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Yiftah Elazar | The Department of Political Science

Yiftah Elazar

Yiftah new 2019
Yiftah
Elazar
Doctor, Department of Political Science
Room 4316, Social Science

 

I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I specialize in political theory and the history of political thought. Most of my work has been about political ideas in the Enlightenment period and how they might enrich contemporary conversations about politics.

I have a particular interest in republicanism, broadly understood as the tradition of thinking about the norms and institutions of the political community that belongs to its citizens. I have worked and am working on topics such as republican ideals of freedom and the critical response to them; the appropriation and distortion of republican ideas by nationalists; the challenge posed to republicanism by the Scottish Enlightenment; and the way in which feminism has developed and enriched the radical strand of the republican tradition.

My research has appeared or is forthcoming in Citizenship StudiesHistory of Political ThoughtIntellectual History ReviewJournal of the History of Economic ThoughtJournal of the History of IdeasJournal of Political IdeologiesModern Intellectual History, and The Review of Politics. I edited, with Geneviève Rousselière, a volume entitled Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which offers new perspectives from leading scholars on how republicanism can help transform democratic theory and respond to some of its most pressing challenges.

I am writing a book entitled Rethinking Republican Liberty: Richard Price and the Idea of Self-Government, which is a study of the popular republican account of liberty developed by the philosopher Richard Price and its significance in the Age of Revolutions and in our own time. The book aims to contribute to our understanding of republican liberty by looking beyond the idea of non-domination to the argument that liberty consists in the power of individual and collective self-government.

I used to be a journalist before committing to an academic career. I started my academic path at the Hebrew University, with a BA in philosophy and in the Amirim Honors Program in the Humanities, followed by an MA in political science. I received my PhD in politics from Princeton University. I was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, before returning to the Hebrew University as a faculty member in 2015.