Geoffrey Hawthorn is Professor Emeritus of International Politics, University of Cambridge. He has taught sociology and politics at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge and was twice a visiting professor at Harvard University. He has published books on human fertility, the history of social theory, counterfactual thinking in history and the social sciences and the politics of east Asia. He also studied the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and has written a large number of essays and reviews across a range of subjects in philosophy and politics.