In the second part of my conversation with professor Jacob T. Levy we look at the need people have for guarantees in their political and moral systems; guarantees that their will of the world will both be actualized and be morally correct.  We ask what the world looks like in the absence of such certainty. 

 

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, Professor of Political Science, and associated faculty in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University.  He is the coordinator of McGill’s Research Group on Constitutional Studies, the founding director of McGill’s Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds, and the political theory field editor for The Journal of Politics. His areas of research include liberal and constitutional theory, federalism and local self-government, multiculturalism and nationalism, freedom of association, and the history of political thought, especially centered on the eighteenth century and Montesquieu.

 

He is the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear (OUP 2000) and Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (OUP 2014), and editor or coeditor of Colonialism and Its Legacies, Nomos LV: Federalism and Subsidiarity, and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory.   He serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Political Studies, and Publius: The Journal of Federalism. He is a member of the Board of Advisors and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Brown University, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, and an LL.M. from the University of Chicago Law School.

 

His writing on contemporary questions has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Vox, Foreign Policy, Salon, The Australian, Slate (France), The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reason, The Boston Review, and The New Republic online.