Aishwary Kumar

Aishwary Kumar is Professor of History of Political Thought & Institutions and Director of The Democracy Institute at Cal Poly Pomona, where he chairs The GIFT (Global Inquiries in Freedom and Tyranny) Project and the American Institutions Common Core. Kumar received his PhD. in Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and was Rouse Ball Fellow in Intellectual History at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He first arrived from the UK as an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in 2007, where he taught for 12 years and served as Director of the Majors Program in History, Philosophy, and the Arts. He has held appointments, among other institutions, in History of Consciousness at UC-Santa Cruz and the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and delivered invited lectures on government and constitutionalism at UC-Berkeley, Oxford, Berlin, Hyderabad, Vienna, and Harvard Law.

Kumar is an intellectual historian and political philosopher of democratic ideals and institutions. His work focuses on the global lineages of modern political and legal thought and the moral and constitutional life of the liberal democratic experiment refracted through the figure of the “Global South,” especially the “American South.” In particular, his writings are compelled by questions of inequality and violence and of the future of human freedom in the face of rapid technological mutation. For a beginning, see his first book Radical Equality, published by Stanford University Press in 2015. Most recently, see “After Cruelty" (2025). His current projects include a study on political cruelty, The Neodemocratic Condition, and The Gravity of Truth, an inquiry into democratic disappointment. 

Kumar has served as The Teagle Foundation Fellow of the National Forum for the Future of Liberal Education. You can hear him on his podcast Mutant: Dialogues at the End of Democracy (2023-2025), now under contract as a two-volume book, After Freedom: Moral Lessons on Justice from the Edges of Democracy.