Yiftah Elazar
I am a political theorist, whose work lies in the intersection between political science, intellectual history, and philosophy. My research currently revolves around the concept of democratic participation or action – its history, meaning, value, and future prospects. I am particularly interested in the historical and conceptual connections between modern conceptions of democracy and the republican or neoclassical tradition of thought on liberty and government.
I am currently working on a book manuscript, based on my PhD Dissertation, which engages these issues by looking at an intellectual debate that took place in Britain while the American Revolution was raging across the Atlantic. More details on this project below. Future projects include a contextual history of the reinvention of democracy in the late eighteenth century, and an essay on the future of participatory democracy.
I received my PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 2012, and am currently a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I hold an MA in Political Science, and a BA in Philosophy and in the Amirim Program for Excellence in the Humanities, both received magna cum laude from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I have received several fellowships and awards, including an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the year 2010-2011, a 2009-2010 Graduate Prize Fellowship at the University Center of Human Values at Princeton University, and a 2005-2007 Fulbright Grant for Doctoral Studies in the United States.
Prior to my doctoral studies, I worked as a Supreme Court Correspondent and news editor in some of Israel’s leading media outlets, and contributed to the Israel Democracy Institute's journal for media review. I have a research and teaching interest in the role of the media in modern democracy.
Book Project
My book will be the first full-length account of an important and largely neglected political and philosophical debate that took place in Britain between the American and the French revolutions, and especially in 1776-1780. The debate was stirred by the publication of a bestselling and controversial defense of the American Revolution, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), written by the Dissenting minister, moral philosopher, and political economist Richard Price.
Price is sometimes remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the minister whose enthusiastic sermon in support of the French Revolution provoked Edmund Burke into writing the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). But the origins of the famous controversy on the French Revolution can be traced back to the American Revolution, when Burke was one of dozens of critics who responded to Price’s Observations. Many of them were provoked by the democratic theory of liberty and government developed by Price in defense of the colonists, and they responded by offering their own theories on the nature of civil liberty and free government, and their relation to democratic participation.
Arguably, the body of texts produced in this exchange is one of the most important resources in the history of reflection on some of the fundamental questions of political philosophy: what does it mean for an individual to enjoy civil or political liberty? How is individual freedom related to the form of political institutions, and is it necessarily related to the right and ability to participate in government? What does it mean for individuals and groups to be politically self-governing, and what is the value of self-government? It was in the 1776 Liberty Debate that Jeremy Bentham first developed the argument, famously employed by Isaiah Berlin, that liberty is a “negative” idea; it was in this debate that Price first used the term “self-government,” borrowed from moral psychology, in a political sense.
The Price Debate should be of particular interest to scholars of democratic thought, as it provides exceptional insight into the rise of democratic ideas at the end of the eighteenth century as well as the reaction to it. I argue that the exchange between Price and his critics forms part of that surprisingly under-researched process in which representative government came to be re-imagined and re-described as democracy.
Moreover, the Price Debate should be of interest to scholars interested in the extensive research produced in the past few decades on the neoclassical or republican tradition. There is controversy in the scholarly literature on the relation between the idea of democracy and the conception of freedom as non-domination or independence, as reconstructed by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. The challenge of reconciling non-domination and democratic participation is one of the guiding themes of my current research, and my book project engages it by working through the historical material found in the Price Debate.
