Kenneth Minogue

Kenneth Robert Minogue (September 11, 1930 – June 28, 2013) was an Australian academic and political theorist. Long residing in the United Kingdom, Minogue was a prominent part of the intellectual life of British conservatism.

Associated for much of his career with the London School of Economics, where he was Professor of Political Science from 1984 to 1995, he was described as a central figure in a group of prominent conservative philosophers and commentators at the LSE that included Maurice Cranston, Elie Kedourie, and William Letwin.

Biography Minogue was born on 11 September 1930 in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Minogue was involved in student journalism – which he admitted was to the detriment of his studies – and wrote for Honi Soit and a short-lived free-thinking broadsheet, Heresy. A running theme in the book was Minogue's distaste for the 'melodrama of oppressors and victims' that he saw as constituting liberal historiography.

From 1991 to 1993 Minogue was chairman of the euro-sceptic Bruges Group.

On Minogue's legacy, James Philbin in The American Spectator suggested that Minogue was "no mere academic" but "a model of the conservative activist" because "he was in the business of defending old-fashioned civility against ideological rage, and he believed this was the real meaning of the freedom that the English-speaking peoples have created and enjoyed."