History as Autobiography

Item No. 21.

J. H. Burns

History as Autobiography

Professor James Henderson Burns was Emeritus Professor of the History of Political Thought at University College London and the first General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Burns’ contribution to Bentham studies and The Bentham Project were enormous but Burns, forever a modest man, played down his expertise. Part of the reason was his brilliance in medieval political thought and intellectual history, which made him one of the few leading scholars whose interests ranged from the medieval to the modern. Professor Burns’ papers were donated to the University of St Andrews in 2013 and contain volumes of unpublished research articles, teaching materials, undergraduate essays and correspondence. In this unpublished speaking paper, given in March 1998 to the History Alumnus Association of UCL, Burns reflects on his life as an historian and on history as both an enterprise and a mode of experience.