Josiah Ober

About

Josiah Ober, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is also the Markos & Eleni Kounalakis Chair in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis in the School of Humanities and Sciences, professor of political science and classics, and professor of philosophy (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is the founder and currently the faculty director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, a joint project of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences and Hoover’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions.

Ober’s scholarship focuses on historical institutionalism and political theory, especially democratic theory and the contemporary relevance of the political thought and practice of the ancient Greek world. He is the author of several books, including The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (with Brook Manville, 2023), The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (2022), Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism (2017), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015). He has also published about 100 articles and chapters, including recent articles in American Political Science Review, Philosophical Studies, Polis, Public Choice, Critical Review, and Transactions of the American Philological Association. Work in progress focuses on the relevance of Aristotelian ethics for the development and regulation of artificial intelligence.

The Stanford Civics Initiative unites participants in the belief that US universities have a responsibility to offer students an education that will promote their flourishing as human beings, their judgment as moral agents, and their participation in society as democratic citizens.

Ober joined the Stanford faculty in 2006, after previously teaching at Princeton and Montana State Universities. He has served as chairman of Princeton’s Classics Department and of Stanford’s Political Science Department. Ober holds a BA in history from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in history from the University of Michigan.