Michael Rosen is the Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University.

He has worked on a wide variety of topics in philosophy, social theory, and the history of ideas, but is particularly known for his work on 19 th  and 20 th  century European philosophy and contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. He teaches courses on German Idealism, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Rawls, and on various topics in contemporary political philosophy.

After taking his undergraduate degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, he did graduate work at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt before returning to Oxford where he wrote his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Charles Taylor.

He was a Special Fellow in Politics at Merton College, Oxford and a Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London before becoming Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1990. He came to Harvard in 2006.

Rosen is the author of numerous articles and several books: Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1982); On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology (Harvard University Press, 1996), and Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Harvard University Press, 2012). He translated Kant’s Opus Postumum (with Eckart Förster) for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (1993). He edited Political Thought: An Oxford Reader (with Jonathan Wolff, 1999) and The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (with Brian Leiter, 2007).

He has been Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor at Oxford and is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Humboldt- Universität, Berlin.

His most recent book is The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel and the Passage from Heaven to History (Harvard University Press, 2022).

Professor Rosen is on leave during the academic year 2022-23, but will return in Spring '23 to teach GOV 2093, Political Theory Field Seminar.