Yuval Levin


Yuval Levin is an American political analyst, public intellectual, academic, and journalist. He is the founding editor of National Affairs, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing editor of National Review and co-founder and a senior editor of The New Atlantis .
Levin was vice president and Hertog Fellow of Ethics and Public Policy Center, executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics, Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. Prior to that he served as a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.
Levin's essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, among them, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, among others. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, including “The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism”. In 2020, he published his latest book, “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream”.

Early life and education

Levin was born in Haifa, Israel, and moved to the United States with his family at the age of eight. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science at American University, and earned a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Career

Levin is the author of five books, and of numerous essays and articles dealing largely with political theory, science, technology, and public policy. On the relationship between political theory and public policy, Levin has said:
For me, these things are very deeply connected. I think politics really is rooted in political philosophy, is much better understood when it's understood in light of political philosophy. And that a lot of the policy debates we have make much more sense if you see that people are arguing about two ways of understanding what the human person is, what human society is, and especially what the liberal society is. The left and right in our country are both liberal, they both believe in the free society, but they mean something very different by that.

Conservatism, Levin has said, "understands society not as just individuals and government, but thinks of it in terms of everything that happens in between. That huge space between the individual and the state is where society actually is. And that's where families are, it's where communities are, it's where the market economy is."
Ross Douthat called Levin a leader of the "reform conservative" movement, and Levin was prominently featured in a 2014 New York Times Magazine cover story about the conservative intellectuals who comprise it. The Times' Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Levin was one of a group of young conservative Republicans who had "become the leaders of a small band of reform conservatives, sometimes called reformicons, who believe the health of the G.O.P. hinges on jettisoning its age-old doctrine — orgiastic tax-cutting, the slashing of government programs, the championing of Wall Street — and using an altogether different vocabulary, backed by specific proposals, that will reconnect the party to middle-class and low-income voters."
Levin has been called "probably the most influential conservative intellectual of the Obama era" by Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, while The New Republic has dubbed Levin "the right's new Irving Kristol," fondly nicknaming him "Baby Kristol".

Works