John Burrow on Duncan Forbes

Item No. 4.

John Burrow

(1935-2009)

Duncan Forbes and the History of Ideas: An Introduction

John W. Burrow was the first holder of a chair in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex and was one of the founding members of the subject at that university. Along with two Sussex colleagues, Donald Winch and Stefan Collini, he wrote a book on That Noble Science of Politics (1983), which laid the foundation for what later became known as the 'Sussex school of intellectual history'. Burrow’s lifelong interest in 19th century thought had been awoken during his years as an undergraduate in Cambridge, in particular by his then supervisor Duncan Forbes (1922-1994), whose lectures and lecturing style made a lasting impression on him. In his autobiography Memories Migrating (2009), Burrow described the experience in vivid detail:

“He had a braying voice and a manner of breezy, genial informality, swooping down on particular words or names for emphasis. I remember him speaking once of some seventeenth-century jurist as “one of those bloody Dutchmen with Latin names”. He clearly saw interpreting a past author as a kind of protracted grapple in which he would try to pin his adversary down. He revered David Hume, on whom as a historian he wrote an important book, but would speak of him when finding him particularly elusive as ‘the bloody man’.”

(Burrow, 2009, p. 125).

In 2001, Burrow wrote an introduction to one of Forbes’ unpublished essays which was then being published by History of European Ideas. The belatedness of the essay gave Burrow cause to revisit and reconstruct aspects of his own past as well as to reflect on the fact that a more widespread appreciation of the work of his former teacher had been equally belated.