Director

Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

David Johnston has taught at Columbia since 1986, specializing in political philosophy and the history of moral and political ideas. He has served as President of the New York State Political Science Association and as Chair of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought as well as several leadership roles within Columbia. His books include The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and The Politics of Cultural Transformation; The Idea of a Liberal Theory; and A Brief History of Justice. He is editor of Equality (a selection of readings on equality); co-editor, with Nadia Urbinati and Camila Vergara, of Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict; editor and translator of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. and (most recently) of Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Norton Library Edition. His current research focuses on the role of the idea of individual autonomy in modern political/economic/social imaginaries.