Ian Shapiro

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. Provided by Wikipedia