Jean Bethke Elshtain
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School
Regularly named as one of America's foremost public intellectuals, Jean Bethke Elshtain has been a Guggenheim Fellow; a Fellow at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation; holder of the Maguire Chair in Ethics at the Library of Congress; and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, where she also served on the Board of Trustees. In 2012 she will serve as the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. She has been a Phi Beta Kappa Lecture. In 2002 she received the Goodnow Award, the highest award bestowed by the American Political Science Association for distinguished service to the profession. She is a member of the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress, and the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2008 she was appointed to the President's Council on Bioethics. In 2006, she delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, joining such previous Gifford Lecturers as William James, Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. In 2011 she was honored with the Democracy Service Award, previously given to the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, among others.
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, Harvard University
Michael Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he teaches political philosophy. He has been described as “perhaps the most prominent college professor in America,” “the most relevant living philosopher,” a “rock-star moralist,” and “the most famous teacher of philosophy in the world.”
His writings have been translated into 21 languages. His legendary course “Justice,” is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was named the “most influential foreign figure of the year.” (China Newsweek)
Sandel’s new book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, what should be the role of money and markets in our society?
Critics have called it “a brilliant, indispensable book on the relationship between morality and economics,” and “one of the most important exercises in public philosophy in many years.”
Like his previous book, Justice, an international best seller, What Money Can’t Buy has generated interest around the world, including in London, where 2,000 people packed St. Paul’s Cathedral for his recent book tour, and in Seoul, Korea, where 14,000 people filled an outdoor stadium to hear him speak.