Christopher Dawson in context: a study in British intellectual history between the World Wars
Abstract
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was a British historian of culture and a pioneer
during the 1920s in linking history with the social sciences. Much existent writing on
him today simply tries to summarize his views on the historical process or on specific
time-periods. There is a fundamental lack of real historical perspective on Dawson,
linking him to his own intellectual environment. This thesis attempts to remedy that
lack. It demonstrates that the most important years in which to understand Dawson’s
development were roughly those of the interwar period (1918-1939). During those
years he wrote scholarly books as well as social and political commentaries. This
thesis uses Dawson’s life and writings as a window into his world—hence it is a
“study in British intellectual history between the world wars.” A number of contexts
will be examined through relevant archival and published source material: textual,
social, cultural, and biographical, all in order to account for the numerous ideas and
events that raised questions in Dawson’s mind to which he then responded in his
writings. Chapter one studies Dawson’s reputation from the interwar years up until
today in order to highlight his broad visibility, the diverse images through which his
work was viewed, and the central themes he engaged with and which are the subjects
of the following chapters. Those themes are: (1) Dawson’s entry into British
sociology during the 1920s; (2) his response to the question of human progress in
Britain after the Great War; (3) his response to historiographical problems
surrounding religious history, nationalism, and empiricism; (4) the various ideas of
religion present in interwar Britain and the wider Western world by which Dawson
informed his thinking not only about religion but also about (5) those “political
religions” (as he saw them) taking shape in the totalitarian regimes during the
interwar years. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to general knowledge of
interwar British history, aid more historically sensitive readings of Dawson’s work
today, and reveal something of Dawson’s “cultural mind”: the fundamental
interdisciplinary and catholic ways of historical thinking by which he viewed the past
and the present and which were his most important contributions to the discipline of
history.