Prof. Daniel Layman writes and teaches about political philosophy and its history. He is especially interested in liberty, rights, and the conceptual and historical relationships between them.
His current research focuses on the concept of political liberty, both as it figures into early modern political theory and as we ought to understand it today. He is trying to figure out what political liberty is, why it is valuable, and how contemporary puzzles about liberty and its limits developed in the works of modern thinkers like John Locke in the seventeenth century and Henry George in the nineteenth century.
Dan is the author of two books: Locke Among the Radicals: Liberty and Property in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2020) and (with Michael Huemer) Is Political Authority an Illusion? A Debate (Routledge, 2022). He is also Editor-in-Chief at Locke Studies, and he is currently co-editing a new scholarly edition of the political and economic works of Henry George.
Before joining WashU, he was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Davidson College. Before that, He held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Political Theory Project at Brown University.