Lloyd Algernon Best

Lloyd Algernon Best, one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most acclaimed intellectuals, is the recipient of the OCC, conferred in 2002.

Described as “economist, politician, publicist, political commentator, philosopher and ‘doctor of doctor politics'”, Lloyd Best developed an intimate relationship with the University of the West Indies, beginning his illustrious multifaceted career as a Junior Research Fellow in 1958 at the Institute of Social and Economic Research of the UWI in Jamaica.

This relationship solidified with his tenure at the St. Augustine Campus as a Lecturer in Economics.

Known for his radical non conventional philosophies, Lloyd Best was not the passive participant in the Region’s status quo, daring to disagree and advance cogent alternative viewpoints about the political, economic and intellectual realities of Caribbean society. This earned him the title “doctor politics” which by no means captures the brilliance, tenacity and fertile intellect of a great West Indian social philosopher and thinker.

Lloyd Best, in the 1960s, co-founded the New World Group of independent thinkers who theorised and philosophised about the economic, social and political systems of their time.

This intellectual giant of the Caribbean stimulated a rethinking of accepted models and practices in institutions of politics and economics and development as a whole, giving direction to the principles that support the establishment and continuity of the Caribbean integration movement.

He is said to have “bestrode the regional intellectual world like a colossus” and it was for his contribution to the Region’s intellectual advancement that he was deservedly inducted into the membership of the prestigious OCC.