About the Department

Michael L. Frazer's research focuses on canonical political philosophy and its relevance for contemporary political theory. After receiving his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, Professor Frazer spent the 2006-7 academic year as a postdoctoral research associate in the Political Theory Project at Brown University.

Professor Frazer's book The Enlightenment of Sympathy is now available from Oxford University Press. It argues that, while Enlightenment rationalists such as Immanuel Kant separated reflective reason from the unreflective mental faculties that must obey its commands, their sentimentalist contemporaries such as David Hume, Adam Smith and J. G. Herder did not. Instead, they saw moral and political reflection as the proper work of the mind as a whole. Without emotion, imagination and the imaginative sharing of emotion then known as "sympathy," we would be incapable of developing the reflectively-refined moral sentiments which are the basis of our commitment to justice and virtue. The Enlightenment of Sympathy reclaims the sentimentalist theory of reflection as a resource for enriching social science, normative theory and political practice today.

Professor Frazer has also published articles on Maimonides, Nietzsche, John Rawls and Leo Strauss in such journals as Political Theory and The Review of Politics.

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