John W. Burrow

John Wyon Burrow (1935-2009) 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. 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. 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 laid the foundation for what later became known as the 'Sussex school of intellectual history'. John Burrow was 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.