Ian Shapiro

Ian Shapiro (born September 28, 1956) is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He is known primarily for interventions in debates on democracy and on methods of conducting social science research. 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.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa on September 29, 1956, Shapiro is the youngest of four children. He was educated at St. Stithians School in Johannesburg (1963–68); St. Albans School in Pretoria (1969); and South Africa's first multiracial high school, Woodmead School in Rivonia (1970–72). At the age of 16, he left for the United Kingdom where he completed "O" and "A" levels at Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire (1972–75). This was during South Africa's Border War and South Africa required compulsory military service, which would mean complicity in the enforcement of Apartheid. Shapiro chose to remain in Britain to read Philosophy and Politics at the University of Bristol, receiving his B.Sc. (Hons) in 1978. Then he left for the United States and enrolled in Yale University’s Ph.D. program in Political Science, where he obtained an M.Phil. in 1980 and a Ph.D., with distinction, in 1983 for his dissertation entitled “The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Political Thought: A Realist Account," which won the Leo Strauss Prize awarded by the American Political Science Association in 1985. At Yale, Shapiro was a student of the important theorist of pluralism and democracy, Robert Dahl, though his work also shows the influence of Douglas Rae and Michael Walzer, who served as an external adviser of his thesis. Shapiro went on to the Yale Law School, earning the J.D. in 1987. Appointed to the department of Political Science as Assistant Professor thereafter, Shapiro was promoted to Full Professor in 1992, named William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in 2000, and Sterling Professor of Political Science in 2005. Shapiro is currently Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He 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. 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, Nuffield College, Oxford and Keio University in Tokyo.

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