J. H. Burns


James Henderson Burns, was a Scottish historian of medieval and modern political thought who also studied utilitarianism and Jeremy Bentham.
He was born in Linlithgow, West Lothian, the son of a manager of a paper mill. He was educated at George Watson's College before attending Edinburgh University, where he was awarded a BA. Due to poor eyesight, he was declared unfit for military service in the Second World War, and so worked as a sub-editor for the news department of the BBC. Abandoning his membership of the Communist Party, Burns converted to Roman Catholicism during the war and from 1950 he contributed to the Innes Review, which analysed the role of the Catholic Church in Scottish history.
After the war, he studied PPE at Balliol College, Oxford, for which he was awarded another BA First. Also in 1947, he married Yvonne Birnie and was appointed lecturer in political theory at Aberdeen University. He was awarded a PhD in 1952 for his thesis, 'Theories of Limited Monarchy in Sixteenth-Century Scotland'.
He took up a readership in the history of political thought at University College London and in 1961 he was the founding editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, a position he held until 1979. Three of the first four volumes were co-edited by Burns and, together with H. L. A. Hart, Burns contributed to the major reassessment of Bentham's influence on jurisprudence and political philosophy.
Burns was appointed professor of the history of political thought at UCL in 1967 and he was also the head of the history department. He edited The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–c. 1450 and The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, which are his most widely read works.
Burns retired from UCL in 1986 and was appointed the John Hinkley Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University, the result of his friendship with J. G. A. Pocock. In 1992 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Works