Donald Winch taught me on the Concepts, Methods and Values in the Social Sciences course at Sussex University in 1967-68. It was not until much later that I realised the intellectual power on offer.
He certainly was not a man who cultivated student popularity, but he was miles ahead of the game in the way he put out key concepts and subjected them to their historical meaning.
The “market” was one of those ideas which, for student lefties like ourselves, was tantamount to Sussex treason. But Winchie kept going and the result was a liberation from all those slabs of (mainly) American social science transactions that seemed not to resemble anything or anyone, anywhere.
At last, the idea of a “science” of the “social” was up for discussion. I remember a particularly passionate seminar during which he put to us the idea of not releasing findings that could be damaging to (what were then called) race relations.
Sussex was a very special place in those days not because of its architecture, or its flash reputation, but because it was capable of being shaped by hard reasoners such as Donald Winch.
