One of the great, yet little known Kiwi academic giants has passed away. Professor Kenneth Robert Minogue, a New Zealander by birth, Australian by upbringing, and Englishman in his working life, has died at 83.

Minogue spent the past 50 years as a professor of political science at the London School of Economics (LSE). His intellectual reach went far beyond the lecture halls of the LSE. And like many expats, he made his fame and reputation abroad.

In particular, Professor Minogue’s most recent and greatest contribution to political thought was his book, The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (2010).

Despite the title, Minogue’s thesis was not that democracy was bad per se, but that a class of self-loathing intellectuals are constantly denigrating the Western world as a place of inequality and oppression. According to this worldview, society’s Foucaultian superstructure grinds people down into living desperate lives of consumerism and ordinariness.

Minogue argued that before the fall of the Soviet Union, there was within the academia a sentimentalist longing for, and pseudo-intellectual cover given to, totalitarian socialist regimes. These were states that people tried to escape from, at great risk, if given half the chance. Think Cambodia, Poland, East Germany, the Soviet Union.

But why was there such longing for vile regimes to succeed?

It is because, Minogue said, there is a great addiction in the Western world to the idea of creating the perfect society, as since the mid-nineteenth century the old idea of improvement was replaced by progress. Improvement is about the modest betterment of one’s situation or society, and progress implies pursuit of a goal. In this sense, progress is the antithesis of what made Western societies attractive, that is, the freedom to choose one’s own version of the good life.

Minogue saw this political idealism as leading to a ‘politico-moral’ public sphere where people only need to give lip service to politically correct views on poverty, taxes or, environmental causes without being required to consider the moral consequences of their own actions.

Professor Minogue’s passing should be mourned in New Zealand. He made a substantial contribution to the world of ideas, modern liberal thought, and thought deeply about how governments should interact with their citizens.