Ernest Barker

Sir Ernest Barker FBA (1874–1960) was an English political scientist who served as Principal of King's College London from 1920 to 1927.

Barker was born on 23 September 1874 in Woodley, Cheshire; and educated at Manchester Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford. He was a don at Oxford and spent a brief time at the London School of Economics. He was Principal of King's College London from 1920 to 1927, and subsequently became Professor of Political Science in the University of Cambridge in 1928, being the first holder of the chair endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation. In June 1936 he was elected to serve on the Liberal Party Council. He was knighted in 1944. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958. Barker died on 17 February 1960. There is a memorial stone to him in St Botolph's Church, Cambridge.

On Barker see the special issue of Polis, vol. 23:2 (2006), Ernest Barker: A Centenary Tribute, ed. J. Stapleton, author of the definitive modern study of Barker, Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1994).

• The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1906)
• The Republic of Plato (1906)
• Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the present day: 1848-1914 (1915)
• Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors (1918)
• Ireland in the last Fifty Years: 1866-1918 (1919)
• Translator's Introduction (1934) to Otto von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society (1934)
• Oliver Cromwell and the English People (1937)
• Britain and the British People (1942)
• Reflections on Government (1942)
• "The Development of Public Services in Western Europe 1660-1930" 1944
• The Politics of Aristotle (1946)
• Character of England edited (1947)
• Traditions of Civility (1948)
• Principles of Social and Political Theory (1951)
• Essays on Government (1951)
• The European Inheritance edited with Sir George Clark and Professor P Vaucher (3 volumes, 1954)
• Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities and the Father of Man (1953)
• Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau (1956)