A Hegel Admirer

One never knows what to expect a Harvard professor to be like. Nerdy, suave, articulate, comatose...they come in all varieties.

But if anything is typical, it is a certain intimidating intellect and relentless curiosity, a teeming desire to understand and explore fields unknown to the average "Simpsons" viewer.

It is those properties that bring them to the faculty claiming to be "the best in the world," and it is those properties that emerge most clearly in a conversation with new Professor of Government Seyla Benhabib, who returns to the department where she once taught as a junior professor.

Sprinkling her talk with professor-speak like "decisional matrices," the professor does have room for a colloquial vocabulary. She calls Brandeis University, where she studied, the "boondocks" in comparison to her native Istanbul. She also notices when slang usage is no longer au courant with her undergraduate students (e.g. "awesome").

Benhabib's speech, though, betrays her academic background. She has published six weighty-sounding books (the most recent being "Critique, Norm and Utopia, A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory") and has taught at universities in Germany, Italy and France as well as the U.S.

"She's the best kind of colleague in that she brings energy and commitment to teaching and research as well as a broad range of intellectual interests in political theory," says Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel.

Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics Susan J. Pharr, who chairs the Government Department, says Benhabib's earlier stint in the department was marked by an ability to reach out to both undergraduate and graduate students. Benhabib is a "sophisticated and cosmopolitan person of great personal warmth," Pharr says.

A slender, well-dressed woman, Benhabib is neither pretentious nor distant. The laity may not easily grasp her work, but her effort to explain the intricacies of research into the thoughts of the great theorists of moral and political philosophy is fascinating.

A specialist in 19th and 20-century German political and social theory, she is passionate on the subject of Hegel and his disciples and says she became so in her teens, at an age when many students haven't moved past the Harlequins and Le Carres.

"I guess I knew I was going to do something in intellectual life since 16 or 17," she says. "I never really seriously contemplated doing anything else...It just must be the way my mind works."

The scholarly bent might have come from her grandparents, she says. Growing up in a sophisticated, well-educated Jewish area of Istanbul provided her with both her cosmopolitanism and, perhaps, the motivation to leave her native country for a scholarship at Brandeis. Today she returns to Turkey only for visits and has no plans to live there again.

When Benhabib came to Brandeis, she found the place provincial in some ways compared to Istanbul. Many American students at the time were not eager to meet or understand international students, she says. She went on to receive her Ph.D. at Yale, with a dissertation titled "Natural Right and Hegel: An Essay in Modern Political Theory."

Today, "I reread Hegel every two years," she says. Reading such theorists as Hegel provides a "sense of orientation, of one's own place in culture and history," she says.

The dedication to understanding and questioning led her into a new field of research in the mid-1980s. Benhabib is now a leading scholar of feminist political and social theory and was prominent in the debates surrounding Professor of Education Carol Gilligan's "In a Different Voice."

She is today examining gender in the work of Hannah Arendt, specifically in the writer's explorations of the realms of public and private. "I think we have a lot to learn from her insistence [on the importance of the separation between public and private]...where does that line run and how should it be drawn," she says. She is working to "unpack these terms" and find the place of gender in an interpretation of Arendt's thought.

She will bring aspects of her research to a Core course she offers next semester on the public and private domains in politics, morality and law.

"We cannot help but ask these questions....The issue is, does this question bear fruit," she says. "We're always coming from the present to the past. There is no prima facia answer." For her, there are always more questions.