Alan Kahan
2021-23 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy
Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization

Alan S. Kahan was the visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy for the 2021-22 academic year and is returning for the 2022-23 fall term . Kahan, a historian, political theorist and author, is professor of British Civilization at the Université de Paris-Saclay. Kahan is the author of Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford, 1992); Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: the Political Culture of Limited SuffrageAlexis de Tocqueville Palgrave, 2003)Mind vs. Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism (Transaction, 2010, Routledge 2017); and Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion (Oxford, 2015). He is also the translator of Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (Chicago, 2 vols. 1998, 2001) and Benjamin Constant’s Commentary on Filangieri's Works (Liberty Fund, 2015). He is currently working on Liberalism – An Incomplete History, which will be published by Princeton University Press. Kahan has been living in France since 2007. Previously he taught at Florida International University in Miami. He received his PhD in history from The University of Chicago in 1987. View Kahan's 2020 CU Boulder lecture, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion.