Ernest Barker Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Sir Ernest Barker (1874–1960) was a British scholar of the early twentieth century and a noted authority on classical political philosophy. Barker was the oldest of seven children born to a farm family in rural England. He was noted for his hard work and exceptional intellect. Barker received his PhD from Oxford University, where he was fellow of several colleges and served on the history faculty for twenty-one years. Barker was principal of Kings College, London; held the first Rockefeller funded chair in political science; and was fellow of Peterhouse at Cambridge University from 1928 until his retirement in 1939. Barker was knighted in 1944 for his contribution to the Books Commission of the Allied Ministers of Education.

Barker’s most noted work, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, was published when he was thirty-two years old and became an enduring foundational work in classical political philosophy. Barker produced exceptional quality work throughout his life. Forty years after The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, Barker published his translation of Aristotle’s Politics, which remains a classic in the field and is still widely read today. By the close of his career, his work was published in canonical collections of current political thought, alongside Peter Kropotkin, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Bertrand Russell.

Barker, as underscored by Professor Jean Stapleton, “lectured on the social and political ideas of European civilization in historical perspective” and notably did so in a lecture commemorating the 700th anniversary of Albertus Magnus’ first lectures on Aristotle in a European university. Barker’s works on The Character of England and Traditions of Civility continue to reflect his European outlook on civilization, which he held with ever greater conviction throughout his life. The European perspective was the shared cultural foundation of the West and, was fundamentally combined, for Barker, with a sense of Englishness. Barker was not only an English patriot, but a Burkean intellectual whose politics were those of the Liberal Party, though with a qualified conservatism. The foundation of Barker’s thought should be understood as being twofold, first in his Platonism and second in his perspective on Christendom.

As Barker noted in his introduction to Aristotle’s Politics, “the translation has been a labour of love, and a permanent consolidation of such leisure as was left to the writer, from the autumn of 1940 to the spring of 1945, among the anxiety and duties of war.” Barker credits Sir Richard Livingston for the encouragement for his translation of Politics, and Barker acknowledged the debt to Merton College by dedicating the work to the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, for it was they who “gave him the opportunity of a scholar’s life, when it elected him to a Prize Fellowship in Classics in 1898.”

Barker is a foundational writer in the tradition of English political thought. Barker’s work on classical political philosophy makes him a seminal authority in the discipline, but his work on Western civilization and English political culture make him indispensable for understanding the clash of civilizations that defines our present time.

Bibliography:

Aughey, Arthur. The Politics of Englishness. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2008.
Barker, Ernest. Greek Political Theory: Plato and His Predecessors. London: Methuen, 1925.
The Character of England. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1947.
The Politics of Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.
The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle. New York: Russell and Russell, 1959.
Reflections on Government. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Traditions of Civility. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1967.
Political Thought of England. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980.
Stapleton, Julia. Englishness and the Study of Politics:The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.