Professor Paul Kelly pays tribute to an influential scholar, committed teacher and distinctive thinker who left a lasting impact on his department and students.
It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Rodney Barker. He died in Greece on the 9 May 2025, leaving a wife Helen Roberts, children Hannah, Polly, Tom and Ben and six grandchildren.
Rodney’s association with the LSE and with the department of government was long and illustrious. After taking a BA in History at Downing College Cambridge, Rodney came to LSE to read for a PhD under the supervision of Richard Titmuss in the department of social policy and after some confusion, Robert McKenzie in the sociology department. The confusion was whether he was to be assigned to Ralph Miliband, at that time also in the sociology department: a move that would have been interesting for all concerned and subsequent history. He was awarded his PhD in 1968.
His first teaching post was at the University of Swansea which at that time, under the influence of W.H. (Jack) Greenleaf, was an outpost of Michael Oakeshott’s LSE Department of Government. Rodney taught in Swansea from 1967 until 1971 and then returned to LSE as a lecturer in the Department of Government. He remained with the department as lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor, for the rest of his academic career until retirement.

In the days when there was still a default retirement age, he was persuaded to stay on for a final two years in the government department as convenor or head of department, convening not leading that complex and difficult beast. Rodney was of the view that the role of head was very much that of a convenor – someone whose job it was to call people together for a meeting and not a leader who set and directed the policy of the department. This idea was partly informed by his scepticism about academic governance and managing academics. When I succeeded him as Head of Department in 2009, he gave me a copy of F. M. Cornford’s Microcosmographia Academica (1908) which was his handbook for leading the department and which is both funny and revealing.
However, the convenor ideal was not simply the legacy of Cornford or Rodney’s undergraduate Cambridge experience, as it was very much part of the LSE way, drawing on a culture of strong and influential academics, relatively weak (by design) departments and a culture shared with Trades Unions and early twentieth century labour politics that shaped LSE and was in turn shaped by LSE academics, emphasising dispersed power and the importance of debate and deliberation over externally imposed agendas and outcomes. It was this LSE way that shaped him and gave him the opportunity to develop his own distinctive voice as a scholar of political ideas and of British government and politics.
By the time I got to know him as a colleague in 1995, he was part of a political theory group which was ‘professionalising’ under the influence of Brian Barry with his experience of US political science and Rawlsian political theory. Rodney fell into neither camp but remained an important presence amongst the group and his courses remained especially popular and attractive to students who still valued the pluralistic and non-doctrinaire approach to the study of politics that he had inherited from an earlier LSE generation. His approach to the study of political ideas was similarly broad at a time when the study of political ideas under the influence of Cambridge scholars such as Quentin Skinner sought to open a categorical distinction between the proper historical study of political thought and the ways in which political theorists used or abused ideas. That said, his scholarship was substantial and influential on many generations of students and scholars.
His early publications included Education and Politics 1900-1951: A study of the Labour Party, (Oxford, 1972), Political Ideas in Modern Britain (reissued as a 2nd edition by Routledge 1997), and Politics, People and Government: Themes in British Political Thought since the Nineteenth-century (MacMillan 1994). The first edition of Political Ideas in Modern Britain, was still a widely used textbook in British universities when I started my career. All these works reflect the LSE tradition of linking the impact of political ideas on political discourse and policy making within a distinctive national political tradition or culture.
His later published work turned to the problem of legitimacy and the development of distinctive strategies of political legitimation in a number of books such as Political Legitimacy and the State, (Oxford 1990), Legitimating Identities: The Self-Presentations of Rulers and Subjects, (Cambridge 2001), and Making Enemies, (Palgrave 2006) and most recently Cultivating Political and Public identity: Why Plumage Matters, (Manchester 2017). The latter was the first open access book by a department scholar. This work on the problem and practice of legitamcy was outside of the normative or contextual historical paradigms that were dominating mainstream political theory, but they addressed fundamental problems about the emergence of political identities and their impact on the scope of limits of political argument and action that have become central again following the reemergence of a realist strand in political theory and for good or ill the recovery of the ideas of Carl Schmitt and his critics. Rodney also edited a number of books.
Yet it would be a distortion to try and fix Rodney’s academic identity in a narrow disciplinary, straight jacket, whether that be in terms of methodology or debates and objects of enquiry. His engagement with politics was wide as was his broader cultural interest. He wrote on politics for the press and for many years he served as opera critic for labour’s oldest democratic socialist newspaper Tribune. He loved the LSE as a curious institution, however frustrating he may have found it at some points, and this is reflected in his long running contribution to the LSE Magazine – Rodent’s Rambles. His political thinking was also rooted in proximity to a concrete political tradition with institutions, and ways of carrying on political life.
Rodney was a committed and accomplished teacher who impacted the lives and careers of many students, some of whom went on to academic careers. Between 2006 and 2009, he held the position of Gresham Professor of Rhetoric. He continued to think and write about politics, amongst other things, until the end of his life.
The department will hold a reception and memorial event for colleagues, students and alumni later in the year.