Students of politics at Wadham College, Oxford, between 1965 and 2000 may well have encountered better known or more frequently published scholars than Robert Currie, but few will have had as lasting an impact on them as he did. Dr Currie, who has died aged 72, was that rare Oxford figure: a dedicated teacher and genuinely original thinker, one who made the conventional experts in his field look as if they were missing the point.
Let's say the subject was the Sino-Soviet split. He would set a reading list comprised of the key, respected texts. His students would return with an essay dutifully plodding through the theoretical distinctions between Chinese and Russian forms of Marxism. Currie would listen politely – though loudly clearing his throat to indicate disapproval of, say, a mixed metaphor – then proceed to strip away the abstract guff and cut to the chase. Who were the men involved? Stalin and Mao. How could global communism possibly contain two such outsized egos? It couldn't. The pair were bound to be rivals, latching on to ideology merely to justify their antagonism.
"This town ain't big enough for the both of us," Currie would conclude, the over-theoretical approach of most political science suddenly cast as entirely irrelevant.
Power was what mattered, Currie taught from his cosy study in Wadham's front quad. Power, money, sex and religion were the only true motives for human behaviour: the rest was justification. That approach sometimes led Currie to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but a determination to find what his son, Dan, in his eulogy, called "the real drivers of history" was what he conveyed.
Tellingly, few of his students went on to become practitioners of what Currie saw as "the dirty game" of politics. Many became journalists, including, on this paper, Vikram Dodd, Jess Cartner-Morley and me and, on the Times, the columnist Robert Crampton; others included the Booker nominee Monica Ali.
He inculcated us all with scepticism, certainly, but not cynicism. His was a kind of disappointed idealism, perhaps inevitable in a child of Communist party members who had once planned to become a Methodist minister. His first book, published in 1968 and hailed as definitive, was Methodism Divided. He published three more books by 1979, but none afterwards, possibly because he was reluctant to narrow his focus. His intellectual interests were unusually catholic: he delivered university lectures on philosophy and literature as often as politics.
Born in Bristol, Currie was the son of a postman, a grammar school boy who was the first in his family to make it to university. There he met the love of his life, Pamela, a fellow Oxford don who died just 12 days before he did.
They are survived by Dan, their daughter, Lizzy, and two grandchildren.
