An American by birth and Hoosier by upbringing, Bob Goodin took his D.Phil. in Politics at Oxford in 1975. He spent a decade teaching government at the University of Essex before moving in 1989 to the Australian National University, where he is Distinguished Professor jointly of Philosophy and of Social & Political Theory in the Research School of Social Sciences. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1990 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2004. He gave the Dewey Lecture on Law and Philosophy at the University of Chicago Law School in 2008.

Goodin is General Editor of a 10-volume series of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science for Oxford University Press; he co-edited two volumes in that series himself, both published in 2006 (Public Policy, with Michael Moran and Martin Rein; Contextual Political Analysis, with Charles Tilly); and he will edit a one-volume consolidation of the series, The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, published in 2009. He is founding Editor of Blackwell's Journal of Political Philosophy, with previous service as Co-editor of the British Journal of Political Science and, for over a decade, as an Associate Editor of Ethics. He is also founding Editor of a series of books on 'Theories of Institutional Design' for Cambridge University Press. His other major reference books include:

• A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, co-edited with Philip Pettit (Blackwell, 1993; 2nd edn 2007, co-edited with Pettit and Thomas Pogge).
• Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, also co-edited with Philip Pettit (Blackwell, 1997; 2nd edn 2006).
• A New Handbook of Political Science, co-edited with Hans-Dieter Klingemann (Oxford UP, 1996), named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1997 by Choice, the official journal of the American Association of College and Research Libraries.

Goodin's own work focuses on political theory and public policy. His books include:

• Political Theory & Public Policy (U Chicago Press, 1982)
• Protecting the Vulnerable (U Chicago Press, 1985)
• Reasons for Welfare (Princeton U Press, 1988)
• No Smoking: Ethical Issues (U Chicago Press, 1989)
• Motivating Political Morality (Blackwell, 1992)
• Green Political Theory (Polity, 1992)
• Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge U P, 1995)
• Social Welfare as an Individual Responsibility: For and Against, with D. Schmidtz (Cambridge UP, 1998)
• The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, with B. Headey, R. Muffels and H.-J. Dirven (Cambridge UP, 1999)
• Reflective Democracy (Oxford UP, 2003)
• What's Wrong with Terrorism? (Polity, 2006)
• Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom, with J.M. Rice, A. Parpo, and L. Eriksson (Cambridge UP, 2008)
• Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory & Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford UP, 2009)

With Geoffrey Brennan, Nic Southwood and Lina Eriksson, Goodin is in the midst of a three-year project on 'Reasons, Values & Norms', funded by the Australian Research Council.

View Goodin's full CV

Dewey Lecture