Life Stories
Sir Larry Siedentop
Sir Larry Alan Siedentop (Fellow and Tutor 1973-2003, Honorary Fellow) died on 13 June 2024 aged 88.
Sir Larry Alan Siedentop in the Keble College SCR. Image © Geraint Lewis.
Sir Larry Alan Siedentop was an American-born British political philosopher and a passionate advocate of liberalism. He wrote Democracy in Europe (2000) and Inventing the Individual (2014).
So fulsome were the reviews of Larry Siedentop’s book Democracy in Europe that they could have been fantasy plaudits dreamed up by the author. “A thrilling, compulsively readable book about constitutional reform in the EU…he manages to recast the entire European debate,” declared Peter Preston in the Observer.
Published in 2000, the book took its title from Siedentop’s interest in the nineteenth-century French liberal philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America.
Siedentop’s bestseller catapulted him onto the airwaves and op-ed pages. A pupil of Isiah Berlin, he became a recognisable public intellectual and one of the most ardent and persuasive champions of liberalism. A knighthood was bestowed.
Yet, already 64 years old, he confided to friends, “It’s come too late”.
Siedentop arrived as a politics tutor at Keble College, Oxford, in 1973. It was a dreary place. Women would not be admitted for another six years — astonishingly, a bar on Catholics had been lifted less than a decade earlier. Callow PPE undergraduates, such as myself, were engrossed listening to Bowie and Roxy Music.
By contrast, Siedentop, urbane and marinated in high culture, appeared to have wafted in from the age of enlightenment, a living philosophe. Weekly tutorials, very often one-to-one, were held with a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau gazing down at us. At an auction, only he, apparently, had recognised it was an original likeness.
Understandably, some undergrads didn’t connect. He was not always an easy person. At the end of his life, his closest friends reminisced good-humouredly about “the look” received if you fell below his high standards (everybody did).
Other students were inspired and stayed in touch. At the launch of his last book, Inventing the Individual, Siedentop was flanked by ex-pupil Ed Balls. Again, this study was well received critically. But this was a dense, scholarly tome, off-putting to the audience Siedentop had so effortlessly engaged with his slim best-seller.
At his funeral, it was a surprise to hear that our old tutor was a Christian. Or, at least, he had declared archly that he was a “fellow traveller”. Deftly, the presiding minister distilled Siedentop’s political and religious sensibilities into a single precept: We are all equal, and we are all loved.
Kindly provided by Victor Smart (PPE 1972)