Faculty

Danielle Allen is a political theorist who has published widely in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. As a democratic theorist and historian of political thought, she investigates core values such as equality, non-domination or freedom, and trustworthiness. As a political sociologist, she analyzes relations among legal structures, political values, and power dynamics, as well as foundational practices such as punishment, deliberation, opinion formation, and citizenship generally. This year she is finishing a book on the Declaration of Independence as well as working on essays on the public sphere and education.

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Didier Fassin’s body of work is situated at the intersection of the theoretical foundations of the main areas of anthropology—social, cultural, political, medical. Trained as a medical doctor, Fassin has conducted field studies in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France, illuminating important aspects of urban and maternal health, public health policy, social disparities, and the AIDS epidemic. He recently turned to a new area that he calls “critical moral anthropology.” He analyzes the ways in which, in recent years, inequality has been redefined as “suffering,” violence reformulated as “trauma,” and military interventions qualified as “humanitarian.”

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Eric Maskin is probably best known for his work on the theory of mechanism design for which he shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He has made contributions to many other areas of economics as well, including the theory of income inequality, the study of intellectual property rights, and political economy.

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Joan Scott's work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience. Drawing on a range of philosophical thought, as well as on a rethinking of her own training as a labor historian, she has contributed to the formulation of a field of critical history. Written more than twenty years ago, her now classic article, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," continues to inspire innovative research on women and gender. In her latest work she has been concerned with the ways in which difference poses problems for democratic practice. She has taken up this question in her most recent books: Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man; Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism; and the The Politics of the Veil. She is currently extending her work on the veil to examine the relationship between secularism and gender equality. She is also preparing a collection of her essays that deals with the uses of psychoanalysis, particularly fantasy, for historical interpretation. The book will be called The Fantasy of Feminist History.

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Albert O. Hirschman's work contributed to the discussion around the economic reasons for the emergence of authoritarian regimes in Latin America in the sixties and seventies and for the return to democratic forms of governance in the eighties. He extended applications of the exit-voice dichotomy to various organizations of the social world, from the family to the fall of the German Democratic Republic. He has traced the contrast between "interests" and "passions" in the history of social thought from Machiavelli to Tocqueville. He also wrote on the principal forms taken by "reactionary" and "progressive" rhetoric over the past two centuries, demonstrating the powerful attraction exercised by certain invariant arguments.

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Michael Walzer has written about a wide variety of topics in political theory and moral philosophy: political obligation, just and unjust war, nationalism and ethnicity, economic justice and the welfare state. He has played a part in the revival of a practical, issue focused ethics and in the development of a pluralist approach to political and moral life. He is currently working on the toleration and accommodation of "difference" in all its forms and also on a (collaborative) project focused on the history of Jewish political thought.

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Clifford Geertz conducted extensive ethnographical research in Southeast Asia and North Africa. He has also contributed to social and cultural theory and was influential in turning anthropology toward a concern with the frames of meaning within which various peoples live out their lives. He has worked on religion, most particularly Islam, on bazaar trade, on economic development, on traditional political structures, and on village and family life. At the time of his death, Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.

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