Thomas L. Pangle APSA Candidate Statement

Career and Accomplishments

Thomas L. Pangle holds the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He previously held a University Professorship in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He has also taught at Yale, Dartmouth, the U. of Chicago, and the EHESS in Paris. He received his BA in Government from Cornell, and PhD from the University of Chicago.

His research is in normative political theory. His publications include Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism (1973); The Laws of Plato (1980); The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (1988); The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Age (1992); The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders, co-authored with Lorraine Smith Pangle (1993); Justice Among Nations, co-authored with Peter Ahrensdorf (1999); Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (2003) and Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (2006). He is political theory editor of The Encyclopedia of Democracy (Congressional Quarterly, 1995)

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has won Guggenheim, Isaac Waltam Killam, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, SSHRC, and four NEH fellowships.

He delivered the Heisenberg Memorial Lecture at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 2007, and was awarded the Robert Foster Cherry Great Teacher Prize by Baylor U. in 1992.

He has chaired the Leo Strauss Dissertation Award Committee, served on the Council of the New England Pol. Sci. Assn., and is at present a member of the Research Council of the National Endowment for Democracy, of the Council of the Society for the Study of Greek Political Thought, and of the editorial Boards of Political Research Quarterly and Polis, as well as being General Editor of the Agora Editions at Cornell U. Press.

Statement of Views

If elected, I would be concerned to contribute to further progress in: fostering a wider diversity, methodological and substantive, in our discipline; accelerating our outreach to and benefit from other disciplines; increasing integration of the APSA with foreign associations and association meetings abroad; and forging closer coordination of the APSA with U. S. regional associations. Given our strong financial condition, and the fact that our membership has vastly increased in the last two generations while the number of pages available for publication in our association journals has not kept anywhere near proportionate pace, I would like to explore possibilities for expanding somewhat the size, or number of pages available, in our journals.