Harvard PhD and Johns Hopkins Research Fellow, Jacob Roundtree, on Building a Civic Discourse Network and Redeeming Our Democracy

Jacob Roundtree is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Economy and Society within the SNF Agora Institute, an academic and public forum at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). The program is fully integrated into the university and operates as a multi-disciplinary center where JHU faculty, students, and researchers study and work to strengthen global democracy and civic engagement. A political theorist by training, now writing on political epistemology, enlightened democratic constitutionalism, and modern intellectual history, Roundtree is currently building the Civic Discourse Network, which seeks to unite similar university extension centers across America in one continuous dialogue and shared civic mission. Jacob received his PhD in political theory from Harvard in 2023, and a BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from Colby College in 2010.  His dissertation is a critical genealogy of the social theories of Hegel and Marx that raises the question of whether freedom is possible in the modern world given the complexity of capitalism and the modern nation-state. Roundtree is especially concerned with the contemporary problems of public ignorance, ideology, propaganda, elite dogmatism, and political polarization. He views these phenomena as the great obstacles to achieving a rational democratic society. Roundtree’s pedagogical approach is designed to help students and citizens combat the epistemic pathologies of present–day politics. He has deployed this approach in a range of courses dealing with the politics of truth, Marxism, German Idealism, Conservatism, race and politics, and the politics of technology. His current book project, "Crisis and Redemption-The Theory of American Democracy," diagnoses the essential source of our problems today as stemming from our collective subordination to oligarchic systems of power and proposes enlightened democratic constitutionalism as a new framework for ordering society that can lead us out of the morass in which we presently find ourselves.