Jeffrey Friedman (born March 25, 1959) is a political scientist. He is the founder and editor of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society.
Friedman majored in history and philosophy at Brown University. He received an MA in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985 and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 2002. He taught in the Government department at Dartmouth College in 1998, the Social Studies program at Harvard from 1998 to 2000, and the Political Science department at Barnard College, Columbia University from 2001 to 2006.
Friedman is a visiting scholar in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science University of California, Berkeley and the Max Weber Fellow of the Institute for the Advancement of the Social Sciences at Boston University. Since August 2017 Jeffrey Friedman blogs at the libertarian Niskanen Center.
The Rational-Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (ed.) Yale University Press (1996).
What Caused the Financial Crisis. (ed.) University of Pennsylvania Press (2010).
Engineering the Financial Crisis: Systemic Risk and the Failure of Regulation w/ Wladimir Kraus - University of Pennsylvania Press (2011).
Articles
"Locke as Politician." Critical Review 2(2-3): 64-101 (1988).
"The New Consensus: I. The Fukuyama Thesis" Critical Review 3(3). 1989.
"The New Consensus: II. The Democratic Welfare State" Critical Review 4(4). 1990.
"What's Wrong with Libertarianism." Critical Review 11(3): 407-67 (1997).
"Public Ignorance and Democratic Theory." Critical Review 12(4): 397-411 (1998).
"After Democracy, Bureaucracy?" Critical Review 14(1): 469-79 (2000).
"Public Opinion: Bringing the Media Back In." Critical Review 15(3-4): 239-58 (2003).
"Theory Gets a Reality Check: Power, Money and a Little Bit about Love." The Dissident, no. 2.
"Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance." Critical Review 17(1-2): i-lvii (2005).
"The Bias Issue." Critical Review 17(3-4): 221-236 (2005).
"Public Competence In Normative and Positive Theory: Neglected Implications of "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." Critical Review 18(1-3): i-xliii (2006).
"'A Weapon in the Hands of the People': The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical and Conceptual Context." Critical Review 19(2-3): 197-240 (2007).
"The Irrelevance of Economic Theory to Understanding Economic Ignorance" (with Stephen Earl Bennett). Critical Review 20(3): 195-258 (2008).
"A Crisis of Politics, Not Economics: Complexity, Ignorance, and Policy Failure." Critical Review 21(2-3): 127-83 (2009).
"'Search' vs. 'Browse': A Theory of Error Grounded In Radical (Not Rational) Ignorance." Critical Review 23(1-2): 73-104 (2011).
"Capitalism and the Jewish Intellectuals." Critical Review 23(1-2): 169-94 (2011).
"Motivated Skepticism or Inevitable Conviction? Dogmatism and the Study of Politics." Critical Review 24(2). 2012.
