1 Making Sense of Christopher Dawson Garrett Potts and Stephen Turner British Sociology is conventionally understood to have produced neither great public intellectuals nor big thinkers of the stature of Max Weber or Talcott Parsons (Turner, B. 2006). The early history of institutional British sociology, before the founding of the BSA (British Sociological Association), is typically dismissed as a great muddle, in which its main representatives, Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, pursued an eccentric collection of ideas derived from Auguste Comte and Frédéric LePlay, and produced neither a great synthesis nor great works. Their rivals, such as L. T. Hobhouse, were lost in evolutionary speculation. The interwar years were, until the arrival of Karl Mannheim, a dead zone. There is, however, an odd exception to this story: Christopher Dawson is arguably the greatest product of this “barren” period of British sociology, a sociological classic and major historian, and the person whose influence as a public intellectual has been the greatest and most enduring. But he is also not remembered as a “sociologist,” nor as a part of the tradition of professional historians, to which he stands on the outside. Dawson is now remembered instead as the greatest Catholic historian of the twentieth century, and as one of the figures, along with but opposed to Jacques Maritain, who created the modern Catholic accommodation to liberal democracy. Although the interest in Christian circles in Dawson has ebbed and flowed, his works have remained in print, including works written when he was identified as a sociologist, and later works which address sociological questions historically. Dissertations and biographies have been and continue to be written on him, and there is a large secondary literature. But this literature also rarely refers to him as a sociologist. 1 Some of this can be explained by shifting tastes in the relevant audiences. What Dawson was not was the pioneer of a method that lesser scholars could follow. Nor could they duplicate his vast historical erudition. Nor was he a “theorist” in the sense that he invented and promoted a system of concepts, although as we will see he thought theoretically. He was subject to the same cohort effects as Karl Mannheim, who felt compelled by the world situation during the rise of the ideology of planning, fascism, Nazism, and Communism in the 1930s to provide a sociological solution to the world’s problems ([1929] 1936; [1929] 1940). Mannheim’ solutions were ignored; Dawson, who outlived him, expected his solutions, which involved de-secularization, to be ignored. But his description of the fundamental dilemmas, produced in the 1930s, which became unfashionable in post-war Britain, had more long-term resonance in the large Catholic world of the US, where he was received and accepted. As a result of this he ultimately held a chair at Harvard—the first Catholic to be appointed to one—in Catholic studies. And through this circuitous route he is returning in a small way to academic sociology, for example, in the work of the American sociologist Christian Smith who has discussed 1 A rare exception to the neglect of Dawson is John Scott, British Social Theory: Recovering Lost Traditions before 1950 (2018), who recognizes his role in sociology but nevertheless treats him as a historian.