Post: CUF University Lecturer in Politics, Member of the Centre for the Study of Social Justice, Fellow in Politics and Sociology, Balliol College

Appointed: 1989

College: Balliol College

Office Details: Staircase 10 Room 21 (also room 142 in the Dept.)

Phone No: (01865) 277722/285943 -  Contact electronically

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Introduction:

I am a political theorist with some training in sociology. I read PPE at Balliol College, did an M.Phil in Sociology at Nuffield College, and then returned to Balliol as a Tutorial Fellow. I am also a member of Oxford's Centre for the Study of Social Justice. I have held visiting positions at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Australian National University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Research Activities and Interests:

I have worked on the communitarian critique of liberalism, the relation between public opinion and political philosophy, the normative aspects of class analysis and social mobility, and the morality of school choice. I was a member of the British team participating in the International Social Justice Project, which investigated popular attitudes to social justice in 13 countries. I am currently working, with Harry Brighouse, to develop a liberal egalitarian theory of the family.

October 16 2009, I will be talking about legitimate parental partiality at the University of Edinburgh

October 29-31 2009, I will be giving a paper on 'Equality of Opportunity and the Family' at a conference on Whose Opportunities? A Critique of Equality in Lisbon.

January 21-22 2010 I will be participating in a workshop at the University of Frankfurt on the relation between ideal and non-ideal political theory.

Research News

• Jul 2006, Dr Adam Swift Awarded a Workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions, Read more


• Jul 2005, University Research Development Fund (RDF) Award for Dr Adam Swift, Read more

Teaching Responsibilities:

I mainly teach for the Honours Course in Theory of Politics, though I also offer tutorials in Marxism and Sociological Theory. At graduate level, in 2009-10, I will be co-teaching (with David Leopold) the core class in Political Theory for students doing our M.Phil in Political Theory and running our Graduate Political Theory Workshop.

 

Media Expertise:

I have appeared on TV and radio ('The Moral Maze', 'The Learning Curve'. 'The Westminster Hour') discussing education policy, the morality of school choice, and meritocracy, and have written on those and other issues for a variety of newspapers and magazines.

Publications:

BOOKS

How Not To Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent (Routledge Falmer 2003)

Political Philosophy: A Beginners’ Guide for Students and Politicians (Polity 2001, 2nd edition 2006) [This is translated into Czech and Chinese; Serbian and Japanese translations are in progress]

Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies with Gordon Marshall and Stephen Roberts) (OUP 1997)

Liberals and Communitarians (with Stephen Mulhall) (Blackwell 1992, 2nd edition 1996) [This is translated into Spanish, Korean, and Japanese; Turkish and Albanian translations are in progress]

EDITED COLLECTION

"Social Justice: Ideal Theory, Nonideal Circumstances" (with Ingrid Robeyns), special issue of Social Theory and Practice 34(3) July 2008

ARTICLES

'Educational Equality v Educational Adequacy: A Response to Anderson and Satz' (with Harry Brighouse), Journal of Applied Philosophy 26(2) May 2009

'Legitimate Parental Partiality' (with Harry Brighouse), Philosophy and Public Affairs 37(1) Winter 2009

'Putting Educational Equality in its Place' (with Harry Brighouse), Education Finance and Policy 3(4) Fall 2008

'Comment on Carole Pateman and Charles Mills: Contract and Domination', Journal of Political Ideologies October 2008

'The Value of Philosophy in Nonideal Circumstances', Social Theory and Practice 34(3) July 2008.

'Political Theory, Social Science, and Real Politics' (with Stuart White), in D. Leopold and M. Stears (eds.) Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (OUP 2008).

'Family Values and Social Justice' (with Harry Brighouse), in G. Craig, D. Gordon and T. Burchardt (eds.) Social Justice and Public Policy (Policy Press 2008).

'The End of the Tory War on Single Parents?' (with Harry Brighouse), Public Policy Research November 2007

'Egalitarianism' (with Harry Brighouse), New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2nd ed)

'Parents' Rights and the Value of the Family', (with Harry Brighouse), Ethics October 2006. [Reprinted in A. Bailey et al (eds.) The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought: The Twentieth Century and Beyond (2008)]

'Equality, Priority and Positional Goods' (with Harry Brighouse), Ethics April 2006

’Justice, Luck and the Family’, in S. Bowles, H.Gintis and M.Osborne-Groves (eds.) Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success (Princeton UP 2005)

’Political Philosophy and Politics’ in A. Leftwich (ed.) What Is Politics? (Polity 2004)

The Morality of School Choice Reconsidered: A Response, Theory and Research in Education 2004. [This appears in Catalan in M. Àngel Alegre, X. Rambla and O. Valiente (eds.) L'elecció de centre escolar a Catalunya. Elements per a un debat 2009.]

’The Morality of School Choice’, Theory and Research in Education 2004

'Would Perfect Mobility be Perfect?’, European Sociological Review 2004

'Defending Liberalism in Education Theory' with Harry Brighouse, Journal of Education Policy 2003.

’Rawls and Communitarianism’ (with Stephen Mulhall) in S. Freeman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (CUP 2003)

’Social Justice: Why Does It Matter What The People Think?’ in D. Bell and A. de-Shalit (eds.) Forms of Justice (Rowman and Littlefield 2003)

'Class Analysis from a Normative Perspective', British Journal of Sociology 2000

'The Relation between Social-Scientific and Philosophical Analyses of Distributive Justice', Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1999

'What Is and What Ought to Be: Popular Beliefs about Distributive Justice in 13 Countries' (with Gordon Marshall, Carole Burgoyne, and David Routh), European Sociological Review 1999

'On the Meaning and Measurement of Inequality' (with Gordon Marshall), Acta Sociologica 1999

'Wesolowski, Walzer and the Complex Good of Education' in Melvin L. Kohn et al (eds.) Power and Social Structure, Essays in Honour of Wlodzimierz Wesolowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, 1999)

'Meritocratic Equality of Opportunity: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, or Both?' (with Gordon Marshall), Policy Studies 1997

'Merit and Mobility: A Reply to Peter Saunders' (with Gordon Marshall) Sociology 1996

'The Social Self in Political Theory: The Communitarian Critique of the Liberal Subject' (with Stephen Mulhall), in D. Bakhurst and C. Sypnowich (eds.) The Social Self (Sage, 1995)

'Class, Gender, and the Asymmetry Hypothesis' (with Gordon Marshall, Carole Burgoyne, David Routh and Stephen Roberts), European Sociological Review 1995

'The Sociology of Complex Equality', in D. Miller and M. Walzer (eds.) Pluralism, Justice and Equality (OUP 1995)

'Social Class and Social Justice' (with Gordon Marshall), British Journal of Sociology 1993 and in G. Marshall Repositioning Class: Social Inequality in Industrial Societies (Sage, 1997)

WORK IN PROGRESS

Family Values (with Harry Brighouse), (Princeton University Press, hoping for 2010).

'Do comprehensive schools reduce social mobility?' (with Vikki Boliver)