John W. Burrow

John W. Burrow

John Wyon Burrow (1935-2009) was the first holder of a chair in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex and one of the founding members of the subject at that university. In 1966, he published a path-breaking book, Evolution and Society; A Study in Victorian Social Theory, exploring the influence of a variety of evolutionary theories on the social sciences during the nineteenth century. It was one of the earliest instances of a contextual approach to writing the history of the social sciences, one that did not treat the past as being of interest only in so far as it anticipated the present. Alongside two Sussex colleagues with whom he taught at Sussex, Donald Winch and Stefan Collini, he went on to write a book on That Noble Science of Politics (1983), which extended this approach and laid the foundation for what later became known as the 'Sussex school of intellectual history'. John's unrivalled knowledge of the Whig component within English liberalism provided him with the theme of his Carlyle lectures at Oxford, Whigs and Liberals; Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (1988). John Burrow was also one of the leading British exponents of the history of historiography. In 1981, his book A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History. The crowning achievement of this aspect of Burrow’s academic career, however, came with his last major work, A History of Histories (2007), in which he presented an impressive panoramic view of Western historiography in the entire period from ancient Greece to twentieth-century Europe and America.

The John Burrow Papers