David Johnston (Ph.D., Princeton, 1981), was Assistant Professor at Yale before coming to Columbia in 1986. A political theorist, he specializes in liberal political philosophy and in politcal thought in the liberal tradition from the seventeenth century to the present. He has been chair or co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Political and Social Thought since 1989, was President of the New York Political Science Association in 1993-94, and is currently Chair of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT). His principal publications included The Idea of a Liberal Theory (Princeton University Press, 1994), The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton University Press, 1986), and, as editor, Equality (Hackett, 2000) and (with Richard Flathman) Leviathan: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton, 1997). He is currently working on A Brief History of Justice and he has research interests in the concept of equality and in private property conceived as a political institution.