Ben Berger
Associate Professor
Executive Director, Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility
Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility
Political Science
Contact
Associate Professor of Political Science Ben Berger is the executive director of the College's Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. In this role, he has focused the Center's mission on connecting the curriculum with the community. For his community-based learning pedagogy and research, he was selected by the civic education consortium Project Pericles as one of 26 Periclean Faculty Leaders nationwide.
Berger studies the intersection between normative political theory and empirical political science. His book, Attention Deficit Democracy: The Paradox of Civic Engagement (Princeton University Press) won the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award for the best social philosophy book published in 2011. It was also named one of the top 10 nonfiction books of 2011 by Zocalo Public Square, a public affairs think tank. Current research projects include a book on civic education and another on moral engagement and disengagement, which spans the fields of political philosophy, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. He has also published work on Alexis de Tocqueville, Hannah Arendt, political participation, and civic education, and is a frequent guest on the nationally syndicated NPR program "Radio Times."
Berger received his A.B. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
