Isaac Kramnick is an American historian, social scientist and the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. He is a subject-matter expert on English and American political thought and history.

Research

Kramnick has researched, written, or edited about twenty treatises. His Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole was awarded the Conference of British Studies Prize for the best book on British politics. His other works include the Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State, co-authored with R. Laurence Moore, studies of Edmund Burke, a biography of the English socialist Harold Laski, and an edition of the Federalist Papers. Kramnick edited American Political Thought (2009) with Cornell’s Professor Theodore Lowi. An excerpt:

“America has a conservative political tradition that is just as broad and deep as the liberal tradition. But the two are rarely in true competition, let alone dialectical tension. They are as ships passing the day – conservatism being local and parochial, liberalism more cosmopolitan; conservatism concerned with order and obligation, liberalism with consequences and satisfactions. One pursues goodness, the other happiness.”

Professor Kramnick’s research has perhaps been less data-oriented than directed toward a textual critique of the metaphysical, the product of extensive reading and writing. This is true of his 1986 work on Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley, FRS was an 18th-century English theologian, Dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, chemist, educator, and political theorist who published over 150 works...

, author of The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated

The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated

The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity is one of the major metaphysical works of 18th-century British polymath Joseph Priestley.Between 1774 and 1778, while serving as an assistant to Lord Shelburne, Priestley wrote a series of five major metaphysical works, arguing for a materialist philosophy...

(1777).

The Godless Constitution

Frequently cited but seldom read, Kramnick’s controversial treatise, written with Cornell co-faculty member R. Laurence Moore, does not deny that the Republic’s founding generation had religious beliefs. Rather, The Godless Constitution argues that the founding fathers believed that a clear separation between religious and civil authority could prevent a specific kind of tyranny. Kramnick and Moore suggest that the colonial 18th American eastern seaboard experience proved that civil magistrates given religious authority used that power irresponsibly. By separating church and state, one preserved the integrity of both.

Early Life & Career

Kramnick is native to rural western Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

, the son of Max and Sarah Shushulski Kramnick. The family emigrated from Grudno

Grudno

Grudno is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Bolków, within Jawor County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in south-western Poland. Prior to 1945 it was in Germany....

, which then was in the Silesia

Silesia

Silesia is a historical region of Central Europe located mostly in Poland, with smaller parts also in the Czech Republic, and Germany.Silesia is rich in mineral and natural resources, and includes several important industrial areas. Silesia's largest city and historical capital is Wrocław...

 region of the German Empire

German Empire

The German Empire refers to Germany during the "Second Reich" period from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.The German...

. Isaac Kramnick took his bachelors and doctoral degrees from Harvard (1959, summa cum laude; 1965) and studied at Cambridge University from 1959-1960. He taught at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

, and Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, and arrived at Cornell in 1972.
Kramnick served as Chair of Cornell’s Government Department (1981–1985; 1996–2001). He was Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (1986–1989) and Faculty-elected Trustee (1990–1994). Professor Kramnick was Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Cornell from 2001 to 2005. During this time he provided leadership for Cornell’s initiative to reorganize undergraduate residence policy. Kramnick’s commitment to the quality of Cornell’s undergraduate living and learning included service as a founding member of the Cornell Faculty Fellows and Faculty-in-Residence programs and as a faculty leader in the University Committee on Restructuring West Campus Residential Life. Just after the turn of the century, Kramnick was responsible for the planning and coordinating academic programming for Cornell’s North and West campuses. He also was in charge of undergraduate research opportunities, student advising, and the art and practice of teaching.

Honors

Professor Kramnick is a fellow, Britain’s Royal Historical Society

Royal Historical Society

The Royal Historical Society was founded in 1868. The premier society in the United Kingdom which promotes and defends the scholarly study of the past, it is based at University College London...

. He has also served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (1989). In 1998, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

elected him fellow. Cornell University has honored him with the Clark Award for distinguished teaching (1978), the Steven Weiss Presidential Fellow Prize (1988) for teaching, and the Cornell Students have chosen him “favorite professor of the year” (1996).

Sample Publications

• American Political Thought: A Norton Anthology (I. Kramnick & T. Lowi, eds. 2009);
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Kramick & Bevan, ed.)(2003)
• Isaac Kramnick & Laurence Moore, Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (1996);
• The Portable Enlightenment Reader (I. Kramnick, ed.)(Viking Portable Library, 1995);
• Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left (1993);
• Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (1990);
• Federalist Papers (Isaac Kramnick, ed. 1987)(this was the third edition of the Papers edited by a Cornell Faculty member; predecessor included Clinton Rossiter and Goldwin Smith);
• Isaac Kramnick, “Eighteenth Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism,” 25 J. Brit. Studies (1986) at 1-30.
• Isaac Kramnick, Age of Ideology: Political Thought, 1750 to the Present (Foundations of Modern Political Science, 1979);
• Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (1977);
• Isaac Kramnick, Revolution: Definitions and Explanations, A Critique of Recent Scholarship (1972);
• The Bolingbroke Political Writings (Viscount Bolingbroke & I. Kramnick, eds. 1970);
• Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (1968).

External links

• Official Curricula Vita.