“The history of social theorising in western Europe and the United States since the 18th century” has very largely been “a history of failure”. With these words, written in 1976, Geoffrey Hawthorn, who has died of leukaemia aged 74, announced the conviction that was to inform his wholly distinctive relation to the social sciences over the next four decades. One of his deepest beliefs was that the ambition to develop a “science of society” was fundamentally flawed.
His readable and provocative short history, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology (1976; in the second edition, 1987, the subtitle was changed to the more accurate A History of Social Theory) traced the fortunes of this ambition from its Enlightenment beginnings through to the establishment of the modern disciplines in the first part of the 20th century. The book moved from Montesquieu to Herbert Marcuse with great brio, leading generations of students to treat it as a handy textbook.
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