Rodney Barker

Rodney Barker is a professor of government in London School of Economics.

He has published on political thinking in modern Britain, and on the legitimation of governments, subjects, and rebels.

His most recent books in these fields are Political Ideas in Modern Britain in and after the Twentieth Century, published by Routledge in 1997, and Legitimating Identities: the self-presentations of rulers and subjects, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001.

His research on legitimation is continuing, and he is in addition working on the conceptualisation of enemies in the construction of political identities.

Major works of Rodney Barker

– Barker, Rodney. ‘Legitimacy, Legitimation, and the European Union: What Crisis?’ In Law and Administration in Europe: Essays in Honour of Carol Harlow. Edited by Rawlings, Paul Craig & Richard. Oxford University Press, 2003
– Barker, Rodney. Legitimating Identities: The Self-presentations of Rulers and Subjects. Cambridge University Press, 2001
– Barker, Rodney. ‘Hooks and Hands, Interests and Enemies: Political Thinking as Political Action.’ In Political Ideas and Political Action. Edited by Barker, R. Blackwell, 2000
– Barker, Rodney. ‘Nuove regole per società aperte.’ In Duemila: Verso una società aperta, Vol. 2: Politica, migrazioni, guerra e pace, religione. Il Sole 24 Ore, 2000
– Barker, Rodney. ‘Pluralism, Revenant or Recessive?’ In The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Hayward, J.; Barry, B.; Brown, A. Oxford University Press, 2000
– Barker, Rodney (ed.). Political Ideas and Political Action. Blackwell, 2000
– Barker, Rodney. ‘The Long Millennium, the Short Century, and the Persistence of Legitimation.’ Contemporary Politics 6, no. 1 (2000)

Rodney Barker is a British academic and political commentator. He was Professor of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science and was Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London from September 2006 to September 2009. He is married to the medical sociologist Helen Roberts.^[1]

After gaining his BA in History from Downing College, Cambridge, he undertook a PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science, jointly supervised by Richard Titmuss in the Department of Social Administration, and Robert McKenzie in the Department of Sociology. His first full academic position was as a lecturer in Politics in the Department of Political Theory and Government of University College Swansea, a position he held between 1967 and 1971. After that, he returned to the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1971 and has held the positions of Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and Professor of Government. He was an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow between 1990 and 1991.^[2]

As well as numerous scholarly articles, he is widely published in the British broadsheet newspapers and has been an opera critic for the Tribune.

Books

• Making Enemies, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, ISBN 978-0-230-51681-6
• Legitimating Identities, Cambridge University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-521-00425-1
• Political Ideas and Political Action, Blackwell, 2000, ISBN 0-631-22142-5
• Political Ideas in Modern Britain, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0-415-07121-6

References

• Webpage at the Government Department, LSE
• Personal webpage
• Gresham College biography