29 Facts About Ian Shapiro

Ian Shapiro was born on September 29,1956 and is an American legal scholar and political scientist who serves as the Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

Ian Shapiro served as the Henry R Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University from 2004 to 2019.

Ian Shapiro 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.

Ian Shapiro was educated at St Stithians School in Johannesburg ; St Albans School in Pretoria ; and South Africa's first multiracial high school, Woodmead School in Rivonia.

At Yale, Ian Shapiro was a student of the important theorist of pluralism and democracy, Robert Dahl, though his work shows the influence of Douglas Rae and Michael Walzer, who served as an external adviser of his thesis.

Ian Shapiro went on to the Yale Law School, earning the JD in 1987.

Ian Shapiro was appointed to the department of political science as an assistant professor.

Ian Shapiro was promoted to a full professor in 1992, and named the William R Kenan Jr.

Ian Shapiro 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.

Ian Shapiro is a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Ian Shapiro has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town, Nuffield College, Oxford and Keio University in Tokyo.

In books such as The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory, Political Criticism and Democracy's Place, Shapiro engaged with the liberal, communitarian, and democratic theories which dominated political theory at that time.

Ian Shapiro argued that attempts to adapt the way we talk about rights to these new conditions of post-Humean skepticism sometimes resulted in incoherence.

In Political Criticism, Ian Shapiro continues to explore the theme of managing modernity's loosened objectivity.

In Democracy's Place, Ian Shapiro collects a number of essays, which together complete the critique and groundwork for his theory of democracy.

Ian Shapiro's concern is to develop a pragmatic political ethics which takes people and institutions as they are, in imagining what they might become.

In Democratic Justice, Ian Shapiro argues that democracy and justice are often mutually antagonistic ideas, but are nonetheless best pursued together.

But, in addition to these political considerations, Ian Shapiro contends that there is a philosophical link between justice and democracy, rooted in the fact that the most plausible accounts of both ideals involve commitments to the idea of non-domination.

Additionally, Ian Shapiro has written on the negative consequences of devolving political power to the grassroots level in modern democracies.

In several articles and books Ian Shapiro has defended distinctive accounts of the nature of social scientific knowledge, the best means of acquiring it, and its implications for political philosophy.

Universalism inevitably results in what Ian Shapiro calls 'method driven' rather than 'problem driven' social science.

Graetz and Ian Shapiro were to have received the 2006 Sidney Hillman award for the book, but the award was revoked at the last minute due to allegations that Ian Shapiro had intimidated graduate student assistants during a union campaign at Yale in 1995, which an administrative court later found to be an illegal partial strike.

Ian Shapiro expressed regret over the withdrawal of the award and noted that the administrative law judge dismissed claims against Yale stemming from the 1995 strike, so the allegations against him were never adjudicated.

Kennan's defense of containment had been strategic all the way down, but Ian Shapiro argues that the doctrine's imperative to ratchet up only enough coercive force to stop the bully, without yourself becoming a bully, embodies the central commitment to resisting domination that gives the democratic ideal its normative appeal.

Therefore, Ian Shapiro and Graetz posit that the solution to economic insecurity is a return to the hard work of building coalitions around realistic goals and pursuing them doggedly through the political system - providing evidence of the success of this tactic in earlier reforms, such as in the cases of the abolition of the slave trade and the pursuit of civil rights legislation.

Ian Shapiro edited NOMOS, the yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, for eight years, as well as a number of other collections of scholarly work.

Ian Shapiro offers a defense of what he describes as the mature Enlightenment.

Ian Shapiro served as the instructor for Moral Foundations of Politics, an introductory course on political philosophy offered on Coursera by Yale University since January 2015.