Robert A Dahl Ian Shapiro Popular Books

Robert A Dahl Ian Shapiro Biography & Facts

Ian Shapiro (born September 29, 1956) is an American legal scholar and political scientist who serves as the Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He served as the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University from 2004 to 2019. He is known primarily for interventions in debates on democracy and on methods of conducting social science research. In democratic theory, Shapiro has argued that democracy's value comes primarily from its potential to limit domination rather than, as is conventionally assumed, from its operation as a system of participation, representation, or preference aggregation. In debates about social scientific methods, he is chiefly known for rejecting prevalent theory-driven and method-driven approaches in favor of starting with a problem and then devising suitable methods to study it. His most recent work, coauthored with Michael J. Graetz, Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It, proposes achievable policies and strategies to mitigate economic insecurity in the United States. Life and career Born in Johannesburg, South Africa on September 29, 1956, Shapiro is the youngest of four children. He was educated at St. Stithians School in Johannesburg (1963–68); St. Albans School in Pretoria (1969); and South Africa's first multiracial high school, Woodmead School in Rivonia (1970–72). At the age of 16, he left for the United Kingdom where he completed "O" and "A" levels at Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire (1972–75). This was during South Africa's Border War and South Africa required compulsory military service, which would mean complicity in the enforcement of Apartheid. Shapiro chose to remain in Britain to read Philosophy and Politics at the University of Bristol, receiving his B.Sc. (Hons) in 1978. Then he left for the United States and enrolled in Yale University's Ph.D. program in Political Science, where he obtained an M.Phil. in 1980 and a Ph.D., with distinction, in 1983 for his dissertation entitled “The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Political Thought: A Realist Account," which won the Leo Strauss Prize awarded by the American Political Science Association in 1985. At Yale, Shapiro was a student of the important theorist of pluralism and democracy, Robert Dahl, though his work also shows the influence of Douglas Rae and Michael Walzer, who served as an external adviser of his thesis. Shapiro went on to the Yale Law School, earning the J.D. in 1987. Shapiro was appointed to the department of political science as an assistant professor. He was promoted to a full professor in 1992, and named the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in 2000, and Sterling Professor of Political Science in 2005. Shapiro served as the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University from 2004 to 2019. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, the American Philosophical Society in 2008, and the Council on Foreign Relations in 2009. He is a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town, Nuffield College, Oxford and Keio University in Tokyo. Scholarly work Early work Shapiro's early work explores existing theoretical frameworks for the study of politics. In books such as The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (1986), Political Criticism (1990) and Democracy’s Place (1996), Shapiro engaged with the liberal, communitarian, and democratic theories which dominated political theory at that time. The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (1986) examined the changing place of individual rights in liberal political thinking from the seventeenth century on. The book poses the questions: why did particular modes of talking about rights take hold around the English Civil War; how and why have they changed in the ways that they have; and how do they animate and constrain contemporary politics? Shapiro traces liberal political ideology through four major moments, bound to larger economic and social transformations, which he dubs transitional, classical, neo-classical, and Keynesian. Each is explored by reference to an emblematic theorist: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls. Skeptical of the claims of postmodernists, like Richard Rorty, that our intellectual commitments are contingent and, hence, subject to voluntary endorsement and revision, Shapiro argues that “[m]any of our most fundamental philosophical beliefs are integral to social practices in which we engage unreflectively every day. Those beliefs are required, in nontrivial ways, by those social practices, thus generating an important limitation on how we might reasonably expect beliefs to change.... We need to take much better account of our actual circumstances, how they have come to be what they are, and how they influence our own values and actions, if we are seriously to argue for the pursuit of significantly different values in the contemporary political world.” Shapiro argues that “the liberal view of rights evolved via processes of adaptive change importantly conditioned by and functional to the evolution of capitalist markets”. Shifts in epistemological frameworks from the 17th to the 20th centuries demonstrate how this kind of adaptation functions. For example, because their epistemologies are not yet plagued by Humean skeptical worries, Hobbes and Locke were able to assume that each of us, as autonomous agents, would opt for a set of rights coextensive with an ‘objectively right’ set of rights, our universal moral ends. After Hume, this assumption is no longer tenable. Shapiro argued that attempts to adapt the way we talk about rights to these new conditions of post-Humean skepticism sometimes resulted in incoherence. Later theorists of rights like Nozick and Rawls try to make up for this by means of a resort to economic assumptions (for Nozick, neo-classical in origin; for Rawls, Keynesian). These provide an apparently objective anchor for subjective aims. Shapiro concludes “The principal reasons for the tenacity of the liberal conception of individual rights, its negative libertarian view of the substance of rights, its view of individual consent as the legitimate basis of rights, and its essentially pluralist and utilitarian conception of the purposes of rights have, in their various formulations, combined to express a view of politics that is required by and legitimates capitalist market practices” In Political Criticism, Shapiro continues to explore the theme of managing modernity’s loosened objectivity. Here, Shapiro engages political frameworks articulated in opposition to Rawls’s neo-Kantian foundationalism, including the anti-foundationalist work of Richard Rorty, J.G.A. Pocock, Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Allan Bloom. These thinkers attempted to ground morality in varieties of convention, trad.... Discover the Robert A Dahl Ian Shapiro popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Robert A Dahl Ian Shapiro books.