Professor Norman Barry occupied a unique place in the rediscovery, resurgence and refinement of classical liberal theory both in the United Kingdom and worldwide. He also played a leading part in the intellectual development of the University of Buckingham, and in the establishment and expansion of political studies there.

Norman Patrick Barry was born in Northampton in 1944. His father (then in the Armed Forces) had been a railway clerk; his mother was a nurse. Educated at Northampton Grammar School and the University of Exeter, Barry’s scholarly interests coalesced in the investigation of the relationship between economic doctrine and political action, and in the popularisation of the theory of public choice — the economics of politics. While teaching politics first at Queen’s University Belfast, and then at Birmingham Polytechnic (now the University of Central England), he researched the social and economic philosophy of Friedrich von Hayek, whose slim volume The Road to Serfdom (1944) had given warning of the totalitarianism inherent in the centralisation of economic planning and who celebrated the virtues of free-market capitalism.

Like other devotees of Hayek, Barry was initially a man of the Left, and, like these other disciples, his move to the right was strongly influenced by the grim reality of socialist economic planning and the oppressive, and obsessive, collectivism that underpinned and sustained it. These influences were readily apparent in his study of Hayek’s Social and Economic Philosophy (1979), and were reflected in his Introduction to Modern Political Theory, which appeared two years later and which is still regarded as a standard text.

After the downfall of the Soviet empire he expanded and refined his earlier views in Classical Liberalism in an Age of Post-Communism (1996). But Barry’s interests ranged over a much wider canvas. His deep cynicism over the growth of what has become known as business ethics led to two seminal studies in this field, The Morality of Business Enterprise (1991) and Business Ethics (1998). A critical survey of The New Right appeared in 1987 and a provocative study of Welfare was published in 1990. He contributed more than 150 learned essays to compendia in the fields of political and economic theory, thought and action.

In 1982 Barry moved to the University College of Buckingham as Reader in Politics. Two years later he became Professor of Social and Political Theory at the institution, which was to remain his academic home for the rest of his life. Established in 1976, Buckingham received its Royal Charter in 1983; it was and has remained Britain’s only completely privately funded university.

Barry had grown deeply suspicious of the state funding of higher education; he warmed to the intellectual independence that Buckingham’s status bestowed, and he revelled in the reality that his salary really was paid by his students. Buckingham’s growing reputation as a centre of excellence in the study of classical liberalism owed much to his presence there, and to the heavy undergraduate and postgraduate teaching commitments that he enthusiastically undertook. His informal, didactic method and his dry sense of humour endeared him to generations of students many of whom, now scattered worldwide, may be regarded as his disciples.

In 2005 Barry received the Liberty in Theory Lifetime Award from the Libertarian Alliance of Los Angeles. A visiting scholar at the Centre for Social Philosophy and Policy, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and at the Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, he was also 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.

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Barry insisted on continuing to teach even though in great pain.

Professor Norman Barry, teacher of political studies, was born on June 25, 1944. He died on October 21, 2008, aged 64