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
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).