John H. Laslett

Thomas Peter Ruffell Laslett (18 December 1915 – 8 November 2001) was an English historian. == Biography == Laslett was the son of a Baptist minister and was born in Bedford on 18 December 1915. Although he spent much of his childhood in Oxford, he was educated at the Watford Grammar School for Boys. In 1938, he took a double first in history from St John's College, Cambridge. He stayed in Cambridge for some time, conducting historical research, then in 1940 joined the Fleet Air Arm. After a period working on protection of Arctic convoys, Laslett then learned Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a lieutenant and worked on decoding Japanese naval intelligence. He was stationed first at Bletchley Park and later, after VE Day, in Washington, DC. It was at Bletchley Park that he met his future wife, Janet Crockett Clark, whom he married in 1947. Laslett was demobilised in 1945 and returned to Cambridge, initially spending time at Peterhouse as a protege of Herbert Butterfield. In 1948, he was awarded a research fellowship at St John's College, based on his pre-war postgraduate research into Robert Filmer. His editing of Filmer's political writings resulted in the 1949 publication titled Patriarcha and Other Political Writings that, according to historian J. G. A. Pocock, was the work by which Laslett provided the initial inspiration for the "Cambridge School" of the history of political thought, the methods of which are now widely practised. 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, having earlier discovered and begun research into a substantial proportion of the library of John Locke, privately held at a shooting lodge in the Scottish Highlands, Laslett earned an appointment as a university lecturer in history at Cambridge and was elected a fellow Trinity College; thereafter, his involvement with the BBC declined and in 1960 ended. He worked with the philanthropist Paul Mellon and various institutions to negotiate the purchase and transfer of the library to the more suitable and accessible environs of the Bodleian in Oxford. He continued work in the history of political theory, arguing (against the accepted account) that Locke's Two Treatises of Government had been written to justify the English Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, but instead that it was written to justify Whig activity during the Exclusion Crisis remarking tha