Philip Green (born October 6, 1932) is an American political theorist and Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus of Smith College in Northampton, MA. An outspoken public intellectual, he is best known for his critiques of American liberal pluralism, beginning with a critique of American Cold War strategic policy based on massive nuclear deterrence and first-strike capability, to numerous recent writings about the retreat of representative democracy in the United States. His recent book, American Democracy: Selected Essays on Theory, Practice and Critique (2014), contains a compilation of many of those essays.

Education

Green attended Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA, graduating with a BA in History (Magna cum laude) in 1954. He received a Master's in Public Administration from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in Princeton, NY (1961), as well as a PhD in Politics at Princeton (1965).

Career

Green taught political theory in the Government Department at Smith College from 1964–1998, Early in his career, he taught at Princeton University and Haverford College.

In addition to his academic work, he has been a frequent contributor to public policy journals and magazines on topics ranging from affirmative action to anti-Semitism. He has served on the editorial board of The Nation since 1978, He was co-chair of the American Writer's Congress in New York in 1981, participated frequently in the Socialist Scholars Conference and its successor, the Left Forum. He is a founding member of the Caucus for a New Political Science within the American Political Science Association (APSA), and has appeared on numerous additional APSA panels.

Views

In his first book, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence (1966), Green criticized the allegedly scientific approach to the nuclear arms race advanced by strategic policy scholars and policymakers of the time. Their reliance on scientific solutions to nuclear escalation was, he argued, profoundly unscientific and inattentive to the deeper moral and political dimensions of the possibility of nuclear warfare. In a further development of that criticism in "Science, Government, and the Case of Rand: A Singular Pluralism" (World Politics 1968, reprinted in American Democracy, ch. 2), to arguing in favor of open borders (American Democracy, ch. 7). and that representative democracy and modern capitalism—which deepens social inequalities and thus undermines the foundations of political equality—are fundamentally incompatible (Equality and Democracy, 1999). Pointing out that vibrant democracy must be continuously open to mass protest movements (American Democracy, ch. 11), and the unleashing of gigantic concentrations of wealth, as well as the tendency to institutionalize and contain democracy movements endemic in contemporary American politics (American Democracy, ch. 9).

  • Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio (1992)
  • Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Recipient, "Political Equality: Toward the Ideal of a Self-Governing Community" (1982)
  • Visiting Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton University (1981–1982)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (1976–77)

Personal

Green is married to Dorothy Green, with whom he lives in New York City. He has two children, Laura Green, an English professor and Department Chair at Northeastern University, and Robert Green, a film and internet producer.

His memoir, Taking Sides: a Memoir in Stories, is a nostalgic and ironic account of his personal, political, and intellectual development.

Selected works

Books

  • Green, Philip. (1966). Deadly Logic: The Theory of Deterrence. New York: Schocken Books.
  • Green, Philip. (1981). The Pursuit of Inequality. New York: Pantheon Books.
  • Green, Philip. (1985). Retrieving Democracy. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
  • Green, Philip. (1997). Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
  • Green, Philip. (1999). Equality and Democracy. New York: The New Press.
  • Green, Philip. (2005). Primetime Politics: The Truth about Conservative Lies, Corporate Culture, and Television Culture. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
  • Green, Philip. (2014). American Democracy: Selected Essays on Theory, Practice, and Critique. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Green, Philip. (2015). Taking Sides: A Memoir in Stories. Amherst, MA: Levellers Press.

Edited books

  • Green, Philip and Michael Walzer, eds. (1969) The Political Imagination in Literature: A Reader. New York: The Free Press.
  • Green, Philip and Sanford Levinson, eds. (1970) Power and Community: Dissenting Essays in Political Science. New York: Pantheon Press.
  • Green, Philip, ed. (1993, 2d ed. 1999) Democracy. New Jersey: Humanities Press.
  • Green, Philip and Robert Benewick, eds. (1992, 2d ed. 1998) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Political Thinkers. New York: Routledge Press.

References