Paul Hirst

Paul Quentin Hirst (20 May 1946 - 17 June 2003) was a British sociologist and political theorist. He became Professor of Social Theory at Birkbeck, University of London in 1985 and held the post until his death from a stroke and brain haemorrhage.

He studied at the University of Leicester and the University of Sussex before taking up a lectureship at Birkbeck College in 1969. In 1972, he was one of the founding members of the Department of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck. He was appointed Reader in Social Theory in 1978 and Professor seven years later.

During the 1970s he became well known (along with Barry Hindess) as the main figure in British Althusserianism. By the late 1970s and 1980s, however, Hirst had become a critic of Louis Althusser's brand of Marxism. Drawing upon Foucault but also Quine and Wittgenstein, he criticised essentialism, epistemological discourses and the possibility of any general theory, in a move against careless sociological constructionist imperialism. In his work on democratic governance, he turned towards the ideas of the English political pluralists: J. N. Figgis, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hirst developed a theory of associationalism which attempted to revive social democracy by providing an alternative to state socialism and free-market liberalism. He also made important contributions to critical legal theory.