Geoffrey Hawthorn interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 23rd April 2009
 
0:09:07 Born in Slough in 1941; single parent family with no money; spent a lot of time with grandmother as mother found it difficult to cope; ended up in a local authority prefab and was living there when I was at secondary school; went to the local grammar school; I know nothing about my paternal side and only found out who my father was when I was in my fifties; my mother's family was downwardly mobile; my maternal great-grandfather was head postmaster in Bristol, his son was quite successful and became editor of a Bristol newspaper; they were Catholics; my grandmother worked as a telephonist among other things; she married through the Catholic church a man who was one of eleven children, son of a farmer from near Frome in Somerset; of those children, six were girls and five, boys; five of the girls became nuns, the sixth became governess to a Catholic family; the eldest boy inherited the farm and the other boys had to seek their fortune; my grandfather became a butcher's assistant in Bristol; I met him a few times although they separated before I was born; a vigorous man but not a hero as he cut off his little finger to disqualify himself when war broke out in 1914; he was clearly a clever man but angry and frustrated, and drank; the family suffered enormously from that in the late twenties; my mother was neurotic but very clever; she got a scholarship to the girls high school in Bath where they were living, but her father would not allow her to take it up; he would not allow her to bring back young men and would become violent; she migrated; at the beginning of the depression work was difficult to find but there were quite a large number of jobs in the expanding pharmaceutical and white-goods industries on the bypasses west of London; she ended up in Slough and got a job as a secretary and produced me; my grandmother did not know quite what to do with herself and she came to look after me; she had to earn money and the only way she could do so was as a residential domestic servant, which she did not like; the advantage was that she could take me with her; I would just sit in the corner wherever we were; the disadvantage was that she was always falling out with her employers; I can remember some of the characters she worked for, and they were pretty ghastly; I remember when I was about five or six, her resigning on the spot, and us being on the pavement with a suitcase and nowhere to go; we would get on a bus or train and get off somewhere so she could look for work; occasionally I would go back and live with my mother if she was somewhere that she could have me, but she was generally living in bed-sits; eventually she got onto a housing list and that is why we went to live in a prefab in  [what John Betjeman called ‘the sordid western suburbs’ of Windsor]; my mother married and I had a stepfather during those years; that was a truly working-class world; he had grown up in west London where he had become a garage mechanic; he had had a successful war, in the sense that he had enjoyed it; he was a mechanic on air-sea rescue boats and was involved in the American move up through Italy, I think very involved in the extensive smuggling rackets; he didn't really know what to do when he came back and never settled; he married my mother in 1950; he and his brother paid their way by washing cars but it turned out there was another racket of stealing cars; in the same week that I went to Oxford he went to Wormwood Scrubs and that is the last I saw of him; my mother then lived on her own until she died ten years ago in local authority housing, a very sad unsatisfactory life for her; the one thing that she did feel as a result of her own experience was that education was important; it was very easy for me; there were two emblematic moments, one was in the Thomas Grey Primary School in Slough when I was nine; a Mrs  Auden came up to me and said I was not good at anything but reading; mother was furious but I said she was right; much later  she was tickled to find that there was a job called Reader, when I got one; the second moment was at Windsor Grammar School - a tremendously important place for me; in the 1950s the universities were not expanding at all and a large number of clever students went into school-teaching; the quality of teaching in that school, at its best, was terrific; they took an interest in you, took you seriously and introduced you to intellectual discipline in various ways; I flourished there on the reading side, but I was not good at science although I was very interested in biology, in the natural world; I thought I might do biology with chemistry; it was a school that wouldn't put you in for 'O' level unless it knew you were going to do well; there were rehearsals including one for practical chemistry where we were supposed to produce some purple crystals; the rest of the form did so but I did not; the chemistry master, whom I respected, said I was the stupidest person he had ever met; this left me with the only option of arts 'A' levels
 
11:17:10 I wanted to go to the LSE as I had heard about the social sciences in a vague way and read some prospectuses; the BSc Econ at the LSE seemed attractive; then we had a new Headmaster who changed the uniform so it was identical to St Paul's, put the school's rugby results in the Times and said that everybody in the Upper Sixth had to go in for an Oxbridge scholarship; as a result I got an open scholarship to Oxford; I was not entirely happy, but I went and it was academically a complete disaster
 
12:37:05 All the way through my childhood and adolescence reading was the escape; I never knew quite where I would be living so went to eleven or twelve different primary schools; it wasn't easy to establish friends so I was a solitary child though I don't remember being unhappy; one of the reasons that I became an academic was that books were my life; in early adolescence I was introduced to the school's natural history society by a master who became tremendously important to me; the introduction to the natural world was another escape; where we lived was the area deemed for the most deprived of council tenants - when at Oxford I would go back and fill in social security forms for neighbours who couldn't write; this area was on the edge of town near the countryside where I could cycle when I wasn't reading; the master, Raymond South, got permission for himself and a few boys from the school to wander in private areas of the Royal Parks; one of these is an extraordinary area, which is still closed, an ancient hunting forest established by William I which has never been touched since, there are rides through it but otherwise it is a virgin oak forest; it was a wonderful place to get lost in and I got completely absorbed by the birds, flowers, fungi; remember going on an expedition with Professor Hora from Reading, gathering fungi for him to identify; I was very proud to come back with a fungus that was new to Britain; the two escapes for me were reading and then natural history; by sixteen-seventeen there were girls, then university
 
17:50:09 I remember reading very intensively and rereading, particularly nineteenth and twentieth century poetry; I loved the language, music and imagery; for a child who was a dreamer it was wonderful; I thought of doing English at university but I had a puritan, utilitarian streak, and didn't know what I would do with it; the poet I loved was Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I read a lot of modern novels, particularly European novels; growing up in the way that I did didn't produce any great affection in me for England; I liked the English imagination and countryside but I didn't like much else so was drawn to Europe; French was the foreign language at school so I liked its literature, and would read other literature in translation
 
20:16:05 There was no escape into religion; I don't think I have much religious sensibility; it has been a defect of my intellectual life that I hear the importance of it in other people, I read about it, but I have great difficulty feeling it; my mother had left the Catholic church and was moving left through the Protestant denominations; when I was eighteen she was a member of the Elim Foursquare Fundamentalists, an extraordinary church in Slough; the congregation consisted of three sets of people - people like my mother, the dispossessed,  a large contingent of Welsh who loved the singing, and Sikhs who had left Sikhism; this was difficult because the first two were deeply racist; the total immersion baptism was a regular trauma for my mother; I would go to a service with her occasionally where there would be speaking in tongues, and there was a lot of true or simulated ecstasy; my most direct experience of religion otherwise had been a rather unfortunate local Pastor who came into to give us religious instruction in grammar school, and would tell us that Darwin was mistaken; so what was presented to me was not appealing
 
24:29:08 Am interested in the sociology of religion, and now in mysticism; am just writing a review of a biography of Max Weber and one of the arguments is how important mysticism was to him; intellectually I am an atheist, but socially a tolerant agnostic; I can recognise religious feeling and need, and I am curious about it; attending memorial services shows me that we have no other way of collectively expressing  our feelings, of collectively acknowledging a life; I am moved by the services which surprises me
 
28:39:18 I don't like Dawkins’ views but also I don't like the public manifestations of Catholicism [and certainly have no truck, as Graham Hough put it, with ‘what goes on at the smoky end’]; I have become increasingly sceptical of the use of intellectual positions to deny other peoples lives; I have come to appreciate the radical cultural contingency of things, so that things that are done in the name of any belief I react against; I have become much more pragmatic, and more sensitive to the non-rational in human life; in that dispute as in other ideological disputes I find myself not merely disinterested but angry
 
30:56:06 Oxford was in some ways a disaster; I took an open scholarship in geography, the subject I was best at in school; went to Jesus College; realized very quickly that this was a mistake as there was nothing of intellectual interest in the subject for me; the really intellectual part of it was geomorphology but human geography was superficial; I realized that I wanted to look more deeply at social things and the wish to do social sciences at LSE was still there; I asked to change to PPP but at that time they only took twenty-eight people a year and were full; I then asked if I could change to PPE and the College refused; at that time quite a number of the geography scholars had changed out of geography, and the last one to graduate had got a fourth; I then decided to leave assuming my open scholarship carried an automatic state scholarship, and go to the LSE; they said I needed a letter from them to transfer a state scholarship and refused to give me one, so I was caught; the quality of teaching in geography was quite appalling and I am still very angry about it; the Professor was a man called Gilbert who had written very little, but had written a book called 'Brighton:  Old Ocean's Bauble'; we all thought this very odd as Brighton is not on an ocean; in his lectures, in passing, he mentioned that Salazar, the dictator of Portugal and then in power, was the most enlightened ruler in Europe because he was the only one to have employed professional geographers to carve his country up into administrative regions; it was not hard to get a good degree but the question was how to pass my time in Oxford; I got involved in left-wing politics, not because I was particularly left-wing but because it was intellectually exciting; I was saved by Günter Hirsch who came from a long line of rabbis in Worms; he had fled Germany in 1938 and ended up in Cornwall where he had got a job as a farm labourer; he found he could not stand the hard winter of 1940-41 and left Cornwall hoping to get to London; could only afford to get as far at Didcot and got a lift to Oxford; he got a warm job as boilerman in the Agricultural Economics Research Institute; in 1944-45 Colin Clark realized that he knew an enormous amount about European land law as he had been a lawyer; brought him upstairs, invented a job for him as University Demonstrator in Rural Social Organization, and he became an academic; he did not have many students but my Tutor at Jesus put me on to him; I explained my predicament and he agreed to talk with me on a fortnightly basis; he would suggest a whole range of literature and we would just talk about it; he glowed in my eyes because he had been to some of Max Weber's last lectures in at the start of the 1920s; he had a broad European education and opened my eyes to all sorts of things; he made it clear to me that I wasn't going mad and what I wanted to do was reasonable; after Oxford, in 1962, I didn't quite know what to do or where to go; quite a lot of people had gone on to do the diploma in anthropology, so I went and had a conversation with the anthropologist, John Beattie; he asked me if I wanted to study small groups of non-literate people who were depressed and diseased, and who in my lifetime would have ceased to exist; put like that, I did not; I had a picture in my mind of the Tchukche of north-eastern Siberia, whom I had read about, and already had a plan to work with them; Beattie had never heard of them and thought the Russians would have killed them all; thus I did not do anthropology; Günter suggested I go to the LSE; he persuaded my local authority to pay for another year; I spent a year doing a qualifying exam and then stared a PhD; I had a sociology plan because the new universities had been announced and they were going to set their face against the traditional subjects; they were to start in 1964-5 and I thought that if I did graduate work I could then teach as I wanted to be an academic; in Spring 1962 I had read a profile of Alan Little who taught sociology at the LSE with whom I identified; he was assigned as my supervisor but after three weeks he suggested I applied for a job in sociology at the new Essex University; I applied for an assistant lectureship and got it, so went to teach at Essex at twenty-three with no qualifications whatsoever for the job
 
44:00:05 At the LSE, Ernest Gellner made an impression on me; David Glass was very remote but I had a certain respect for him; Donald MacRae made one remark which stayed with me, that sociology meets its match when it has to deal with religion; I could see exactly why; it stayed with me because I thought it true but also because it put its finger on a weakness of my own, that I didn't understand religion; at the time I took him to be saying that sociologists can forget that religion is founded on a faith; sociology has its origins in the regressive rationalism of the eighteen-century, so people not best fitted to understand religion; I think now what he may have been saying something that I only came really to understand later in life, that sociology was in danger of being a reductive subject - it would take beliefs and emotions and reduce them to other phenomena; when I read Durkheim's 'Elementary Forms', I thought it a clever book, but I could nevertheless see what MacRae might have meant; just in the last month I have come to understand Weber's interest in mysticism and can now see what he may have been driving at
 
48:29:03 Starting at Essex was utterly terrifying; I was the first non-professorial appointment so I was on every committee to plan everything; the first year teaching, on the social structure of modern Britain, didn't worry me very much because at LSE I had done some extra-mural teaching on the subject; I had taught in Brixton with West Indian immigrants; that was a good education for me because these people did not have an academic interest in the subject but wanted to know how Britain worked; there were four members of the sociology department at Essex - the Professor, Peter Townsend, Herminio  Martins, Paul Thompson, Ernest Rudd, and me; the department started a master's course in the first year; the week before it started, Townsend came to me and said that Rudd wouldn't teach the methods course, would I; I had been to a methods course at LSE which was wonderful, run by Claus Moser, Ernest Gellner and Ronald Dore; I had to teach it and can remember that first class; all these students had done social science as undergraduates so feared they knew more than I on the subject; it was fun until 1968 and the revolution when I found myself in the middle; I thought the University authorities were behaving obtusely in reaction to a student protest, and it was better managed elsewhere, such as Sussex; on the other hand the revolutionaries' demands were ludicrous and fantastic; because I had the ear of both sides and was sympathetic to views on civil rights, Vietnam, but also to progressive forms of university governance; found myself having to chair meetings trying to bring the two sides together; also chaired meeting between students and the townspeople of Colchester; later in life I read something by David Daiches who was at Sussex in those years talking about their educational philosophy which was to concentrate on the modern world but not be subject to the tyranny of the present; I didn't put it that way to myself at the time but realize that was exactly what I felt at Essex; it had decided to teach sociology, politics and economics, but not history or philosophy, or English literature; I thought that this was going too far, that the curriculum together with the force of these events of 1968 suggested that this place was subject to the tyranny of the present; I was also politically lonely and emotionally lonely; the Sociology Department was huge by then with twenty-eight people, twenty-seven of whom were married; I was getting rather fed-up with being introduced to people at dinner parties, and in fact I met my first wife in London when I was on leave from Essex; I decided to leave and come back to an older university; there were jobs in Oxford and Cambridge for which I applied; the Oxford interview was first, and the sociology job was tied to my old college; as I had made myself unpopular in the past there, I was told that all the University people had voted for me, all the College people against; was offered the job at Cambridge; the interview was in the Old Schools, February 1970; there was a power cut in the middle of the interview and candles were found for the rest of the interview; remember that Meyer Fortes was on the committee, asked most of the questions, but also answered them all himself; Leach gave the impression of being asleep then asked how I thought men were different from animals; the job was a university lectureship in sociology (statistics), to teach methods; I didn't really want to do this but I wanted to get out of Essex; John Barnes very politely asked if I knew anything about statistics, which I said I didn't; in the darkness I stumbled out of the room followed by an administrator who asked me how much I was being paid at Essex, and told me I was being grossly overpaid; I think in the darkness they must have made a mistake, but anyway I got the job
 
Second Part
 
0:09:07 Came to Cambridge in October 1970; John Barnes had been elected to the Chair of Sociology in 1968 and the idea was that Social and Political Sciences as a tripos would largely consist of bits drawn from elsewhere - political thought from history, some of the more comparative sociological things from anthropology, bits of social psychology from management and engineering; there were things that were not available in the University so three lectureships were established in 1969 to provide those - one was to teach methods, which was the lectureship in sociology that I took, one was developmental psychology which Martin Richards took, and one was comparative sociology which Malcolm Ruel took; there were two or three posts in sociology in the economics faculty where the subject had been introduced in the 1960s - Tony Giddens and Ray Jobling were lecturers there; John Barnes became and remains a very close friend; I think him to be a very good anthropologist; there were two difficulties, one was that he was more of an anthropologist than a sociologist; he was not very interested in modernity but sociology is largely about that; remember there was a paper on the sociology of economic life where people talked largely about industry, labour and management; John gave a lecture on peasants which perhaps symbolised the nearest he could come; secondly, he did not really want to take much responsibility and didn't like administration, so it fell to others; not entirely unfortunate for me; in the early years of SPS we had external chairmen who could be very powerful, like Moses Finley, and a lot of the leg work was then done by the junior staff who were the academic secretaries as the chairman only appeared every other Tuesday afternoon; John Barnes was, however, a true liberal, a very decent man; the ideology of SPS was much more left-wing; nevertheless, being a liberal, he suited SPS very well as it would have been very difficult if we had had someone who imposed a particular vision of the social sciences; my wider view of SPS is that it was a notionally radical entity created in the most deeply conservative of circumstances; it was a set of compromises where everybody from genetics to theology wanted to have a say, as a result of which no one intellectual voice was primary; I think that in many ways that was a good thing; my experience of the social sciences is that when they start institutionally trying to define themselves, excluding other things, then a rigid theoreticism and methodological obsession takes hold; I think the environment of Cambridge and John's character kept SPS plural; quite inadvertently it sustained its conservative inspiration
 
8:31:00 I am a tremendous admirer of Jack Goody; I love the range and intellectual openness, his almost matter-of-fact originality, that he will take cooking or flowers to be self-evidently as serious a subject as kinship; he is so prolific; he was better than most other heads of the anthropology department had been at exciting young people; his own anthropology was possibly not of the deepest but his encouragement of others, and the creation in Adams Road and in Free School Lane of a welcoming atmosphere, seemed to me terrific; I am sure that Ernest Gellner was much more deeply reflective, Leach in his own tortured way, much more brilliant, Marilyn Strathern is very intense, but Jack has a set of qualities which none of them had; just his presence seems to me have been crucial to the subject of anthropology in the 1970s and 80s, but that is just looking from the outside; looking at anthropology with John Beattie's remark in mind, the subject has a genius for reinventing itself, unlike sociology which has drifted into some sort of sterile backwater, at least for the moment; it was particularly vivid in Cambridge because Jack was so good at energizing the subject; John Barnes had the same liberality but not the same energy
 
12:57:05 There was nobody else around who could have done what Tony Giddens did; tremendous confidence, managerial energy, will and determination to get something done; I was very nervous about doing what he did when he did it as I didn't think we had the resources; he took the view that he had to introduce a part 1 and try to extend the number of students because that was the only way to get more money; meanwhile the load on the staff was terribly heavy; we disagreed about that; also thought that in contrast to Barnes and Goody, Tony wasn't a very liberal character; it still seems to me that Cambridge flourishes because it tolerates intellectual heterogeneity; it hires clever people and lets them do what they want to do; for Tony the corollary of giving a faculty an institutional identity was  disciplinary distinctiveness; what that meant was that a particular vision of sociology was given pre-eminence over politics and social psychology, and there was no connection with anthropology because he wasn't interested in it; I didn't think that it was right for this place, but at the same time I can see its practical point; it made the University sit up, made the schools acknowledge its existence, but I think quite a high price was paid for it; what Tony did bringing it together in this way caused the later explosion that led into separating departments as there were too many of us who were not happy to be corralled in this way
 
16:29:22 I realize that I have had a problem with sociology all the time; when I came into sociology I was attracted by ethnographies of British society; a book by Brian Jackson and Denis Marsden 'Education and the Working Class', was published in 1962, and that book spoke to me for obvious reasons; Young and Willmott's work on family etc., and by others, a lot of whom had been trained as anthropologists, seemed to me terrific and that sociology was going to say what life was like in Britain; sociology had two other sets of ambitions, one was to be a generalizing science, and Tony had something of that; the other was to agonise about a distinctive method; one of the reasons I have always admired historians and anthropologists is that they seem much less preoccupied by method; I had been employed to teach it and completely lost my faith in it; I think that the subject got distracted by these two dispositions - obsession with method and the desire to be a synthetic science - and lost its ethnographic impulse; where are the ethnographies of modern Britain? - they exist in novels, and some work by anthropologists or social historians like Raphael Samuel; I am as guilty as anybody because I did not go out and do it; Cambridge is a very abstracted university and inclines people much more to theory; in a subject where there is a temptation to very high levels of excessively generalising abstraction, and this  has been a bad environment for sociology; this is just one view and many people would say I never really was a sociologist anyway, and perhaps I wasn't; this great hope of the sixties, nowhere is it on the intellectual front line; psychology has moved into the study of neurology, philosophy has broadened out and has become interesting again, anthropology keeps finding new life in itself, the study of history keeps renewing itself, English has broadened into cultural studies - these subjects are alive, where has sociology gone? - nowhere really; at Harvard, where I was offered a job in sociology for a second time, the department was more or less collapsing; it was for a similar reason as Harvard had tried to maintain a more ancient conception of the subject, with a group of clever, heterogeneous individuals, but the professionals were moving in and wanted more methodologists and theorists, and the subject was being killed
 
23:24:11 I used to enjoy book reviewing, partly because I enjoy reading; Daniel Bell once lamented that his natural length for pieces was 17,000 words which nobody wanted; my natural length is about 2,500 words which was one of the reasons that I likes reviewing; it offers the same pleasure and discipline that supervising does - the thing I have loved most about my job is supervising; it forces one to get a subject, unpack it, to make it clear without becoming crude, and have an argument about something, all in the space of fifty minutes and I have always most enjoyed talking to undergraduates; lecturing I enjoy less, though I  liked getting the material together but I was very nervous; I found it very difficult often to persuade myself that I had enough to say that was interesting and worth taking fifty minutes of an audience's time; it is different from a supervision as one is constantly monitoring whether the interest is there; in a lecture, unless you are very good at playing to the audience, it is more difficult as I am not confident enough; remember Quentin Skinner saying to me that one has to persuade the audience that this is the most important thing that they are hearing at this particular moment, and there is nowhere else they should be, and they will believe you; I have never been able quite to do this; as far as my work is concerned, teaching has dictated a lot of it; I had an interest in population and in social theory; the interest in population came at the end of Oxford; I had been so impressed by publications of the Institute of Community Studies that I wrote to Michael Young; he wrote back that the whole question of population was interesting, the question of fertility similarly, and couldn't be left to demographers, so I got interested in that; my first book was about fertility; it had a certain success and got me invited to Harvard as a visiting professor; that set me off on one line of work; the second thing was the history of social theory; I wanted to understand how sociology had come into being, and Essex had provided the opportunity because the social theorists there thought nothing worthwhile had been written before 1937, and could I teach on the early period, which I did; I carried on doing so here; they came to converge later; at Harvard I was given a course on population in the Third World which I had not thought about; I concentrated on India and China partly because the Khanna study had recently been published by Harvard and had been criticised by Mamdani; I had a job partly in sociology and partly in public health; I realized that to try to understand the dynamics of fertility one had to understand the social circumstances; looking at India and China from the thirties to the sixties (I was at Harvard in the early 1970s), one had to understand the economic circumstances and in order to understand those one had to understand the political circumstances; I became interested in the politics of these countries; meanwhile, the history of social theory was quite separate from this and led me to the view that the development of a distinctive social theory from the eighteenth century invention of the idea of society, the presumption that what had for a couple of thousand years been taken to be question in politics and law were questions in something now called sociology, was perhaps too strong; these two things converged; got a sense of the practical importance of politics through starting with population, and a sense of the more general intellectual importance of politics from looking at the history of theory; these two things together inclined me more to politics; then the question was how to do it; I didn't do political theory because partly a lot of it was going on here and there was plenty of teaching in it; I was curious about Third World politics, made particularly so when I went to India after Harvard; I had friends who were working in the administration in Delhi; this was in 1976 during Mrs Gandhi's emergency and what was going on in the Planning Commission was a fierce argument about whether India should take the Chinese path or the Japanese path; I was already pretty convinced that the Chinese path was not a path for India, both for international political reasons but also because India was as it was; I was more intrigued by the Japanese path and then I realized that there was a country that had adopted the Japanese path, though wouldn't admit it for reasons of history, and that was Korea; I got very interested in South Korea and its politics; then I got interested in failure, why had other places not been like this; I didn't have a feel for Africa but did for South America; thus there was a whole trajectory of work which took me through into the 1990s; meanwhile I was still wondering about questions of theory; the important influence then was Bernard Williams and he and I became close friends; initially it was a friendship that didn't have much to do with our intellectual lives; we had plans to do things together - we thought of writing a book on the philosophy of the social sciences and Michael Young asked us in the 1980s if we would write a manifesto for the new Social Democratic Party; rather glad we didn't, but we had endless happy conversations about both; I suddenly realized that there was a possibility of being intensely reflective, often at a very abstract level, while at the same time having a very strong human sense of the limitations of theory; that is what Bernard embodied for me, the importance of how far you could take theory, and where theory stopped; he used to have a saying about moral arguments that one could have a thought too many, that you could be too rational about things, and the importance of contingency, emotion etc.; he would generalize at a very high level on the importance of particularity; that was an enormous influence on me; I didn't like the strongly generalizing impulse in social theory and so I wrote a book about contingency and did it through writing about counterfactuals, just trying to knock the dignity of general laws off their pedestal; I am not sure it was a very successful book but that was the impulse
 
37:31:13 The next part of the story, again driven by teaching in Cambridge, was that I turned away from third world politics, not because I had lost interest, but because I was becoming more interested in international politics; population required an understanding of economy, economy required and an understanding of domestic politics, and that required an understanding of international politics; this was accelerated by a pure contingency which was that I got a personal Chair and the question was what do I call myself; John Dunn insisted that I shouldn't call myself professor of politics, but I was no longer a sociologist; decided on ‘international politics’ but then realized that if I called myself Professor of International Politics I needed to know something about the subject; simultaneously with this the educational structure of SPS was changing and there was going to be more dedicated politics teaching in part 2; by this time I was having to organize the second year course and take a lead in teaching; decided that as I was Professor of International Politics it would have to be a course in that subject; I then went home and hurriedly read some textbooks; Cambridge is wonderfully indulgent; whether it will continue to be, I don't know, but I have been so lucky as every fancy that has taken me, Cambridge seems to have said yes to; at the beginning of these text books was reference to  Thucydides' description of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta; I was sheltering from the rain in a shop doorway when Emma Rothschild also took shelter; she asked what I was doing and encouraged me to read Thucydides; I read him and it was a complete transformation, I thought it was an extraordinary book, that at last I was reading something that wrote about politics as they should be written about; then I thought it could be the basis of an undergraduate course; most second year courses are survey courses; thinking of this new part 2 in politics, realized that they have a first year where they do too much too quickly, they don't any longer read whole books at A level, so perhaps one should take a radical view of how to educate them in the second year; I was then in the position to do so, and instead of doing a survey course in the Michaelmas term, they should all just read Thucydides; they were in a state of shock because firstly the whole reason they were doing the course was to understand what was happening in Iraq tomorrow, and secondly it was one whole, old, book; it turned out to be an enormous pedagogical success and the course became very popular; they loved the book, thought about it, wrote well about it; that made me realise what an important book it was; that is where I am at now; I taught it until I retired and I am now writing a book about Thucydides
 
45:18:22 Cambridge has been a good place for me; I used to look at people who had been here all the time and thought that perhaps their experience had been a little too confined; to go away and come back has much to be said for it; SPS in the middle years was not easy and there was a moment in the late eighties when I would have gone to Harvard; the reason why I did not was because of my wife who is South American; it was a very cold winter at Harvard and she did not want to experience more of them and there were family reasons too; I came back to Cambridge and was very glad I did because things got better; as we all know it is a wonderful place to pursue what one wants to pursue; there is always somebody to talk to; I constantly wonder at people's eagerness to hear a thought; thinking now I feel it was an astonishing piece of luck to be here, and astonishing that this institution exists
 
48:12:18 On working, I tell myself to set aside part of the day, but I work in fits and starts; one of the best things that I have written I wrote in one night, starting at seven and finishing at seven; other things have been great agonies; bits of 'Plausible Worlds', on counterfactuals, a subject that was in some ways beyond me, were very agonized and it shows in the prose; it differs very much with the difficulty of what I am writing but I do love producing the sentences; although I did do it erratically, when I am doing it is one of the greatest satisfactions; what I regret about academic life, not too paradoxically, is that one has to read so much that one can't do justice to the way things are written; one guts and fillets books, and I am good at that; I realize that I have the time actually to read books but I have mistreated them, so a lot of what I have read and written about I am not sure I have digested properly when I look back; until recently I have very much liked working on word processors but I feel that they are not very good for one's sentences, although they are for the structure, so have gone back to using an old fountain pen; writing for me is a physically very involving thing and very aural, the music of sentences matters to me and goes back to my early love of poetry; I love the English language
 
51:48:13 What I realize at the end of this interview is that I have, to a degree, done something I was very determined not to do beforehand, that is tell the story as though it is a rational progression; in retrospect that is the way it can seem but I wouldn't have claimed to know where I was going