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...

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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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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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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