Bernard Crick

Sir Bernard Crick (born 16 December 1929) is a British political theorist whose views are often summarised as "politics is ethics done in public". He seeks to arrive at a "politics of action", as opposed to a "politics of thought" or of ideology.

Bernard Crick was an advisor to British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during the 1980s. Crick, in 1997, was appointed by his former student, David Blunkett (newly appointed as education secretary in the new Blair government) to head up an advisory group on citizenship education, which led to the introduction of citizenship as a core subject in the national curriculum. 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.

Bernard Crick is also probably the best biographer of the novelist and essayist George Orwell. His definitive biography George Orwell: A Life is the most comprehensive and objective biography of this extraordinary but often ambiguous writer. Crick sets out to examine the life of the author - warts and all - and focuses in particular on how Orwell got his books and essays published. Overall, he presents a very sympathetic portrait of his subject, giving a description of the writer's somewhat eccentric character and his struggle with poverty and initial rejection of his manuscripts. As he points out, fame only came late in Orwell's lifetime...'For most of his career he was too strapped for cash, too hard pressed earning a living by book reviewing and column journalism'. The biography also presents, in its introduction, valid insights of the biographer into Orwell's political development and political standpoint, as well as other interesting topics such as his patriotism, literary criticism and genius as an essayist and political polemicist. Crick set up the Orwell Prize for political journalism.

Ideas

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 Defense of Politics; he saw them as an alternative to "ideology" or any "absolute-sounding ethic". They included but were not limited to:
* Prudence
* Conciliation
* Compromise
* Variety
* Adaptability
* Liveliness

Criticisms

A critic might argue, however, that a "seedier underbelly" also exists. On this account, politics is the attempt to appeal to the masses by masking of one's essential self-interest—with little distinction needing to be made between forceful and peaceful attempts. No clear line can therefore be drawn between the dictator and the democrat, save that the former is given to the use of force. Feminist critics—with their motto "the personal is political"—object to his delineation between public and private spheres