A Cosmopolitan Democrat. David Held (1951–2019)

William Outhwaite
2019 Sociologičeskoe Obozrenie  
one of the most creative and prolific political sociologists of our times, died suddenly of cancer in March, 2019. Born in London and the son of German refugees escaping Nazism, he studied at Manchester, MIT, and Cambridge. Held then obtained teaching posts at Cardiff and York, and a chair in Politics and Sociology at the Open University, the UK's innovative distance-learning university established in the 1960s by Prime Minister Harold Wilson and which became a centre of critical thought in the
more » ... social sciences. In 1980, Held published the first substantial book on Frankfurt critical theory 1 in English. In 1982, with John Thompson, another Cambridge sociologist, Held published an edited book of essays on Habermas by leading scholars from across the world including the editors themselves, and is a publication which remains a fundamental resource on Habermas's early work. 2 Held continued to be deeply influenced by Habermasian critical theory as he began a vast series of authored, co-authored, and edited books on democratic theory and practice. In 1984, he co-founded Polity Press with Anthony Giddens and John Thompson. Polity rapidly became, and remains, one of the leading UK publishers in the social sciences and cultural studies, including a very active translation programme of books from Europe and elsewhere. At the end of the 1980s, the theme of globalization (mondialisation in French) broke over the world, and was reflected in Giddens' published lectures titled Consequences of Modernity 3 and a growing number of other works. 4 In disciplinary terms, the ground had been prepared by a rapprochement between sociology and the newer discipline of inter-
doi:10.17323/1728-192x-2019-1-295-298 fatcat:f2elhkmpdzelfdxj25hfu5hgyq