Bernard Crick

Sir Bernard Rowland Crick (16 December 1929 – 19 December 2008) was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views can be summarised as "politics is ethics done in public".

He sought to arrive at a "politics of action", as opposed to a "politics of thought" or of ideology, and he held that He was a leading critic of behaviouralism.

Crick was born in England, the son of Harry Edgar and Florence Clara Crick, and educated at Whitgift School.

He read Economics at University College London, obtaining a first, before transferring to the London School of Economics for doctoral study.

While working on his Ph.D.—published in 1958 as The American Science of Politics—he was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, 1952–1954; Assistant Professor, McGill, 1954–1955; Visiting Fellow, Berkeley, 1955–1956). Returning to Great Britain in 1956, he obtained his Ph.D at the LSE and was appointed to an Assistant and later a Senior Lectureship, 1957–1965.

During his period at the LSE, recollections of which appear in his contribution to My LSE, Crick craved for greater recognition than his Senior Lecturership signified.

LSE's promotion system was notoriously slow at the time.

When appointed Professor of Political Theory and Political Institutions at Sheffield in 1965, Crick told Beaver, the LSE student newspaper, that he was "going to a better place from the point of view of teaching students".

He taught at the University of Sheffield (1965–1971).

and founded a Department of Politics and Sociology, later the Department of Politics, at Birkbeck College, University of London in 1972.

Crick co-authored, with David Millar, an influential pamphlet entitled Making Scotland's Parliament Work.

Later in his life in Scotland, Crick was delighted to be appointed Stevenson Visiting Professor at Glasgow University.

Despite his frail health at that time, Crick delivered a series of widely praised and very popular public lectures.

Upon his death, Glasgow University marked his contribution by establishing the Bernard Crick Memorial Lecture.

Crick made many other contributions to Scottish political life, from participating in his local Labour Party, to defending Glenogle Baths from closure, to, in his last weeks of life, penning a humorous Op-Ed for The Scotsman on the chaos caused by the tram line delays in Edinburgh.

Crick died from prostate cancer at the age of 79, in St. Columba's Hospice, Edinburgh.

It had been diagnosed about fourteen years earlier.

Crick was awarded four honorary doctorates.

In 1974, Crick began working on a biography of George Orwell with the help of Orwell's second wife Sonia Brownell.

The hardback edition rights were used to set up a grant in conjunction with Birkbeck College to fund projects by new writers that would have interested Orwell.

Crick was an advisor to British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during the 1980s.

In 1980, just before the book was published, a friend of Crick's, David Astor, agreed to match the grant.

Over the years, there were contributions by Richard Blair, Orwell's adopted son, and The Observer newspaper, among others.

Due to a lack of discernible projects, after five years the fund was diverted to produce an annual memorial lecture at Birkbeck College and the University of Sheffield, and also to provide small departmental grants.

In 1993, Crick established the Orwell Prize with sponsorship from The Political Quarterly to honour political writing.

When Labour came to power in 1997, Crick was appointed by his former student David Blunkett to head up an advisory group on citizenship education.

The group's final report in 1998, known as the Crick Report, led to the introduction of citizenship as a core subject in the National Curriculum.

He was made a vice-president of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom (PSA), which also gave him a lifetime achievement award on its 50th anniversary in 2000.

The PSA also created the Sir Bernard Crick Awards for Outstanding Teaching in honour of Crick and his work.

Two awards are made at the PSA Annual Conference, the Main Prize, and a New Entrant Prize for early career academics.

He was knighted in the 2002 new years honours list for "services to citizenship in schools and to political studies".

Crick was knighted in 2002.

After his death, the University of Sheffield established the Sir Bernard Crick Centre.

The centre aims to 'Bridge a number of gaps that appear to have emerged in recent decades (if not before).

The first gap concerns the relationship between the governors and the governed in democratic countries.' The centre also aims to communicate social science to the public – or the social implications of 'hard' scientific advances – without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship that provide depth and context.

Glasgow University also recognised Sir Bernard's contribution by establishing an annual memorial lecture series.

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.

The lectures continue: they are now hosted each year by the Orwell Foundation (originally established by Crick as the Orwell Prize; see below) at University College London, home of the Orwell Archive; in November 2016 the Orwell Lecture was given by Ian Hislop.

Previous lecturers include Rowan Williams and Hilary Mantel.

In 2017, the Orwell Foundation and the Sir Bernard Crick Centre re-established a new Orwell Lecture in the North at the University of Sheffield: the inaugural lecture was given by Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry.