Sharon Krause works on a range of topics in political theory including classical and contemporary liberalism; freedom and political agency; power, social inequality, and emancipatory politics; passions and politics; gender and politics; eco-politics; and public deliberation.

Eco-Emancipation (Princeton University Press, 2023) explores environmental problems through the lens of intersecting forms of domination. Environmental domination includes the political, economic, and cultural forces through which human beings (1) dominate nature, understood as Earth’s more-than-human parts; and (2) are themselves dominated in terms of both [a] the special burdens placed on poor and marginalized people with respect to environmental harms, and [b] the ways that virtually all of us are entrapped and exploited, often with our participation, by forces that degrade the Earth for profit and power. Whoever we are and whether we know it or not, we are in need of ecological emancipation – meaning the liberation of the Earth from human domination, and the liberation of human beings from a way of life that is at once exploitative and exploited, complicit and entrapped. The book helps us grasp the multiple, intersecting forms of domination that drive our current environmental problems and make them so difficult to solve – dynamics that many of us fail to see but that plague virtually every aspect of modern life today. And it identifies alternative institutional forms, social practices, and cultural norms that would help free people and nature from environmental domination, creating new kinds of more-than-human political community and establishing a politics of emancipation for people and the Earth.

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty (University of Chicago Press, 2015), investigates the informal and often unintentional dynamics (such as implicit bias and cultural stigma) that undermine freedom in systematic ways for members of minority groups in ostensibly free societies such as the United States. Freedom is vulnerable to these dynamics because human agency is an intersubjective, non-sovereign experience that eludes personal control and extends beyond intentional choice. At the same time, agency is not reducible to socially constructed identities or prevailing relations of power; indeed, the agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failures of freedom suffered by those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibilities for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings experiences of those who are marginalized in American society today to the center of political theory and the study of freedom, with a special focus on inequalities of race, gender, and sexual orientation. It shows that none of the prevailing models of political freedom today is adequate once the non-sovereignty of human agency is acknowledged, and it defends a new pluralism of freedom. The book fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism, and it advances our understanding of human action, personal responsibility, resistance to oppression, and the meaning of liberty.

Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation (Princeton University Press, 2008), examines the relationship between reason and passion within political judgment and public deliberation. Must we put passions aside when we deliberate about justice? Can we do so? The dominant views of deliberation rightly emphasize the importance of impartiality as a cornerstone of fair decision-making, but they wrongly assume that impartiality means being disengaged and passionless. Civil Passions argues that moral and political deliberation necessarily incorporate passions, even as it insists on the value of impartiality. Drawing on resources ranging from Hume's theory of moral sentiment to recent findings in neuroscience, the book offers a systematic account of how passions can generate an impartial standpoint for deliberating about justice. By illuminating how impartiality feels, Civil Passions offers not only a truer account of how we deliberate about justice but one that promises to engage citizens more effectively in acting for justice.

Liberalism with Honor (Harvard University Press, 2002), explores the sources of spirited political action in modern liberal democracies. Why do men and women sometimes risk their necks to defend their liberties? What motivates principled opposition to the abuse of power? Liberalism with Honor shows the sense of honor to be an important source of such action. Although often dismissed as a vestige of old world aristocracy, honor still matters for  democratic societies today and is an important support for individual freedom. It combines self-concern with principled higher purposes, and so challenges the disabling dichotomy between self-interest and self-sacrifice that currently pervades both political theory and American public life. Moreover, while most of the time liberal democracy can get by with good citizens, occasionally it needs great ones -- men and women of unusual courage and extraordinary ambition who distinguish themselves by rising when others will not to the spirited defense of liberty.

 

Clay Morgan Award for best book in environmental political theory, awarded by the Western Political Science Association, 2024.

Spitz Prize for the best book on liberal or democratic theory, awarded by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought for Civil Passions , 2010.

Alexander George Book Award for the best book published in the field of political psychology, awarded by the International Society of Political Psychology for Civil Passions , 2009.

Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates, Harvard University, 2003

Donovan Prize for the best faculty paper at the 2001 Annual Meeting, New England Political Science Association, 2001
 

American Political Science Association
Conference for the Study of Political Thought

Professor Krause teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the history of political thought and in contemporary political theory, including topics such as ancient and modern political thought; ecology and politics; freedom, power, and political action; theories of rights; gender and politics; liberalism and its critics; and democratic theory.