Sir Ernest Barker FBA (23 September 1874 – 17 February 1960)^[1] was an English political scientist who served as Principal of King's College London from 1920 to 1927.^{[citation needed]}

Ernest Barker was born in Woodley, Cheshire, and educated at Manchester Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford.^[2] Barker was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1898 to 1905, St John's College, Oxford, from 1909 to 1913, and New College, Oxford, from 1913 to 1920.^[3] He spent a brief time at the London School of Economics.^[4] He was Principal of King's College London from 1920 to 1927,^[5] and subsequently became Professor of Political Science in the University of Cambridge in 1928,^[6] being the first holder of the chair endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation.^[7]

In June 1936 he was elected to serve on the Liberal Party Council.^[8] He was knighted in 1944. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958.^[9]

Barker was married twice, firstly in 1900 to Emily Isabel Salkeld, with whom he had a son and two daughters; she died in 1924. In 1927 he married Olivia Stuart Horner; they had a son, Nicolas Barker,^[10] and a daughter.^[3]

Barker died on 17 February 1960.^[2][3] There is a memorial stone to him in St Botolph's Church, Cambridge.

• The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1906)^[11]
• The Republic of Plato (1906)
• Articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911)^[12]
• Ernest Barker, H. W. Carless Davis, C. R. L. Fletcher, Arthur Hassall, L. G. Wickham Legg, F. Morgan, Why We Are at War: Great Britain's Case, by Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914)
• Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the present day: 1848-1914 (1915)
• Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors (1918)
• Ireland in the last Fifty Years: 1866-1918 (1919)
• The Crusades (1923). A later edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica article, edited with additional notes.^[13]
• Church, State and Studies: Essays. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd. 1930.
• Translator's Introduction (1934) to Otto von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society (1934)
• Oliver Cromwell and the English People (1937)
• Britain and the British People (1942)
• Reflections on Government (1942)
• "The Development of Public Services in Western Europe 1660-1930" (1944)^[14]
• The Politics of Aristotle (1946)
• Character of England edited (1947)
• Traditions of Civility (1948)
• Principles of Social and Political Theory (1951)
• Essays on Government^[15] (1951)
• The European Inheritance, edited with Sir George Clark and Professor P. Vaucher (3 volumes, 1954)
• Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities and the Father of Man (1953)
• Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau (1956)