John Dunn

John Dunn (HF 1964-65) won his Harkness Fellowship to go to Harvard to study the impact of Locke’s political ideas on what was to become the United States.He had lived outside the UK for long periods in childhood and adolescence in Germany and India and for two key summers in 1952 and 1953 in Tehran where his father was military attaché in the Embassy. He has been thinking about politics and the harms it inflicts ever since. He came to King’s College Cambridge as a scholar under force majeure and stayed there with one fleeting interlude ever since. He has been teaching about history and politics there and on other continents for over sixty years, twenty as Professor of Political Theory in the University;and he is doing so still. He is a Fellow of the British academy and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His Harkness Fellowship showed him the United States from coast to coast (the car an indispensable instrument) at the peak of the civil rights movement but also for the Gulf of Tonkin incident which launched the US’s ruinous encounter with Vietnam. He has now spent four and a half decades largely thinking about democracy and what happens through it across the world and what happens through itand has written numerous books about this. The Fellowship has shaped the rest of his life.