Kenneth "Ken" Jowitt
is an American political scientist. He is the Pres and Maurine Hotchkis Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, positions he has held since 2001 and 1995 respectively.
Biography
Jowitt was born and raised in Ossining, New York, approximately thirty miles north of New York City. After graduating from Columbia University in 1962, Jowitt pursued post-graduate and doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his Master's in 1963 and his doctorate in 1970. Jowitt also spent some of his post-graduate life inRomania during the Ceauşescu regime, where he studied the political and cultural dynamics of post-Stalinist Communist Europe.
Professional Career
He has been a professor at UC-Berkeley since 1968. Among other honors and forms of recognition, he won the University Distinguished Teaching Award in 1983, and has been the recipient of two Stanford Hoover fellowships. From 1983 to 1986 he was dean of undergraduate studies at his alma mater, the University of California-Berkeley.
Focusing on social theory and comparative politics, Jowitt specializes in the study of post-Stalinist Eastern Europe and Communist studies. He has published numerous essays, articles, books, and scholarly theses related to these and other Cold War and post-Cold War era subjects.
One of Jowitt's more notable scholarly works is New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, a collection of essays written between 1974 and 1990 that focuses on the nature of Communist regimes. The last three essays argue against a popular early 1990s philosophy that espoused Western triumphalism, and the essays dispute the "end of history" theory propounded at the time by former neoconservative scholar Francis Fukayama.
He also contributed an essay, entitled "In Praise of the Ordinary: An Essay on Democracy," to Adam Michnik's anthology, Letters from Freedom.
Click To Order Book
