Dennis C. Rasmussen
Professor, Political Science
Degree
Ph.D., Duke University, 2005
Specialties
Political theory, history of political thought
Courses
Political
Theory
Capitalism,
For and Against
Foundations
of American Political Thought
The Creation of the U.S. Constitution
Biography
Dennis C. Rasmussen is a political theorist
whose research focuses primarily on the Enlightenment, the American founding,
and the virtues and shortcomings of liberal democracy and market
capitalism. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2005 and his B.A.
from Michigan State University’s James Madison College in 2000, and he has
also held positions at Tufts University, the University of Houston, Brown
University, and Bowdoin College. He is the author of Fears of a
Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders, which is
forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2021; The
Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That
Shaped Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2017), which
was shortlisted for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and named a best book of the
year by The Guardian, Bloomberg, Project
Syndicate, Australian Book Review, and Five Books; The
Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith,
Montesquieu, and Voltaire (Cambridge University Press, 2014);
and The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to
Rousseau (Penn State University Press, 2008), which received an
honorable mention for the Delba Winthrop Award. He is also the editor of Adam Smith and the Death
of David Hume: The “Letter to Strahan” and Related Texts (Lexington,
2018) and a co-editor of Adam
Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics (Edinburgh
University Press, 2018).