Department of Politics at Princeton University

Alex Levitov is completing his Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University, where he is a participant in the Program in Political Philosophy and a graduate fellow with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.  He received a B.A. (high honors) in Social Studies from Wesleyan University in 2007 and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton in 2009.  From 2010-11, he was a Graduate Prize Fellow at Princeton's University Center for Human Values.  This fall, he will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford.

His dissertation, "Legitimacy as Self-Determination," addresses the problem of legitimate political authority as it concerns both the subjects of a juridical state and the outside agents of the international political order.  This project argues that both the domestic and international aspects of a state's right to rule should be understood to derive from its role in enabling the collective self-determination of its members.  More generally, Alex's research interests include democratic theory, modern social and political thought, global justice and human rights, and constitutional theory and interpretation.