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Sir Bernard Crick (born 16 December 1929) is a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views are often summarised as "politics is ethics done in public". He seeks to arrive at a "politics of action", as opposed to a "politics of thought" or of ideology.

Bernard Crick was an advisor to British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during the 1980s. Crick, in 1997, was appointed by his former student, David Blunkett to head up an advisory group on citizenship education, which led to the introduction of citizenship as a core subject in the national curriculum. He authored the 2004 Home Office book Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship, which forms the basis for the new citizenship test required by all people naturalising as British citizens.

Bernard Crick is also a biographer of the novelist and essayist George Orwell. He also set up the Orwell Prize for political journalism.

He taught for a number of years at Birkbeck, University of London. Professor Crick is a Vice-President of the British Humanist Association.

According to Crick, the ideologically driven leader practises a form of anti-politics in which the goal is the mobilisation of the populace towards a common end—even on pain of death. Mao Zedong of China said, "Power grows from the barrel of a gun," and Joseph Stalin of Russia said, "The Pope? How many battalions does he control?" Such views, in Crick's estimation, are anti-political, because the speaker seeks to overcome any ethics of his constituency with the threat of violence.

The "political virtues" were an important feature of Crick's classic book, In Defense of Politics; he saw them as an alternative to "ideology" or any "absolute-sounding ethic". They included but were not limited to:

• Prudence
• Conciliation
• Compromise
• Variety
• Adaptability
• Liveliness

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