Thursday 30 October 2008

Norman Barry

This posting by Peter Boettke at the Austrian Economists blog alerted me to the sad news of the death of the political philosopher Norman Barry on the 21 October 2008.

Barry had been Professor of Social and Political Theory at Buckingham since 1984. He was a graduate of the University of Exeter. Professor Barry lectured in Politics at Queen's University of Belfast and at Birmingham Polytechnic (now the University of Central England) before being appointed as a Reader in Politics at the University of Buckingham in 1982. His books include Hayek's Social and Economic Philosophy (1979), An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (1981), The Morality of Business Enterprise (1991), Classical Liberalism in an Age of Post-Communism (1996) and Business Ethics (1998). He was also a visiting scholar at the Centre for Social Philosophy and Policy, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and at the Liberty Fund, Indianapolis. He was a member of the Advisory Council of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London; the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, London; and the David Hume Institute, Edinburgh.

He came to New Zealand in 1997 to give the Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture on the topic of Business, Ethics and the Modern Economy. See here for a copy. He was a great defender of the classical liberal view of politics and of Austrian Economics.

You can watch a 40-minute video interview with Barry below.

See a nifty 1982 review essay on the history of the idea of spontaneous order from Barry here.

(HT: Reason Magazine)

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