Ian Shapiro

Ian Shapiro's picture
Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University; Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies

Ian Shapiro is a Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry.  In democratic theory, he 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.  A native of South Africa, Shapiro received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004. Shapiro is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 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, Keio University in Tokyo, Sciences Po in Paris, the Institute for Advanced Study in Vienna, the University of Oslo, and Nuffield College, Oxford. His most recent books are The Real World of Democratic Theory; Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror; and The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences. His new book, Politics Against Domination, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2016. His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income and wealth.