Clifford Orwin

Clifford Orwin is a Canadian professor of ancient, modern, contemporary and Jewish political thought. He is also a prominent writer on contemporary politics and culture.

He earned B.A. in Modern History from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy with Allan Bloom, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Harvard University under Harvey Mansfield. He is a Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he has taught for more than twenty five years and where he currently serves as Chair of the Munk Centre's program in Political Philosophy and International Affairs.

He is often identified as a Straussian and is critical of theories that identify Leo Strauss with neoconservatism and the War in Iraq. He supports the Democratic Party, but is critical of its left wing.

He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship. He has been a Fellow at the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership, and in 2003 he received the school's Outstanding Teaching Award.

Multilingual, he can speak English and French and read Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek.

He has written and translated articles on Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Churchill, Charles Taylor, American religion, and humanitarian military intervention. His books are The Humanity of Thucydides (1994), and The Legacy of Rousseau (1997) edited with Nathan Tarcov.

He projects a book on the role of compassion in modern political thought and practice, and a study of the Book of Esther. He describes Rousseau as "the modern philosopher with whom I'm most familiar".

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