H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching (Faculty of Arts)

John Hall

Department of Sociology

I benefited enormously from a teacher late in my education, when I was a doctoral student at the London School of Economics. For a year, I attended a set of lectures on modern ideologies given by the late Ernest Gellner. These forced me to think: he had such a strong, clearly -- and very wittily -- articulated view of the nature of modern society that it was virtually necessary to work out whether one thought it was correct. The virtue of presenting a clear view to which students could react was impressed on me at that time, as was the benefit to be gained from teaching about the material in which one is most interested because of current research.

My hopes for students who have left is conventional but deeply felt: the liberal idea of encouraging people to think for themselves still makes sense. In addition, I hope they have some sense both of the excitement of ideas and of the nature of social reality -- so that their hopes for change may gain in power through understanding that constraints allow us only particular social options.