David Johnston is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in the City of New York. He has formerly served as the Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization and as the Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy at Columbia. He also served from 2003-2011 as Director and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia. He is the author of A Brief History of Justice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, with additional editions and translations into Arabic, Korean, and Japanese), The Idea of a Liberal Theory (Princeton, 1994), and The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, 1986) as well as co-editor, with Richard Flathman, of Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Norton Critical Edition (1997) and editor of Equality (Hackett, 2000). He served as Chair of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought from 2001-2007 and as President of the New York State Political Science Association in 1993-94.
