Peter Laslett

Peter Laslett CBE (18 December 1915 – 8 November 2001) was an English historian.

Born Thomas Peter Ruffell Laslett and educated at the Watford Grammar School for Boys, Peter Laslett studied history at St John's College, Cambridge in 1935 and graduated with a double first in 1938. During World War II he learned Japanese and worked at Bletchley Park and Washington decoding Japanese naval intelligence. It was at Bletchley Park that he met his future wife, Janet Crockett Clark, whom he married in 1947.

Returning to Cambridge in 1948 with a research fellowship at St John's College, Laslett edited Robert Filmer's political writings (Patriarcha and Other Political Writings, 1949). According to noted historian J.G.A. Pocock, it was with this work that Laslett provided the initial inspiration for the 'Cambridge School' of the history of political thought, the methods of which are now widely practised throughout the profession. Laslett combined such academic activity with a lifelong concern to engage a wider audience. He worked simultaneously as a BBC radio producer for the Third Programme. One product of this desire to reach a wider audience was his pathbreaking and highly-popular book The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age (1965; US edition, 1966), issued in a second edition in 1971 and in a retitled third revised edition, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored (1983; US edition, 1984). Simon Mitton credits Laslett with having launched in 1948 the radio broadcasting career of the astronomer Fred Hoyle.

In 1953, Laslett was appointed a university lecturer in history at Cambridge, and was elected a fellow Trinity College in the same year. He continued work in the history of political theory, discovering Locke's library and demonstrating (against the accepted account) that John Locke's Two Treatises on Government had been written prior to the English "Glorious Revolution" of 1688–9, remarking that the "Two Treatises is an Exclusion Tract, not a Revolution Pamphlet." Laslett published an edition of the treatises in 1960, subsequently reprinted many times, which is now recognized as the definitive account of these pillars of modern liberal democracy. From 1957 he founded and co-edited Philosophy, Politics and Society, a series of collections on political philosophy.

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