Sir Bernard Rowland Crick (16 December 1929 — 19 December 2008) was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views were often summarised as "politics is ethics done in public". He sought to arrive at a "politics of action", as opposed to a "politics of thought" or of ideology.
Crick was born in London and educated at Whitgift School, University College London, and the London School of Economics for his doctorate (1950—52). He began teaching at Harvard and taught at McGill before returning to Britain and the LSE in 1956, where he taught for 11 years.
During his time at LSE, recollections of which appear in his contribution to My LSE, Abse, Joan (ed)., London : Robson, 1977, Crick craved for greater recognition than his Senior Lecturership signified. LSE's promotion system was notoriously slow at the time. When appointed Professor of Political Theory and Political Institutions at Sheffield in 1965 Crick told Beaver, the LSE student newspaper, that he was 'going to a better place from the point of view of teaching students'. This may have been true but only a half-truth about his motivation : he was going quite reasonably for a professorship.
Crick sponsorsed the LSE's new-formed 'Society Against Racial Discrimination' (1963). The indigenous British, he remarked, should treat immigrant ethnicities 'as equals - and as no more than equals'. At least one member of audience wondered who proposed treating immigrants as 'more than equals'. The remark was an arrow without a target.
Any university teacher has to manage the transition from school to university for his or her students. A first-year undergraduate in 1963, Geoffrey Thomas (later of the Philosophy department, Birkbeck College, London) recalls his naive bewilderment at a clash between authorities. Professor H.R.G. Greaves promoted one view of cabinet collective responsibility in his lectures, and Dr Crick quite another in his classes. 'You might be interested to know', Thomas innocently remarked with some bafflement in a tutorial, 'that your views on collective responsiibity are polar opposite to those of Professor Greaves'. 'Then', Crick urbanely observed,'having equal access to both of us you are in a position of unique advantage'. A student learnt one difference between school and university that afternoon.
Crick's lectures at LSE displayed the freshness of his language - one might approach a subject, he once said, 'with an eye well-dressed with knowledge' but this is only one of many Crickian metaphors - and his humour. Thomas recalls the following : 'There are two questions : whether ideals have an influence on history and whether politics is to be sensibly seen as the attempt to achieve values. Are all ideals the product of circumstance ?' The answer might have been sententious. Instead Crick said : 'Marxism grew out of one messianic, ill-tempered, bearded, boily individual'. Hardly PC but this was 1964.
Bernard Crick was an advisor to British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during the 1980s. When Labour came to power in 1997, Crick was appointed by his former student David Blunkett to head up an advisory group on citizenship education. The group's final report in 1998, known as the Crick Report, led to the introduction of citizenship as a core subject in the National Curriculum. He was knighted in the 2002 new years honours list for "services to citizenship in schools and to political studies". He authored the 2004 Home Office book Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship, which forms the basis for the new citizenship test required by all people naturalising as British citizens.
He taught for a number of years at the University of Sheffield and Birkbeck College, University of London. He was a Vice-President of the British Humanist Association. He took early retirement in 1984, setting off for Edinburgh to be with his wife, Una MacLean. He remained domiciled there, becoming an ardent proponent of a Scottish parliament.
His ambition was not sated by his high academic reputation, which was recognised in the award of four honorary doctorates. He was made a vice-president of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom, which also gave him a lifetime achievement award on its 50th anniversary in 2000. In an interview with 'Beaver', the LSE's undergraduate newsheet, in 1965 Crick announced his ambition to write 'a big book on the conditions of political freedom'. None such appeared; and the fact is congruent with Crick's cast of mind. Despite the scintillating fun and real perceptiveness of 'In Defence of Politics', Crick had little aptitude for the higher reaches of political theory. He was creative about institutional politics, as 'The Reform of Parliament' (1964) makes clear, but his biography of Orwell, well-researched and competent, operated at the middle range of political theory with which (at least on one view - nothing is uncontroversial) he was most at home.
Crick was married and divorced three times. His first wife was Joyce Crick, herself a senior lecturer in German at Univerrsity College, London, and well known as a translator of Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud. By her he had two sons. His oldest son Olly is an educator and drama practitioner, who among other things has written a well-received book on Commedia dell'arte. His younger son Tom works in international conflict resolution. There were no children of his later marriages.
Crick died from prostate cancer at the age of 79, in St. Columba's Hospice, Edinburgh.
In 1974 Crick started work on a biography of George Orwell with the help of Orwell's second wife Sonia Brownell. The hardback edition rights were used to set up a grant in conjunction with Birkbeck College to fund projects by new writers that would have interested Orwell. In 1980, just before the book was published, a friend of Crick's, David Astor, agreed to match the grant. Over the years there were contributions by Richard Blair, Orwell's adopted son and also The Observer newspaper, among others. Due to a lack of discernible projects, after 5 years the fund was diverted to produce an annual memorial lecture at Birkbeck College and the University of Sheffield, and also to provide small departmental grants. The lectures at Birkbeck continue; in November 2009 the Orwell Lecture was given by Hilary Mantel.
In 1993 Crick set up the Orwell Prize with sponsorship from The Political Quarterly to honour political writing. Two awards are given out each year - one for political journalism and the other for a political book. The first awards in 1994 went to Anatol Lieven for his book The Baltic Revolution and to The Independent on Sunday journalist Neal Ascherson. Crick was on the judging panel until the 2007 awards.
According to Crick, the ideologically driven leader practises a form of anti-politics in which the goal is the mobilisation of the populace towards a common end—even on pain of death. Mao Zedong of China said, "Power grows from the barrel of a gun," and Joseph Stalin of Russia said, "The Pope? How many battalions does he control?" Such views, in Crick's estimation, are anti-political, because the speaker seeks to overcome any ethics of his constituency with the threat of violence.
The "political virtues" were an important feature of Crick's classic book, In Defence of Politics; he saw them as an alternative to "ideology" or any "absolute-sounding ethic". They included but were not limited to:
