Steven Kautz

Steven Kautz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. He has been at MSU since 2000. Beginning in Fall 2005, he will also be Associate Dean at the Honors College. Before coming to MSU, he taught in the Department of Political Science at Emory University from 1988-1999. Kautz received a B.A. from James Madison College at Michigan State University in 1981 and a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1989.

Kautz is the author of /Liberalism and Community/ (Cornell University Press), a defense of classical liberalism against contemporary communitarian critics of liberalism. He continues to write about the political theory of classical liberalism, including essays on toleration, privacy, the rule of law, and the place of liberal education in a liberal society. He is at work on a book on democratic citizenship and the culture wars. More recently, Kautz has also been working on a book on the political thought of Abraham Lincoln, focusing on problems of democratic statesmanship.

Kautz teaches courses on American political thought, modern political philosophy, liberalism and American constitutional law, and comparative constitutionalism.