Joshua Cherniss

Joshua Cherniss is an Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is a political theorist whose research interests range over the history of political ideas. His work has mostly focused on European and American political thought in the twentieth century, and centers on defenses and critiques of liberalism, questions and conceptions of the ethics of political action, and conceptions of history. Before arriving at Georgetown, Cherniss taught political theory at Smith, Harvard, Oxford, and Yale; his work has been supported by graduate fellowships from the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the Center for European Studies, Harvard; the Institute for Humane Studies; and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton.

Cherniss’ most recent book, Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, Fall 2021) reinterprets debates between enemies and defenders of liberalism in the twentieth century as centered on questions of political ethics, and particularly on the validity or virtuousness of ruthlessness as a political disposition. In it, he reveals how a group of politically-engaged liberal thinkers --Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, and Isaiah Berlin -- responded to the challenge of anti-liberalism by articulating, advocating, and exemplifying a liberal political ''ethos," defined by a particular sensibility, temperament, and set of dispositions and values applied to political conduct. Cherniss is also the author of A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin's Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013), and of articles and book chapters on Berlin, Weber, Niebuhr, and other figures in twentieth-century political thought; and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin (2018). 

Cherniss is currently pursuing further work on Berlin's thought in comparison to that of Berlin’s fellow liberal refugee Judith Shklar, he is currently in the early stages of work on a larger project concerning the interplay between liberal political thought and the theory and practice of political resistance to illiberal regimes.