DIRECTOR

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Aishwary Kumar is Professor of History of Political Thought and Institutions and Director of The Democracy Institute at Cal Poly Pomona, where he chairs The GIFT Project and the American Institutions Common Core. He is also Director of Ahimsa Center for Law & Nonviolence.

 

Kumar received his PhD. in Political Thought from the University of Cambridge and was elected Rouse Ball Fellow in Intellectual History at Trinity College, Cambridge. He holds a BA from University of Delhi, and an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Kumar began as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in 2007, where he taught for 12 years and served as Director of the Majors Program in History, Philosophy and the Arts (2012-2016). He has held appointments, among other institutions, in History of Consciousness at UC-Santa Cruz and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and delivered invited lectures on government and constitutionalism at universities around the world including UC-Berkeley, Oxford, Hyderabad, Berlin, Vienna, and Harvard Law.

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Kumar is an intellectual historian and political philosopher primarily concerned with democratic theory, ideals, and institutions. His work focuses on the global lineages of modern political thought and the moral and constitutional life of the liberal democratic experiment. His research and teaching are shaped by questions of inequality and violence and of the future of human form and freedom in the face of rapid technological mutation. For a beginning, see his first book Radical Equality, published by Stanford University Press in 2015. 

 

Two distinct sets of philosophical preoccupations shape Kumar's thinking and writing. The first concerns the moral psychological questions raised by the history of liberalism and law and shaped by the vicissitudes of citizenship and rights in the Global South, especially refracted through the figure of the "South", the "American South" in particular. The second engages the relationship between epistemology and politics; that is, the nature of truth, identity, and faith as they are transformed by human aspirations, conflict, and disappointments.

 

Kumar believes the postwar university is a singular site where these ideas are now being stress-tested and which now demand the work of sustained reinvention. His teaching and research are animated by the belief that the modern university must combine specialized research of greatest rigor with a commitment to widest possible access to the defining ideas that are shaping our century. Along these vectors, his writings on liberalism and cruelty, technology and planetary neglect, the coming struggle over constitutions and civil rights, and the structure of political violence and democratic distrust in the neoliberal world have appeared widely in both print and digital media. ​

 

In Fall 2025, Kumar returns to Stanford University as Resident Fellow of Wilbur Hall to strengthen his engagement with undergraduate education and to deepen his understanding of how we might regenerate liberal education in the face of contemporary and future challenges. ​He has also served as The Teagle Foundation Fellow of the National Forum for the Future of Liberal Education.

 

You can hear Aishwary on his podcast Mutant: Dialogues at the End of Democracy (2023-2025), now in preparation as a two-volume study under the title After Freedom: Moral Lessons on Justice from the Edges of Democracy.