Ian Shapiro (born September 29, 1956) is an American legal scholar and political scientist who serves as the Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He served as the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University from 2004 to 2019. He is known primarily for interventions in debates on democracy and on methods of conducting social science research.
In democratic theory, Shapiro 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. Shapiro’s latest books—Uncommon Sense (2024), The Wolf at the Door (2020), and After the Fall (forthcoming)—diagnose the sources of today’s democratic crisis and advance realistic remedies. Uncommon Sense (Yale University Press, 2024) renews the Enlightenment commitments to reason and science as providing the best available framework for democratic politics; The Wolf at the Door (Harvard University Press, 2020, with Michael J. Graetz) offers a pragmatic program to reduce economic insecurity; and After the Fall (Basic Books, forthcoming) argues that post–Cold War decisions by Western leaders precipitated the current political crises in many democracies and maps out better paths that are available going forward.
Life and career 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, obtaining a 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 a J.D. in 1987.
Shapiro was appointed to the department of political science as an assistant professor. He was promoted to a full professor in 1992, and named the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in 2000, and Sterling Professor of Political Science in 2005.
Shapiro served as the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center at Yale University from 2004 to 2019. 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.
Scholarly work Early work Shapiro's early work explores existing theoretical frameworks for the study of politics. In books such as The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (1986), Political Criticism (1990) and Democracy’s Place (1996), Shapiro engaged with the liberal, communitarian, and democratic theories which dominated political theory at that time.
The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (1986) examined the changing place of individual rights in liberal political thinking from the seventeenth century on. The book poses the questions: why did particular modes of talking about rights take hold around the English Civil War; how and why have they changed in the ways that they have; and how do they animate and constrain contemporary politics? Shapiro traces liberal political ideology through four major moments, bound to larger economic and social transformations, which he dubs transitional, classical, neo-classical, and Keynesian. Each is explored by reference to an emblematic theorist: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls.
Skeptical of the claims of postmodernists, like Richard Rorty, that our intellectual commitments are contingent and, hence, subject to voluntary endorsement and revision, Shapiro argues that “[m]any of our most fundamental philosophical beliefs are integral to social practices in which we engage unreflectively every day. Those beliefs are required, in nontrivial ways, by those social practices, thus generating an important limitation on how we might reasonably expect beliefs to change.... We need to take much better account of our actual circumstances, how they have come to be what they are, and how they influence our own values and actions, if we are seriously to argue for the pursuit of significantly different values in the contemporary political world.”
Shapiro argues that “the liberal view of rights evolved via processes of adaptive change importantly conditioned by and functional to the evolution of capitalist markets”. Shifts in epistemological frameworks from the 17th to the 20th centuries demonstrate how this kind of adaptation functions. For example, because their epistemologies are not yet plagued by Humean skeptical worries, Hobbes and Locke were able to assume that each of us, as autonomous agents, would opt for a set of rights coextensive with an ‘objectively right’ set of rights, our universal moral ends. After Hume, this assumption is no longer tenable. Shapiro argued that attempts to adapt the way we talk about rights to these new conditions of post-Humean skepticism sometimes resulted in incoherence. Later theorists of rights like Nozick and Rawls try to make up for this by means of a resort to economic assumptions (for Nozick, neo-classical in origin; for Rawls, Keynesian). These provide an apparently objective anchor for subjective aims. Shapiro concludes, “The principal reasons for the tenacity of the liberal conception of individual rights, its negative libertarian view of the substance of rights, its view of individual consent as the legitimate basis of rights, and its essentially pluralist and utilitarian conception of the purposes of rights have, in their various formulations, combined to express a view of politics that is required by and legitimates capitalist market practices.”
In Political Criticism, Shapiro continues to explore the theme of managing modernity’s loosened objectivity. Here, Shapiro engages political frameworks articulated in opposition to Rawls’s neo-Kantian foundationalism, including the anti-foundationalist work of Richard Rorty, J.G.A. Pocock, Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Allan Bloom. These thinkers attempted to ground morality in varieties of convention, tradition, and intersubjectivity. Essentially, they hoped to justify ethical and political claims through context, borrowing the insights of W.V.O. Quine’s epistemological holism. Ultimately, Shapiro criticizes these attempts because they “commit the fallacy of identifying one bad kind of foundational argument with all attempts to provide adequate foundations for our beliefs.” In lieu of these flawed alternatives (foundationalism and contextualism), Shapiro recommends a third way, termed “critical naturalism,” which rests on a commitment to pragmatic realism. Drawing on a modified Aristotelianism, Shapiro constructs a notion of an authentic and integrated life as the goal of politics.
In Democracy’s Place, Shapiro collects a number of essays, which together complete the critique and groundwork for his theory of democracy. Here, he explores the question of how “democratic ways of doing things can be made to fit well with other human values, better to shape the ways in which people pursue their collective goals.” To this end, Shapiro engages a variety of approaches to the study of democratic politics. These include public choice theory, contract theories, neo-Kantian foundationalism, and neo-Schumpeterian interest-based approaches (here, in particular, with respect to South Africa's transition to inclusive democracy). Shapiro's concern is to develop a pragmatic political ethics which takes people and institutions as they are, in imagining what they might become. With that in view, it is in this book that he begins to sketch the outlines of his theory of democratic justice. Taking a cue from Michael Walzer's 'Spheres of Justice' Shapiro argues for a “semi-contextualized” approach to the study and pursuit of justice. It varies over time and over the different realms of human social interaction.
In these early, primarily critical, books, Shapiro explores the relationship between justice and democracy and with the realities of politics and pragmatic means of overcoming injustice. In his next book, Democratic Justice (1999), which some scholars rank among the four or five most important books since Rawls's A Theory of Justice, Shapiro begins the systematic articulation of his mature constructive theory.
Justice and democratic theory In Democratic Justice, Shapiro argues that democracy and justice are often mutually antagonistic ideas, but are nonetheless best pursued together. This is partly for pragmatic political reasons. Justice must be sought democratically to be legitimate in the modern world, he argues, and democracy must be justice-promoting if it is to hold our allegiance over time. But, in addition to these political considerations, Shapiro contends that there is a philosophical link between justice and democracy, rooted in the fact that the most plausible accounts of both ideals involve commitments to the idea of non-domination. Power and hierarchy are endemic to human interaction. This means domination is an ever-present possibility. The challenge is to find ways to limit domination while minimizing interference with legitimate hierarchies and power relations.
This leads Shapiro to his claim that democracy is a subordinate or conditioning good: one that shapes the terms of human interaction without thereby determining its course. Pursuing democratic justice involves deferring, where possible, to what Shapiro describes as insiders' wisdom. By this he means encouraging people to democratize - for themselves - the collective pursuit of the things they value. Imposed solutions are unlikely to be as effective as those designed by insiders, and their legitimacy will always be in question. They are solutions of last resort. When adopted, they are best pursued indirectly and designed to minimize interference with peoples’ pursuit of other human goods.
In the applied chapters of Democratic Justice, Shapiro suggests how this can be done in different phases of the human life cycle, from childhood through the adult worlds of work and domestic life, retirement, old age, and approaching death. Shapiro spells out the implications of his account for debates about authority over children, the law of marriage and divorce, abortion and population control, the workplace, basic incomes guarantees, health insurance, retirement policies, and decisions made by and for the infirm elderly.