Catherine and Michael Zuckert Book Award

Honoring a significant work in the field of political theory.

The Catherine and Michael Zuckert Book Award is awarded biennially to a scholar of the history of political thought who has published a book in the previous two years which exhibits the scholarly rigor, breadth of knowledge, attentiveness to philosophical argument, and sensitivity to literary character that typifies the work of Catherine and Michael Zuckert.

It is intended to honor a significant work in the field of political theory, one that offers a rich understanding of the history of thought, exhibits a supple analysis of historical texts, and undertakes genuinely philosophic inquiry. Its purpose is to promote such study in the history of political thought, and to reward scholarship that eschews academic and ideological fashions and instead confronts enduring political questions.

The award comes with a $2000 prize.

2025 Winner

Gianna Englert, Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford University Press)

Judges’ note:

Gianna Englert’s Democracy Tamed is both original and timely.  It is especially valuable for its uncovering of the centrality of the concept of “political capacity” to nineteenth-century French liberalism, and its presentation of the ways thinkers within this tradition used the concept of political capacity to resist arguments for universal suffrage.  In so doing, Englert not only sheds new light on the thought of, among others, Constant and Guizot and Tocqueville, but also invites reflection on liberalism’s origins and its status today.  The prize committee is thus pleased to award AHPT’s inaugural Catherine and Michael Zuckert Award to a book that so evidently exhibits the virtues characteristic of the work of the scholars for whom this prize is named: careful analysis of texts, probing engagement with the extant scholarship, and a deep appreciation of fundamental political questions.

2025 Honorable Mention

Geneviève Rousselière, Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge University Press)

Judges’ note:

Geneviève Rousselière’s Sharing Freedom casts new light on early modern republicanism.  Departing from a time-honored tradition of focusing on Italian and English and American republican thinkers, Sharing Freedom pivots to eighteenth-century France to examine thinkers from Montesquieu and Rousseau to Robespierre and Grouchy.  The result is a rethinking of republicanism that brings to the fore the tension between republican’s egalitarian and emancipatory ambitions and the exclusionary tendencies inherent in certain of its eighteenth-century expressions.  For this reason it will be of interest both to historians of republican political thought and to contemporary theorists, and we are pleased to be able to recognize it as an Honorable Mention for the AHPT Zuckert Book Prize.

Committee

  • Michelle T. Clarke

    Associate Professor of Government

    Dartmouth College

  • Ryan Hanley

    Professor of Political Science
    Boston College

  • Alan S. Kahan

    Professor of British Civilization

    Université de Paris-Saclay