J. W. Burrow

John Wyon Burrow (4 June 1935 in Southsea – 3 November 2009 in Witney, Oxfordshire) was an English historian of intellectual history. His published works include assessments of the Whig interpretation of history and of historiography generally. According to The Independent: "John Burrow was one of the leading intellectual historians of his generation. His pioneering work marked the beginning of a more sophisticated approach to the history of the social sciences, one that did not treat the past as being of interest only in so far as it anticipated the present."

Burrow was born in Southsea. In 1954 after graduating from Exeter School, he won a history scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he became a pupil of J.H. Plumb and obtained a First in both parts of the History Tripos.

Fellowships at Christ's College, Cambridge and Downing College, Cambridge enabled Burrows to complete a doctorate within a new branch of history. It involved a study of the attractions of evolutionary theories, chiefly those of Herbert Spencer, Sir Henry Maine, and Edward Burnett Tylor, to 19th century social theorists. He argued that they were a means of reconciling the disparate demands of romantic-historical and positivistic approaches to society. The result was his first book Evolution and Society (1966), which explores the reasons why Victorian pioneers of social science were habitually approaching the study of other societies with largely positivistic and evolutionary methodologies, making anthropology into a search for affirmation of assumed laws and stages of progress rather than a quest to appreciate and understand other societies in terms of their own uniqueness and functionality.

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