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Mervyn Hartwig has Retired – Farewell and Thank You1

It is with a mixture of pleasure and sadness that we say goodbye and thank you to Mervyn Hartwig who has retired as Editor of the Journal of Critical Realism. Mervyn established the journal over 20 years ago and has nurtured it through different titles and publishers. In its current form, as a reputable academic journal with a consistent output of articles and reviews, it is a far cry from its early days as a self-produced newsletter. This incredible achievement is due in large part to Mervyn, and we can only thank him most profoundly for his contribution. Mervyn came to critical realism in the late 1970s, when he first encountered the work of the late Roy Bhaskar and others working to create a new philosophy of and for the natural and social sciences. Frustrated by the empiricist history of the time (and since) with its narrow positivist underpinnings, Mervyn pioneered a course in the philosophy of the social sciences at Macquarie University for history honours students. The course attracted high flyers from other disciplines leading to an informal Friday group at his home. Here PhD students and other interested academics would present papers, subjecting themselves to a form of collective peer review, and relax with Australian food and wine. Late retiring led to stay-overs and early rising, when the most enthusiastic continued ruminating over the previous evening’s debate. In those days, Bhaskarian discourse proved challenging, and the course required a glossary which was soon forthcoming, though students joked that this demanded a glossary of its own. The hint was taken and this laid the foundations for the eventual production of the Dictionary of Critical Realism, Mervyn’s mammoth labour of love, published in 2007. In the period Mervyn started working on this, critical realism was developing as a distinct presence in philosophy and the social sciences. It was also beginning to acquire an organizational basis under the auspices of the London-based Centre for Critical Realism (CCR). That in turn gave rise to the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR), from which emerged eventually the need for a journal to publish work in the critical realist tradition. It is doubtful that this need would have been met had Mervyn not taken early retirement from his post at Macquarie. Wearied by the increasing marketization of the university sector, Mervyn relocated to a town in Australia’s New England Tablelands, acquired two dogs, and renovated a nineteenth-century wooden cottage with a couple of old wooden barns and a disused dairy. There he bought a high-tech Japanese mini-tractor and created an Englishstyle garden overlooking a creek, but all of this was secondary to an increasing immersion into everything to do with critical realism and especially Bhaskar’s work. Mervyn was then in a position to respond to the call for someone to edit a newsletter. But since few sent any ‘news’ to the Australian outback, Mervyn converted the original newsletter into the journal Alethia, which eventually became the Journal of Critical Realism. When he and Rachel Sharp, his partner, relocated to London, an international editorial team was formed as Mervyn was able to meet personally with colleagues in critical realism. It was in London that the Dictionary of Critical Realismwas finally finished, preparing the way for a continuous production of book chapters, editorial introductions to new editions of Bhaskar’s works, and forthright interventions on the Bhaskar list. All this went together with the detailed written feedback