Alan Wolfe | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1942 |
| Occupation(s) | Political scientist, sociologist |
Alan Wolfe (born 1942) is an Americanpolitical scientist and asociologist on the faculty ofBoston College who serves as director of theBoisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of theFuture of American Democracy Foundation,[1] a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation in partnership withYale University Press and the Yale Center for International and Area Studies,[2] "dedicated to research and education aimed at renewing and sustaining the historic vision of American democracy".
A graduate ofCentral High School (Philadelphia), he received aB.S. fromTemple University in 1963 and aPh.D. in Political Science from theUniversity of Pennsylvania in 1967. He hashonorary degrees fromLoyola College in Maryland andSt. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.
Earlier in his career, Wolfe was a member of the collective that put out theMarxist-oriented journal,Kapitalistate, whose pages featured articles by such writers asNikos Poulantzas,Claus Offe,Ralph Miliband, andBob Jessop. By the early 1980s, Wolfe's politics had become morecentrist. In 2004, one author characterized him as aradical centrist thinker.[3]
A contributing editor ofThe New Republic,The Wilson Quarterly,Commonwealth Magazine, andIn Character, Wolfe writes often for those publications as well as forCommonweal,The New York Times,Harper's,The Atlantic Monthly,The Washington Post,World Affairs and other magazines and newspapers. He served as an advisor toPresident Bill Clinton in preparation for his 1995State of the Union Address and has lectured widely at American and European universities. He was ranked #98 in the list of the 500 most cited intellectuals in the 2001 book byRichard Posner titledPublic Intellectuals.
Wolfe chairs a task force of theAmerican Political Science Association on "Religion and Democracy in the United States." He serves on the advisory boards ofHumanity in Action and the Future of American Democracy Foundation and on the president's advisory board of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is also a Senior Fellow with the World Policy Institute at theNew School University in New York. In the fall of 2004, Professor Wolfe was theGeorge H. W. Bush Fellow at theAmerican Academy in Berlin.
"Wolfe, a self-proclaimedatheist, said he recognizes the importance of being open to religious ideas," a 2008 report about an "Ethics of Atheism" debate put it.[4]
Wolfe has been the recipient of grants from theRussell Sage Foundation, theTempleton Foundation, theSmith Richardson Foundation, theCarnegie Corporation of New York, and theLilly Endowment. He has twice conducted programs under the auspices of theU.S. State Department[citation needed] that bringMuslim scholars to the United States to learn aboutseparation of church and state. He is listed inWho's Who in the World,Who's Who in America, andContemporary Authors.
Wolfe is an advocate ofhuman exceptionalism and a staunch critic ofanimal rights,artificial intelligence anddeep ecology. Wolfe is concerned that modern animal rights and ecological groups promote a dangerous anti-humanistic ideology. According to Wolfe, an essential difference between humans and other animals is the capacity for interpretation and meaning.
Wolfe argues that sociology is anthropocentric by definition since it is concerned with what makes humans different from the animate (animals and nature) and the inanimate (computers and artificial intelligence).[5] Wolfe opposes the idea of "putting nature first" and identifies three groups as promoting this ideology: animal rights, deep ecology and theGaia hypothesis. Wolfe has stated that animal rights philosophy would result in a world without fantasy, excitement and creativity and that non-human animals do not have moral rights as they do not possess agency or understanding.[5]
Wolfe has argued that animal rights is a political movement that threatens the humanist values and lifestyles of ordinary people.[6] Wolfe's bookThe Human Difference defends a unique human domain of being against the naturalising claims ofsociobiology and artificial intelligence and the species arguments of animal rights advocates.[7]
