jim submits:

"Obituary, Professor Paul Hirst"

Ben Pimlott, Guardian (London), June 20, 2003

Distinguished and energetic political thinker whose ideals provided
the intellectual scaffolding for New Labour

Professor Paul Hirst, who has died aged 57 following a stroke and
brain haemorrhage, was one of the most inspiring political and social
thinkers and teachers of his generation. Though he began as a
Marxist, his ideas helped to provide the intellectual scaffolding for
New Labour. His irreverent approach to conventional political ideas
gained him many admirers who, fired by his spirit, went on to break
new ground of their own. Above all, he was a fierce egalitarian, an
evangelist of honesty and the enemy of cant. Hirst was born just
after the end of the second world war, the only child of a
non-practising Jewish mother and an RAF officer who had risen through
the ranks. Because of his father's occupation, his main childhood
memory was of a life on the move -- he used to say he could not
remember how many different schools he had gone to. His best
recollection was of running wild with other forces children on a
military base in Germany: he sported a scar on his cheek which -- he
claimed -- came from an appropriated Nazi bayonet. His last school was
in Plymouth, where his parents settled, and where an uncle with a
chain of garages fondly expected him to go into the business.

Instead, he went to Leicester University, joining what turned out to
be the most path-breaking sociology department in the country, led by
scholars like the Belgian Elia Neustadt and the German refugee
Norbert Elias, who believed in setting impossibly difficult reading
lists and taking groups of the favoured to the latest Italian art
movie, and who instilled the missionary view that sociology was an
instrument for changing the world.

Leicester was the last place you would expect to be an intellectual
crucible, but in the 1960s, it was one. Philip Larkin kept a mistress
there, and the university was the butt of novels by Malcolm Bradbury
and David Lodge. It was the best of times -- with the London School of
Economics and Essex University following in its wake, Leicester
gained fame, or notoriety, as a cauldron of student revolt, with
Hirst as a leading firebrand.

He was not, however, just a revolutionary. He was also a hardworking
sociologist, who -- fired by the Neustadt/ Elias ethic -- quickly made
his mark. Armed with a first-class degree, he moved to Sussex
University in 1968, studied for an MA under Tom Bottomore and, at the
unusually early age of 23, obtained a lectureship in sociology at
Birkbeck College, London University's progressive and urbane centre
for part-time, evening class degrees.

At Birkbeck, Hirst joined his former Leicester teacher, the middle
east expert Sami Zubaida. They, in turn, were joined by Bernard
Crick, who was charged with setting up a department of politics and
sociology. (This has grown and flourished ever since, with an
impressive range of professors, civil servants and government
ministers among its former students).

Teaching Birkbeck's committed students became a life work, and Hirst
learnt as much from his classes as he taught them. Meanwhile,
successive cohorts of students discovered their subject and
themselves in his impeccably neat office, first in Fitzrovia and then
in Bloomsbury, and in surrounding bars and restaurants. He became
reader in social theory in 1978, and professor in 1985 -- a post he
held until he died.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm, another Birkbeck teacher, once called
the college the "poor man's All Souls" -- meaning that, because of the
pattern of evening teaching, staff could spend their daytime writing
books. Hirst took advantage of this opportunity, producing an array
of publications of remarkable richness and vitality, starting with
Durkheim, Bernard And Epistemology (1975). There followed
Pre-Capitalist Modes Of Production (with Barry Hindess, 1975), which
caused a succes de scandale on the radical left by using the
doctrines of the French sociologist Louis Althusser to challenge the
orthodox Marxian canon.

Meanwhile, he joined battle with the New Left Review, whose leading
writers he regarded -- with more than a touch of personal irritation --
as a clique of Trotskyite public schoolboys. In response, he founded
and jointly edited the briefly-flowering, and completely
impenetrable, Althusserian journal Theoretical Practice.

Bit by bit, Hirst was abandoning what friends of those days ruefully
call his "heavy Marxism". Instead, he became one of a group of
radical pioneers who were steeped in Marxist thought, yet treated it
as an analytical tool not a religion.

It was an important feature of his thinking at this time that it was
ever on the move. Maynard Keynes once riposted to a critic, "When the
facts change, I change my opinions. What do you do?" Hirst had a
similar philosophy. Indeed, his writings can be tracked like a graph,
as they took account of world events and political conditions -- and
also of personal circumstances. His happy marriage to a former
student, the sociologist Penny Woolley, with whom he later wrote
Social Relations And Human Attributes (1982), played a key part in
his intellectual transformation, steering him in a commonsense
direction.

In the late 1970s, Hirst began to take a keen interest in critical
legal theory, and -- as always when he picked up a new topic -- wrote a
book about it: Law, Socialism And Democracy (1986). Legal studies led
him away from abstract theory. A key breakthrough was After Thatcher
(1989), anticipating later writers in its call for a third way
between advocates of a purely pragmatic politics of the left, and
radicals who still refused to countenance any alliance with centrist
social democracy. Many of the architects of Kinnockite new thinking
now seized -- liked parched travellers in a desert -- on the reasoned
Hirstian approach, and built on it.

Yet there was much in the developed Blairite agenda that Hirst
continued to reject. Thus, his work on so-called associative
democracy in the 1990s was simultaneously a wellspring of ideas about
communities and voluntarism, and a critique of New Labour's
centralising, bureaucratic tendency.

After Thatcher was a symptom as well as a pointer. It marked its
author's growing interest in practical politics. Working closely with
Anthony Barnett, a friend from Leicester days, Hirst became a key
figure in the constitututional pressure group Charter 88 -- chairing
its executive and hosting many of it meetings in Birkbeck rooms in
Gower Street. Following After Thatcher, he also applied his
theoretical background in another practical direction -- looking at
the much-debated concept of globalisation.

Characteristically, he was a sceptic of easy fashion, arguing that
the death of the nation state was much exaggerated, and that the
developing world, in which globalising capital took scant interest,
would be with us for a long time. Yet he was well aware of global
change, as his War And Power In The 21st Century (2001) -- examining
the impact of technological changes on international conflict -- bears
witness.

Meanwhile, as a founder of the London consortium in the humanities
(involving Birkbeck, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Tate and
the Architectural Association), Hirst pursued a longstanding interest
in architecture. At the time of his death, he was planning a book on
space and politics, and a master's degree on international security.
He had also just been asked by the master of Birkbeck to be
responsible for teaching programmes for the whole college.

An account of Hirst's achievements does not do full justice to a big
man with a big heart, who was loved and enjoyed by everybody who knew
him. There was a touch of Dr Johnson about him, and it is a pity that
there has been no Boswell to capture his table talk. Like Johnson, he
loved to ruminate and discuss his ruminations. Unlike Johnson,
however, he had no misanthropic or chauvinistic tendencies. He worked
best with other people -- he attracted groups of collaborators who
became his friends. At the time of his death, he was the hub of a
series of interlocking circles of the engaged political
intelligentsia, who, in turn, absorbed, argued about and spread his
latest offering.

He was a spellbinding teacher, who broke every rule in the quality
assessment handbook; he was endlessly generous with his time, and saw
redeeming features in every student. He was a natural democrat, who
exchanged high-level political banter with cleaners and porters. He
was incredibly erudite, had read everything and remembered most of
it. Conversations with him were often monologues in which he
demonstrated his expertise on everything from motor cars -- he
couldn't drive -- to computers, which he only recently started to use.

Without an ill-natured fibre in his body, he could sound off at
distant enemies with an outpouring of such inventive obscenity and
imaginative profanity that it left the uninitiated gasping. He had a
sixth sense for phoneys: much of his richest invective was directed
at snobs, particularly the academic variety. Rarely, in a cutthroat
profession, he enjoyed the successes of colleagues. He was suspicious
of journalists and politicians, yet counted several famous ones among
his best friends. He was a completely doting husband and father.

He was immensely energetic, mentally and physically, though impeded
for most of his adult life by excessive weight. In later years, when
he walked, he puffed ominously. He ate too much. Yet he was at the
peak of his intellectual powers when he died and his enjoyment of
company never diminished.

To think of Paul is to think of him in his ground-floor office at 10
Gower Street, working at his desk with one eye to the window. If a
friend walked by, the door would fly open, and he would entice you
into his web. An hour and a half later, you would emerge --
reinvigorated, happier and wiser, your faith in humanity restored.

He leaves his wife Penny and son Jamie.

Paul Quentin Hirst, academic, born May 20 1946; died June 17 2003