The Freedom Center is excited to welcome Dr. Adrian Blau as a visiting fellow during fall 2022.
Professor Adrian Blau is a Professor of Politics in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He works on the following areas:
- democratic theory and practice, including deliberative democracy;
- history of political thought, especially the work of Thomas Hobbes;
- corruption;
- rationality, irrationality, and post-truth politics;
- the methodology of political theory and history of political thought, as well as philosophy of social science more generally.
Blau has published 10 journal articles and book chapters on the methodology of history of political thought. He edited the first ever textbook on political theory methods: Methods in Analytical Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is currently working on the methodology of thought experiments in political philosophy. Blau has published several articles and chapters on Hobbes’s political theory, and is writing a book called Hobbes’s Failed Science of Politics and Ethics. His PhD research was on normative aspects of electoral systems and he still works and publishes on democratic theory and practice. Cross-cutting much of the above is a focus on rationality and irrationality, including the work of Jürgen Habermas. Adrian Blau’s work often brings together ideas from political theory and political science. He is on the editorial board of two journals: Political Studies Review and Hobbes Studies.
