Gianna Englert is Associate Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center. She previously taught at Southern Methodist University and has held visiting research fellowships at Brown University’s Political Theory Project and its Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Her research is in the history of political thought, liberalism (French and Anglo-American), democracy, citizenship, and the development of ‘the social question’. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in History of Political Thought, Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, Polity, The Political Science Reviewer, The Review of Politics, and The Tocqueville Review. Her book, Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford University Press, 2024) explores French liberals’ responses to the advance of democratic equality.
Gianna is currently working on two projects. The first is a book manuscript titled The Social Question in the Age of Equality, a study of European liberals’ political and economic responses to “the social question,” or the political, social, and material problems posed by industrialization in the nineteenth century. Her second line of research is a series of articles on interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville’s work from figures on the political and academic left in the twentieth century.
“Georges Sorel’s Tocqueville” (with Richard Boyd), History of Political Thought. Forthcoming, Summer 2024.
“Democracy in America, America in France: Duvergier de Hauranne on Liberty and Unity,” The Political Science Reviewer, 47.2 (2024): 233–56.
“Tocqueville’s Politics of Grandeur,” Political Theory, 50.3 (2022): 477-503.
“‘Not more democratic, but more moral’: Tocqueville on the Suffrage in America and France,” The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville, 42.2 (2021): 105-20.
“Usurpation and ‘The Social’ in Benjamin Constant’s Commentaire,” Modern Intellectual History, 17.1 (2020): 55-84.
“Despotic or Dynamic? Hayek on Democracy and Expertise” in Philosophy, Politics, and Austrian Economics, eds. D’Amico and Martin, (Emerald, 2020), 67–83.
“‘The Idea of Rights’: Tocqueville on the Social Question,” The Review of Politics, 79.4 (2017): 649-74.
“Liberty and Industry: John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and the Economic Foundations of Political Membership,” Polity, 48.4 (2016): 551-579.
