Professor Rodney Barker, 1942–2025 — A Personal Note of Thanks and Appreciation
/It was with overwhelming sadness that I read this morning that Professor Rodney Barker recently died.
This is a personal note—about what Rodney meant to me and what he did for me.
Rodney was my PhD supervisor and the smartest, wittiest, kindest, and most supportive academic I have met in the 37 years I’ve now been hanging around universities. He changed my life—not only with his brilliant, inspirational teaching and amazingly imaginative, wide ranging, and beautifully written books—but also with his deep empathy and sensitivity.
Without his encouragement, I wouldn’t have started a PhD. Without his gentle, considerate way of introducing a callow working class lad from the north east of England to serious academic discourse and culture, I wouldn’t have completed it. Without his careful mentoring, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to get a lecturing job and start publishing and moving through the academy. He taught me so much. I owe everything to that time as his PhD student.
It all started with the boots.
It was September 1992, and I was down in London, fresh from the University of Birmingham, with a 12-month grant from the ESRC to do the MSc Politics in the LSE’s Department of Government. Nervous as hell, I went to the introductory session for the degree and cowered at the back of the room. Several of the incoming students had already studied as undergraduates at LSE. Those that hadn’t all seemed—to me at least—to be arriving from Oxford or Cambridge, or equally intimidating and prestigious American universities.
By way of “induction” for the programme, a few of the lecturers stood up in grey suits and rather formally said some rather formal things, imperiously and with bland confidence noting the institution’s legacy and its contemporary policy influence while shuffling overhead projector acetates promoting their courses.
But not Rodney. Instead, sitting on a desk and sporting shiny, seven-hole, black Doc Martens boots, he spontaneously improvised wonderfully exciting, fully coherent, and not at all arrogant or intimidating descriptions of his two MSc courses: The State in Britain and British Political Ideas. I was hooked. I enrolled on the courses, loved them, graduated from the MSc, and, with his support, got more funding from ESRC to return the following September to do a PhD under his supervision.
Throughout the experience of the PhD, with all of the inevitable peaks and troughs every researcher experiences, Rodney was unfailingly encouraging, supportive, and kind. Yet, in the ways he behaved, the things he said, the assumptions he signalled, he was also an excellent role model. In my experience, he blended amiable quirkiness and mild rebelliousness with deep curiosity, humour, and friendly charm. But he also displayed a tremendous seriousness about the power of ideas, intellectuals, great books, and great writing. He was never arrogant or didactic. He was always inspiring.
This disposition deeply influenced his students. I saw it at first hand when I was lucky enough to be a teaching assistant for the undergraduate version of his British Political Ideas course. That particular part of my teaching assistant career at LSE was easy. Why? Because his lectures were so brilliant.
Across all of his work, Rodney paid consistent and serious attention to the power of ideas, which for him meant focusing on meaning as conveyed through language, interaction, symbols, imagery, identity claims, and political culture. He was fascinated by the ideas that animated social and political institutions, processes, and events; the things that make politics really tick and the resources that enable elites to cultivate and maintain support over time, even when they operate in ways that can undermine citizens’ interests. Indeed, for Rodney, ideas were the truly significant forces in polities and societies. They possessed energy and moved things, and yet were simultaneously also generated in the interactions that, over time, came to constitute what we understand as institutions, processes, and events in the first place.
Rejecting a perspective that seemed, weirdly, to unite many sociologists with many rational-choice political scientists and free-market economists, Rodney insisted that ideas should not be treated as mere epiphenomena. Nor should they be seen as mere abstractions; the preserve of political theorists and philosophers. Equally problematic, for him, was the view that there were simple coherent “ideologies” in the ways the textbooks tended to discuss them and still do.
Instead, Rodney saw political ideas as constantly evolving and cross-fertilising, in a generative pluralistic mess that sometimes coheres in identifiable ways, but often dissolves and fragments. He was as comfortable discussing Raymond Williams, the socialist pioneer of what would later become known as cultural studies, as he was dissecting the ambiguous legacy left to the Labour Party by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and the other early Fabians. One minute he would be talking about the municipal socialist ideas embodied in the architecture of Waterloo Bridge. The next he would shift to discussing the second wave feminism of Sheila Rowbotham and its links with the 1960s student protest movement or self-help anarchism. This was a profoundly imaginative, relational, interdisciplinary framework integrating history, political science, political theory, sociology, social anthropology and even literary theory. It was far ahead of its time. This kind of openness—and the importance of digging beneath political life’s formal institutional manifestations—has continued to influence my research and writing in so many ways, even as the topics I research have shifted over time.
Last weekend, I was on a family trip to London to see a concert at Alexandra Palace on Friday and an exhibition the following day. To be central to both, we stayed in a hotel in Islington. As we exited the Photographers’ Gallery, the rain stopped and the sun came out. So my wife and I decided to take our daughter, who has just finished her GCSEs, on an impromptu walking tour of the central University of London colleges. The idea was to provide her with a basic sense of the atmosphere of a non-campus university experience. After wending our way through Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, and Holborn, we walked up through Clerkenwell and back toward Upper Street. Nearing the top of St John Street, my wife and I stopped, looked left, and reminisced fondly about the times, back in the day, when we had attended Rodney’s Christmas drinks at his then home nearby.
Back at my desk this morning, I searched the web for Rodney’s latest news, as I have often done since we were last in touch several years ago. (After Rodney retired, he had remained active in writing and public life and often featured as a lively commentator in the press and on radio and television.) I saw the announcement of his passing on the LSE Department of Government’s blog.
Rodney Barker’s Books
Education and Politics, 1900-1951: A Study of the Labour Party (Clarendon Press, 1972).
Political Ideas in Modern Britain (Methuen, 1978).
Political Legitimacy and the State (Clarendon Press, 1990).
Politics, Peoples and Government: Themes in British Political Thought Since the Nineteenth Century (St Martin’s Press, 1994)
Political Ideas in Modern Britain, Second Edition: In and After the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 1997).
Legitimating Identities: The Self-presentation of Rulers and Subjects (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Making Enemies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Cultivating Political and Public Identity: Why Plumage Matters (Manchester University Press, 2017).
As Editor
Studies in Opposition (Macmillan, 1971).
Political Ideas and Political Action (Blackwell, 2000; the book edition of a special issue of Political Studies Rodney edited).
