David Lay Williams

Professor Williams teaches and conducts research in political theory, especially the history of political thought. He received his PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.  Prior coming to DePaul in 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point.​  He is also an affiliate at the University of Chicago’s Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility.  

Williams is the author of Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (2007),​ Rousseau's 'Social Contract': An Introduction (2014) and The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (2024), as well as numerous articles on thinkers ranging from Plato to Jürgen Habermas and topics such as democratic theory, economic inequality, and moral psychology. He has also co-edited several books, including most recently, The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ (2024). 

In 2003-2004 and 2008-2009, he held research fellowships at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and in 2012-13, he held a faculty fellowship at the DePaul Humanities Center. In 2016-2017 he was the Wicklander Fellow at DePaul's Institute for Business and Professional Ethics. From 2017-2022 he was the political theory editor for the journal, Political Research Quarterly. In 2023-2024, he collaborated with Professor Matthew W. Maguire and the Alliance Française​ in Chicago as part of the HumanitiesX​ program, funded by the Mellon Foundation​, in which he co-taught a course on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America​  and co-organized a public roundtable on Tocqueville’s continuing relevance. Professor Williams also writes short pieces connecting the history of political thought to contemporary political concerns for outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Hill, Public Seminar, Bloomberg News, and the Chicago Sun-Times.  

Professor Williams’s latest book on economic inequality has been reviewed broadly, including in the Washington Post, Nature, Compact Magazine, Jacobin, UnHerd, and The Nation. You can listen to podcast interviews with him about this book.  Or you can read about his work here and here.  The book is presently being translated into Arabic.  

In his spare time, Williams plays jazz guitar locally with the Chicago Jazz Dads and the In Full Swing Orchestra big band.  Once every few years he does European tours with the Curt Wilson Alumni Jazz Band, where he has played at the Montreux Jazz Festival, the Umbria Jazz Festival, Jazzaldia, and Jazz à Juan – and in 2026 they will be playing at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam.  ​