B.A. from Oberlin College and Ph.D. from Harvard, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.

He is Director of the Lloyd C. Gardner Fellowship Program in Leadership and Social Policy, an undergraduate honors level program for SAS juniors. He was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Yaounde, Cameroon in 1983 and an NEH Mellon lecturer at Princeton in 1987.  He was Graduate Director of the Department from 1988 until 2006 and Chair from 2006 until 2009.

His publications include:

• "Political Theory and the People's Right to Know," in Government Secrecy in Comparative Perspective (l975)
• Leadership in America: Consensus, Corruption and Charisma (l978)
• "The Nature of Leadership," with W. C. McWilliams (Council for Religion and International Affairs, l979)
• "Tocqueville on Faith and Politics," Political Theory, (1980)
• Political Theory as Public Confession: The Social and Political Thought of St. Augustine (1981)
• "Moral Ties and Political Freedom in Tocqueville's New Science of Politics," in Tocqueville's Political Science (1992)
• "With Himself at War: Shakespeare's Roman Hero and the Republican Tradition" (1996)
• Friends and Citizens: Essays in Honor of Wilson Carey McWilliams, (2002)

He is currently revising his book on Augustine for a second edition.  His work on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville continues with a book length manuscript in the planning stages.