Obituary Professor Paul Hirst
Distinguished and energetic political thinker whose ideals provided the intellectual scaffolding for New Labour
Ben Pimlott
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