John Bordley Rawls was an American moral and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's work "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one".
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is a highly influential figure in both sociology and political science. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
Amy Gutmann is an American academic and diplomat who is the United States Ambassador to Germany. She was the eighth president of the University of Pennsylvania. In November 2016, the school announced that her contract had been extended to 2022, which made her the longest-serving president in the history of the University of Pennsylvania. Gutmann resigned from her role as president on February 8, 2022, following her confirmation by the Senate, after 18 years at the University.
Philip Green is an American political theorist and Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus of Smith College in Northampton, MA. An outspoken public intellectual, he is best known for his critiques of American liberal pluralism, beginning with a critique of American Cold War strategic policy based on massive nuclear deterrence and first-strike capability, to numerous recent writings about the retreat of representative democracy in the United States. His recent book, American Democracy: Selected Essays on Theory, Practice and Critique (2014), contains a compilation of many of those essays.
Noocracy is a form of government where decision making is done by wise people. The idea is proposed by various philosophers such as Plato, Gautama Buddha and Confucius.
Philip Noel Pettit is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.
Peter Clive Sarnak is a South African-born mathematician with dual South-African and American nationalities. Sarnak has been a member of the permanent faculty of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2007. He is also Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University since 2002, succeeding Andrew Wiles, and is an editor of the Annals of Mathematics. He is known for his work in analytic number theory. He also sits on the Board of Adjudicators and the selection committee for the Mathematics award, given under the auspices of the Shaw Prize.
Guillermo Alberto O'Donnell Ure was a prominent Argentine political scientist, specializing in comparative politics, who spent most of his career working in Argentina and the United States, and who made lasting contributions to theorizing on authoritarianism and democratization, democracy and the state, and the politics of Latin America. His brother is Pacho O'Donnell.
Liquid democracy is a form of delegative democracy whereby an electorate engages in collective decision-making through direct participation and dynamic representation. This democratic system utilizes elements of both direct and representative democracy. Voters in a liquid democracy have the right to vote directly on all policy issues à la direct democracy, however, voters also have the option to delegate their votes to someone who will vote on their behalf à la representative democracy. Any individual may be delegated votes and these proxies may in turn delegate their vote as well as any votes they have been delegated by others resulting in "metadelegation".
Danielle Susan Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. Currently on public service leave from the university, she is also on leave from her role as the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard in 2015, Allen was UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Allen is the daughter of political scientist William B. Allen.
A citizens' assembly is a body formed from randomly selected citizens to deliberate on important issues.
Jason F. Brennan is an American philosopher and business professor. He is currently the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
Government crowdsourcing is a form of crowdsourcing employed by governments to better leverage the collective knowledge and experience of their people by tapping into their ability to see connections, understand issues, and coordinate action. It has tended to take the form of public feedback, project development, or petitions in the past, but has grown to include public drafting of bills and constitutions, among other things. This form of public involvement in the governing process differs from older systems of popular action, from town halls to referenda, in that it is primarily conducted online or through a similar IT medium.
Rob Reich is an American political scientist. He is a professor of political science at Stanford University, the director of Stanford's McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, co-director of Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), and associate director of Stanford's institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). A political theorist, Reich's work focuses primarily on applied ethics, educational inequality and the role of philanthropy in the public sector, along with other topics in liberal democratic theory.
Cristina Lafont is Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University.
Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century. Her research includes nineteenth-century American poetry, the history of American poetry, comparative literature, lyric theory, the history of criticism, the history of poetics, and genre theory.
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom is a book by philosopher Martin Hägglund, which pursues a critique of the religious ideal of eternity and reconceives faith in secular terms as the fundamental form of practical commitment. Through new interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr., Hägglund develops the social and political stakes of his analysis of our temporal existence, arguing that labor under capitalism alienates us from our finite lifetime. Calling for a revaluation of our values, Hägglund presents a novel vision of democratic socialism as a post-capitalist form of life in which we could truly own our time and recognize our shared freedom.
Hélène Landemore is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She has a PhD from Harvard University. Her subfield is political theory and she is known for her works on democratic theory.
Oral democracy is a talk-based form of government and political system in which citizens of a determined community have the opportunity to deliberate, through direct oral engagement and mass participation, in the civic and political matters of their community. Additionally, oral democracy represents a form of direct democracy, which has the purpose of empowering citizens by creating open spaces that promote an organized process of discussion, debate, and dialogue that aims to reach consensus and to impact policy decision-making. Political institutions based on this idea of direct democracy seek to decrease the possibilities of state capture from elites by holding them accountable, to encourage civic participation and collective action, and to improve the efficiency and adaptability of development interventions and public policy implementation.
James Wilbur Ceaser is an American political scientist. He is the Harry F. Byrd Professor of Politics, and the director of the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy, at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1976. In addition to his work at UVA, Ceaser is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, Oxford University, the University of Rennes, and the University of Bordeaux, and been a Fulbright teacher at the University of Basel and the University of Florence.
