Political freedom is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Political freedom was described as freedom from oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions for an individual and the fulfillment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion, e.g. economic compulsion, in a society. Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action and the exercise of social or group rights. The concept can also include freedom from internal constraints on political action or speech. The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.
Hannah Arendt was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
In the fields of sociology and political science, authority is the legitimate power of a person or group over other people. In a civil state, authority is practiced in ways such a judicial branch or an executive branch of government.
Michael W. Doyle is an American international relations scholar who is a theorist of the liberal "democratic peace" and author of Liberalism and World Politics. He has also written on the comparative history of empires and the evaluation of UN peace-keeping. He is a University professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs. He is the former director of Columbia Global Policy Initiative. He co-directs the Center on Global Governance at Columbia Law School.
Richard E. Flathman was the George Armstrong Kelly Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for having pioneered, with Brian Barry, David Braybrooke, Felix Oppenheim, and Abraham Kaplan, the application of analytic philosophy to political science. He was a leading advocate of liberalism and a champion of individuality. He defended a conception of social freedom according to which it is "negative, situated, and elemental."
Sheldon Sanford Wolin was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.
Robert Owen Keohane is an American academic working within the fields of international relations and international political economy. Following the publication of his influential book After Hegemony (1984), he has become widely associated with the theory of neoliberal institutionalism in international relations, as well as transnational relations and world politics in international relations in the 1970s.
Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-American philosopher. Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019. She was the Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University from 2001 to 2020. She was director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2002 to 2008. Benhabib is well known for her work in political philosophy, which draws on critical theory and feminist political theory. She has written extensively on the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, as well as on the topic of human migration. She is the author of numerous books, and has received several prestigious awards and lectureships in recognition of her work.
Darin Nesbitt is an instructor of Political Science at Douglas College, in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada.
Dennis Frank Thompson is a political scientist and professor at Harvard University, where he founded the university-wide Center for Ethics and the Professions. Thompson is known for his pioneering work in the fields of both political ethics and democratic theory. According to a recent appraisal, he has become “influential within the world of political theory" by offering “greater concrete political thought than Rawls” and by showing “an atypical grasp, for a political theorist, of the real political world.”
David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University.
Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written books on the role of fear in political life, tracing its presence from Aristotle through the war on terror, and on the nature of conservatism in the modern world, from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Most recently, he is the author of a study of Justice Clarence Thomas that argues that the mainspring of Thomas's jurisprudence is a combination of black nationalism and black conservatism.
The Princeton University Department of Psychology, located in Peretsman-Scully Hall, is an academic department of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. For over a century, the department has been one of the most notable psychology departments in the country. It has been home to psychologists who have made well-known scientific discoveries in the fields of psychology and neuroscience.
Bonnie Honig, is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.
Patchen Markell is an associate professor of political science at Cornell University. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in 1999 and a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from University of California, Berkeley in 1992.
Richard Jacob Bernstein was an American philosopher who taught for many years at Haverford College and then at The New School for Social Research, where he was Vera List Professor of Philosophy. Bernstein wrote extensively about a broad array of issues and philosophical traditions including American pragmatism, neopragmatism, critical theory, deconstruction, social philosophy, political philosophy, and hermeneutics.
Mary Golden Dietz is the John Evans Emerita Professor of Political Theory at Northwestern University. She holds a joint appointment in Northwestern's Department of Political Science and its Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She is the author of many books and articles in feminist theory and the history of philosophy and her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Czech, Turkish, and Japanese. She edited the journal Political Theory from 2005 to 2012. Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern in 2007, she taught at the University of Minnesota. She announced her retirement in 2022, after which Northwestern named her Professor Emerita.
Peg Birmingham is an American academic who serves as Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. Much of Birmingham's work has focused on the work of Hannah Arendt, to whose thought she is considered to have made a profound contribution, although her interest has also ranged widely through other subjects, primarily in modern social and political philosophy, as well as feminist theory.
Simona Forti is an Italian philosopher and academic, whose main interests are in political philosophy and contemporary ethics. She was born in Modena in 1958. She graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna in 1983. In the following years she attended the Phd courses in political theory at the Turin University as well as the Phd courses in political philosophy at The New School in New York. She received her PhD in History of Political Thought from Turin University in 1989. In 2004 she was appointed Full Professor of History of Political Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont. In 2020, she was appointed Full Professor of Political Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Pisa, Italy. She is one of the founding members of FINO”, a PhD Program in Philosophy coordinated by the Northwestern Italian University Consortium, and the standing president of Bios, an international and interdisciplinary research center on biopolitics and bioethics based at the University of Piemonte Orientale.
Anson Gilbert Rabinbach is a historian of modern Europe and the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University. He is best known for his writings on labor, Nazi Germany, Austria, and European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1973 he co-founded the journal New German Critique, which he continues to co-edit.
