Abstract
Christopher Dawson identified with sociology, wrote extensively for the original Sociological Review, was a stalwart of the Sociological Society in the interwar years, achieved international recognition as a sociologist, engaged with Karl Mannheim and the Moot, and in the postwar period defended meta-history and the sociologically oriented historical work of people like Marc Bloch. He ultimately became regarded as the greatest Catholic historian of the twentieth century, and became a Harvard Professor and a cult figure for American and European Catholics. This paper describes this remarkable trajectory, his absence from the later self-understanding of British sociology, and his key ideas, including his Bellah-like account of the axial age and his extensive response to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and to the extension of these ideas in Ernst Troetlsch.
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Notes
- 1.
A rare exception to the neglect of Dawson is John Scott, British Social Theory: Recovering Lost Traditions before 1950 (2018), who recognises his role in sociology but nevertheless treats him as a historian.
- 2.
He was nevertheless quite capable of doing so. In a letter to J.P. Mayer he outlines and diagrams a model of differentiated functions in society and their distinctive forms of authority (Dawson 1938b). Although the model is entirely secular, it reflects what Dawson elsewhere characterises as the ‘organic conception of society’, which involves ‘a mutual dependence and responsibility between its member, and…the principles of hierarchy and authority’ (Dawson 1938a: 134).
- 3.
This story is told by Herman Paul (2015).
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Potts, G., Turner, S. (2019). Making Sense of Christopher Dawson. In: Panayotova, P. (eds) The History of Sociology in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19929-6_4
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