Larry Siedentop is a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He is especially interested in nineteenth-century French liberalism. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book Democracy in Europe (Penguin Press 2000), and an occasionally contributor to several major British daily newspapers, including the Financial Times and The Independent. Democracy in Europe has deliberate echoes of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Siedentop is the author of an intellectual biography of Tocqueville (Oxford University Press, 1994) and the editor of Francois Guizot's History of Civilization in Europe.
Larry Siedentop was born in the United States, where he attended Hope College in Michigan...a small liberal arts college affiliated with the Reformed Church in America...and Harvard University, where he received his AM degree. He did a DPhil degree on the thought of Joseph de Maistre and Maine de Biran at Magdalen College, Oxford, under the supervision of Sir Isaiah Berlin. Siedentop was a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford from 1965 to 1968. He spent virtually his entire academic career as a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford and a University Lecturer at Oxford University.
After retirement, Siedentop was a Visiting Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, The Queen Victoria Eugenia Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, and a Visiting Fellow in the Philosophy and Public Affairs program at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In November 2004, Siedentop was invested with a CBE for services to political thought and higher education.