Avshalom Schwartz

Avshalom Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of political science at Southern Methodist University studying political theory. His research focuses on the role of imagination in politics, the conceptual history of the imagination, and questions of legitimacy and political stability in classical and early modern political thought.

His first book manuscript, The Invention of Imagination, offers a new account of the earliest origins of the concept of “imagination” in archaic and classical Greece and explores its potential roles in democratic politics. It is motivated by the current global crisis of liberal democracy and the growing gaps between how democratic citizens view, interpret, and understand their social and political world. It argues that this phenomenon—often described today in terms of “deep disagreement,” “belief polarization,” or “epistemic fragmentation”—can be traced back to the earliest days of Western philosophy and that it is inextricably tied to the discovery or invention of the concept of imagination. The imagination was “invented” within an environment of radical epistemic uncertainty and as part of an attempt to capture and explain how and why different individuals come to perceive the world in different ways. Recovering this untold history of imagination and situating it within the historical context of the ancient Athenian democracy can inform our search for democratic remedies to our own crisis of epistemic fragmentation, disagreement, and polarization.

He is also interested in the role of imagination in the history of philosophy, especially in classical, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern scientific and political thought. His work in this area has focused on Hobbes’s theory of the imagination, its historical and intellectual context, and its relationship to his political thought.

His work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, History of Political Thought, and History of European Ideas, among others. 

He is a former Gerald J. Lieberman fellow, one of Stanford University’s highest distinctions for doctoral students. He was also a Ric Weiland Graduate Fellow and held graduate fellowships with Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society and the Stanford Basic Income Lab. In 2020, He received an M.A. in classics from Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, He received a B.A. in political science and economics and an M.A. in political science from Tel Aviv University, both Summa cum Laude.