Department of Government

Richard Boyd is Associate Professor of Government. His research interests include the intellectual history of liberalism, civil society and pluralism, economic and sociological theory, and the theory and practice of immigration and citizenship policies in the United States. He is author of Uncivil Society: The Perils of Pluralism and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Lexington/ Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) and editor (with Ewa Atanassow) of Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy (Cambridge, forthcoming 2011). He has published more than thirty journal articles and book chapters on such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, James Madison, Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J. S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Stendhal, Mrs. Frances Trollope, Joseph Mazzini, Michael Oakeshott, F. A. Hayek, and Frank H. Knight. Before coming to Georgetown in 2007, Boyd taught at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Deep Springs College. He is currently the faculty director of the Program in Social and Political Thought.