"Politics is ethics done in public", argued Bernard Crick who died on 19 December 2008. The statement sums up why he had such a profound influence on all of us who struggle with how to lead good lives both in private and in public.
Theorist, activist, academic and public intellectual, Crick was a key advisor to both Neil Kinnock and David Blunkett, and is perhaps best known as the major biographer of George Orwell, and more controversially as devisor of the recent Britishness test for immigrants to the UK.
In his landmark book In Defence of Politics (1962), Crick described politics as a messy, complex and imperfect process. But he believed this is exactly why we must value it. The frustrations of compromise and the need for constant adaptability are precisely what make politics the only tested alternative to government by coercion. He urged against the temptation to reduce politics to ideology, democracy, or nationalism, encouraging all of us who want to engage in political action to learn to live with, indeed to value contingency.
Crick’s ideas are integral to The School of Life’s politics course. Find out more here.
Read an obituary of Bernard Crick in The Independent here.
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