My former university tutor Larry Siedentop, who has died aged 88, was a political philosopher specialising in the study of western liberalism and democracy.
The most widely read of his books was Democracy in Europe (2000), in which he argued that if the European Union had been a state wanting to join the EU bloc, it would have been rejected as insufficiently democratic. From a pro-EU position he advocated for reform, and warned that without change there could be grave consequences – as there were, with the Brexit referendum of 2016.
Larry’s other books included Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2015) and a biography of the French liberal philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1994).
He was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Russell, a buyer for Sunkist, the soft-drinks company, and Dorothy (nee Olson), a teacher.
After attending Downers Grove high school, Larry took a history degree at Hope College, Michigan, and then an MA at Harvard, before moving in the early 1960s to Oxford University, where the philosopher Isaiah Berlin supervised his doctorate.
Becoming a fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1965, he then taught intellectual history at Sussex University. In 1973 he returned to Oxford, now as a lecturer and fellow at Keble College, where he was my tutor for PPE – philosopy, politics and economics. He remained there for three decades until his retirement in 2003.
At the time of Larry’s arrival the college was somewhat dreary. Women would not be admitted for another six years, and undergraduates were more interested in listening to David Bowie and Roxy Music.
Larry, urbane and marinated in high culture, appeared to have wafted in from the age of enlightenment, a living philosophe. Weekly tutorials, often one-to-one, were held with a portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau gazing down at us.
Understandably, some undergraduates did not connect. He was not always an easy person; indeed even his closest friends reminisced good-humouredly about “the look” he would give you if you fell below his high standards. At the launch of his last book, Inventing the Individual, his former pupil Ed Balls, a great admirer, was at his side.
Larry was knighted in 2016 for services to political science. At his funeral we learned that he was a Christian, or, at least, that he had declared archly that he was a “fellow traveller”. The minister deftly distilled his political and religious sensibilities into a single precept: we are all equal, and we are all loved.
Larry is survived by his cousins in the US.
