Lawrence Hamilton

Last updated

Lawrence Hamilton is a political theorist and the SA-UK Bilateral Research Chair in Political Theory [1] at the University of the Witwatersrand, [2] and the University of Cambridge, which he has held since March 2016.

Contents

He became a full professor at the age of 36 and he has been a full professor of political studies [3] at the University of the Witwatersrand since 2014. Before that he was a full professor at the University of Johannesburg, and senior lecturer and associate professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

In Johannesburg and Cambridge he teaches and researches on various topics in political theory, South African politics and the history of political and economic thought.

He is the only political scientist ever to receive an A-rating from the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) [4] .

Hamilton contributes to rethinking political theory from the perspective of the global South. His research interests include topics in contemporary political theory such as states, power, representation, freedom, needs, rights, resistance, democracy, markets, development and political judgment. These are all informed by real world politics — particularly in the global South — as well as the history of political thought, South African politics, political economy and global intellectual history.

Academic career

Hamilton received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2001, where his thesis ‘The Significance of Need: A Political Conception was supervised by Professor Raymond Geuss [5] and Professor Amartya Sen [6] and was nominated for the Sir Ernest Barker Prize for best UK dissertation in political theory. Following his PhD, he went on to be the Mellon Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

He is an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and is editor-in-chief of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. [7]

He is the co-founder and co-director of the African Political Theory Association (APTA), [8] which was set up in 2017 to develop and facilitate the exchange of ideas in political theory on the continent.

One of APTA’s main outreach functions is the APTA Political Theory Summer School.

Publications and selected works

Hamilton has published, co-authored and edited seven books. He has more than 30 journal publications [9] and 12 peer-reviewed book chapters. These include:

His single-authored books published between 2014 and 2020 have been reviewed very positively over 30 times in leading journals such as Perspectives on Politics,Political Theory, Times Higher Education as well as a number of newspapers.

Welfare economist, social scientist and activist Jean Drèze from Delhi School of Economics called Hamilton’s Amartya Sen a lucid and lively book which “will be of immense value to anyone interested in Sen’s essential ideas”. Thom Brooks, Professor of Law and Government and Dean of Durham Law School at Durham University called it a “tour de force examination of key ideas championed by Amartya Sen … well written and insightful, it’s a perfect introduction to one of the world’s greatest minds”.

University of Chicago Professor John McCormick has described Hamilton’s Freedom is Power as an impressive contribution to contemporary democratic theory, calling it both an analytically sophisticated, systematic effort in 'applied' political theory, and also a first-rate intervention into the history of political thought.

John Olushola Magbedelo from African Studies Quarterly describes Hamilton’s work in Freedom is Power as intellectually stimulating with arguments that are lucid and persuasively convincing. “The author deploys historical analysis of relevant literature systematically to evolve a theory of political representation through empirical observation of the socio-economic and political realities of South Africa,” he notes.

In his review of Are South Africans Free?, Historian and Professor Saul Dubow says that Hamilton argues that post-apartheid freedom implies more than liberation from political oppression: it requires effective power. He remarks on how Hamilton is able to “argue his case with analytical acuity, imagination, and rare precision”.

About the SA UK Research Chair in Political Theory

Professor Lawrence Hamilton was awarded the SA-UK Bilateral Research Chair in Political Theory in March 2016. It is the first and only humanities and social science bilateral research chair, funded by the South African National Research Foundation and the British Academy.

The chair primarily builds research networks in political theory between the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa, and the University of Cambridge, UK. The chair is held between the School of Social Science at Wits and the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at Cambridge.

Hamilton, through the chair, has initiated the Witwatersrand-Cambridge Exchange Programme [17] and the Wits Seminar Series in Political Theory. The chair also offers scholarships to graduate students and research fellows to conduct research in political theory. It also hosts a blog, Critical South. [18]

The chair has four central purposes for the two institutions:

Under his chair, Hamilton has founded the Critical South [19] blog which introduces political theory and its significance in understanding politics to a wider audience.

He has also written for several local and international publications including The Conversation, [20] the Mail and Guardian, [21] the Business Day, the Daily Maverick and the Financial Mail. Some of his most prolific commentaries include:


Hamilton has had TV and radio appearances on more than 50 media houses, including South Africa’s eNCA, SABC and Newzroom Afrika, Australia’s ABC, Spanish International News Agency EFE, Al Jazeera, NBC World News, National Public Radio, SAFM, Radio 702, providing comment and live appearance on a range of issues. These include:


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amartya Sen</span> Indian economist and philosopher (born 1933)

Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher. Sen has taught and worked in England and the United States since 1972. In 1998, Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics. He has also made major scholarly contributions to social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and the measures of well-being of countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Rawls</span> American political philosopher (1921–2002)

John Bordley Rawls was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.

<i>Development as Freedom</i> Book by Amartya Sen

Development as Freedom is a 1999 book about international development by Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raymond Geuss</span> American philosopher

Raymond Geuss, FBA is an American political philosopher and scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy. He is currently Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge. Geuss is primarily known for three reasons: his early account of ideology critique in The Idea of a Critical Theory; a recent collection of works instrumental to the emergence of political realism in Anglophone political philosophy over the last decade, including Philosophy and Real Politics; and a variety of free-standing essays on issues including aesthetics, Nietzsche, contextualism, phenomenology, intellectual history, culture and ancient philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quentin Skinner</span> British historian

Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Partha Dasgupta</span> British economist (born 1942)

Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta is an Indian-British economist who is Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Axel Honneth</span> German philosopher (born 1949)

Axel Honneth is a German philosopher who is the Professor for Social Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Jack B. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Columbia University. He was also director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Capability approach</span> Normative approach to human welfare

The capability approach is a normative approach to human welfare that concentrates on the actual capability of persons to achieve lives they value rather than solely having a right or freedom to do so. It was conceived in the 1980s as an alternative approach to welfare economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Pettit</span> Irish philosopher and political theorist

Philip Noel Pettit is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is the Laurance Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kaushik Basu</span> Indian economist and academic (born 1952)

Kaushik Basu is an Indian economist who was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2009 to 2012. He is the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and academic advisory board member of upcoming Plaksha University. He began a three-year term as President of the International Economic Association in June 2017. From 2009 to 2012, during the United Progressive Alliance's second term, Basu served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. Basu is winner of the Humboldt Research Award 2021.

Ben Fine is Professor of Economics at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bina Agarwal</span> Indian development economist

Bina Agarwal is an Indian development economist and Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester. She has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kotaro Suzumura</span> Japanese economist (1944–2020)

Kotaro Suzumura was a Japanese economist and professor emeritus of Hitotsubashi University and Waseda University. He graduated from Hitotsubashi University in 1966. His research interests were in social choice theory and welfare economics. He was also a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 2017.

Christopher Warren Morris is professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Maryland, where he is also a member of the Faculty of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Policy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ingrid Robeyns</span> Philosopher

Ingrid A. M. Robeyns is a Belgian/Dutch philosopher who holds the Chair Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities and the associated Ethics Institute.

Séverine Marie Paule Deneulin is a Belgian senior lecturer in International Development at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, and a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA); she is also the HDCA's secretary with a place on the executive council.

Carolyn Hamilton is a South African anthropologist and historian who is a specialist in the history and uses of archives. She is National Research Foundation of South Africa chair in archive and public culture at the University of Cape Town.

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

Motsamai Molefe is a South African philosopher, one of the thinkers to have popularised African philosophy, and specifically Applied Ethics in context of Ubuntu philosophy. Molefe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, Eastern Cape.

Creating Capabilities is a book, first published by Martha Nussbaum in 2011, which outlines a unique theory regarding the Capability approach or the Human development approach. Nussbaum draws on theories of other notable advocates of the Capability approach like Amartya Sen, but makes specific distinctions. One distinct idea she proposes is to choose a list of capabilities based on some aspects of John Rawls' concept of "central human capabilities." These ten capabilities encompass everything Nussbaum considers essential to living a life that one values. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen are considered to be the main scholars of this approach, but have distinctions in their approach to capabilities. Sen disagrees with Nussbaum's list of values on the grounds that it does not fully encompass the range of capabilities one would consider to live a fulfilling life, which inherently differs by person.

References

  1. ↑ SA-UK Bilateral Research Chair in Political Theory
  2. ↑ University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
  3. ↑ University of the Witwatersrand Political Studies SA UK Bilateral Research Chair
  4. ↑ University of the Witwatersrand News, April 2018, announcement of Professor Lawrence Hamilton A rating
  5. ↑ Professor Raymond Geuss
  6. ↑ Professor Amartya Sen
  7. ↑ Theoria Journal, Berghahn Books
  8. ↑ African Political Theory Association
  9. ↑ Google Scholar
  10. ↑ Penguin Random House
  11. ↑ Polity Press
  12. ↑ Cambridge University Press
  13. ↑ Bloomsbury Books
  14. ↑ Amazon Books
  15. ↑ van Schaik Publishers
  16. ↑ Cambridge University Press
  17. ↑ Polis Cambridge, Witwatersrand Cambridge Exchange Programme
  18. ↑ Critical South blog
  19. ↑ Critical South blog
  20. ↑ The Conversation Africa, Profile of Professor Lawrence Hamilton
  21. ↑ Mail and Guardian newspaper
  22. ↑ Critical South blog
  23. ↑ Critical South blog
  24. ↑ The Conversation Africa
  25. ↑ The Conversation Africa
  26. ↑ The Mail and Guardian newspaper
  27. ↑ The Conversation Africa
  28. ↑ You Tube, Newsroom Africa interview
  29. ↑ You Tube
  30. ↑ You Tube
  31. ↑ You Tube
  32. ↑ You Tube
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.