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: Reflective Sentimentalism in the Eighteenth Century and Today is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. It argues that, although the eighteenth century is still known as "the age of reason," it was actually an era in which many philosophers placed equal emphasis on feeling. While Enlightenment rationalists such as Immanuel Kant seperated reflective reason from the unreflective mental facutlies which 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 Enlightement of Sympathy seeks to reclaim 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.

Papers: