a distance between social theory and much of what’s done as ‘sociology’. Nevertheless, the two enterprises have shared the conviction that there are distinctively social explanations of the goings-on that interest us; and however plausible...
Letter

The Miners’ Strike

6 September 1984

SIR: No one, surely, can be surprised at the fact that Arthur Scargill reviles the media. Most of them are unashamedly right-wing. Most of them simply assume that he is bent on ‘the destruction of the British way of life’ and say so in clichés of this kind. But in a paper like the London Review of Books it is, to say the least, disappointing to see a long line of such clichés wheeled out under...
Letter

Ideal Speech

19 November 1981

Geoffrey Hawthorn writes: I did not intend to suggest that Gillian Rose makes her case for Hegel just against Habermas. I intended to say that she makes it against varieties of what may be described as ‘neo-Kantianism’. Habermas, about whom I was writing in the review, happens to be one of the most recent and most impressive ‘neo-Kantians’. Nor did I intend to reduce her book or any of the...
Letter

Academic Psychology

18 June 1981

Geoffrey Hawthorn writes: Professor Tajfel reads my review as cricket and not cricket. I was certainly a non-professional trying to understand a lifetime player. I was also trying to be a gentleman. I accordingly read every word of his form, marked the distinctive moves, and played no base ball. I did not misdescribe (I did not say that Tajfel had been in a concentration camp) and did not selectively...

Pieces about Geoffrey Hawthorn in the LRB

Be Spartans! Thucydides

James Romm, 21 January 2016

Thucydides​ may well have been the first Western author to address himself to posterity. His forerunners – Homer and Herodotus, principally – show no awareness of a readership...

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The View from Here and Now: A Tribute to Bernard Williams

Thomas Nagel, 11 May 2006

One can believe in moral progress without accusing past ages of wickedness or stupidity (though there is plenty of both in all ages). Perhaps progress can occur only through a series of historical stages,...

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Had Lenin’s train collided with the Berlin-Basle express

Charles Maier, 13 February 1992

Certainly not the saddest for historians, according to Geoffrey Hawthorn’s wonderfully playful and intelligent book: rather, the most instructive. Hawthorn is intrigued by the philosophical...

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What’s wrong with poverty

John Broome, 19 May 1988

Welfare economics is concerned with what economic arrangements we should have, and what governments should do in economic matters. It is about right and good in economics. So it is a branch of...

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