A former Marshall scholar who studied Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford University, received his BA from Cornell, and his PhD from Harvard, Joseph M. Schwartz is Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University. His teaching and published work focuses on the complex interaction among morality, ideology, and political and institutional development. He has won both the College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Teaching Award and the University’s Lindback Prize for Teaching Excellence. His first book, The Permanence of the Political: A Democratic Critique of the Radical Thrust to Transcend Politics (Princeton, 1995) won the North American Society for Social Philosophy Prize for the best book published in 1995. His second book, The Future of Democratic Equality: Reconstructing Social Solidarity in a Fragmented United States (Routledge, summer 2007, forthcoming) argues that defenders of a democratic conception of “difference” must not forget that “difference,” if constructed upon a terrain of radical social inequality, yields unjust inequalities in social and political power.

As a CHAT fellow, Schwartz will be working on a new book project that examines the role of race, racism, and racial politics in the historical development of the American state and public policy. While many students of American political development, Schwartz’s project aims to demonstrate that racism and racial politics continued to play a central role in the construction of conservative political hegemony from the Reagan administration to the present.