Why We Need the Word Evil - Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Bethke Elshtain
1.58
1 October 2009
20 August 2025
"If we lose our ability to name it, we've lost a great deal" Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political philosopher, is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at The University of Chicago. She grew up in the small village of Timnath, Colorado (population 185). She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Politics in 1973. She joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts/Amherst where she taught from 1973 to 1988. She joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1988 as the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the history of that institution. She was appointed to her current position at the University of Chicago in 1995. She has been a visiting professor at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University. She is the recipient of nine honorary degrees. Professor Elshtain was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. She has published 13 books among them, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (1981); Women and War (1987); Just War Theory (1991); Democracy on Trial (1993), a CBC Massey Lecture ; Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003); Sovereignty: God, State, Self (2008) (Recorded on November 05, 2008)
