Steven Michael Lukes is the author of numerous books and articles about political and social theory. His last post was as a professor of sociology at New York University from which he retired in 2021. He was formerly a fellow in politics and sociology at Balliol College, Oxford. He was then, in turn, professor of political and social theory at the European University Institute, Florence, of moral philosophy at the University of Siena and of sociology at the London School of Economics.

His work has always been located in the borderlands that link philosophy and the social sciences. His first major work was the first full-length study of the life and ideas of Emile Durkheim and he has ever since retained a keen interest in the Durkheimian tradition in sociology and anthropology. He then published a study of the history and diverse meanings of ‘individualism’ and a study of the concept of power entitled Power: A Radical View (third edition 2021) that helped to stimulate a long-running ‘power debate’ about how to conceive of power and investigate it empirically.  He has extensive interests in political theory and political philosophy; in Marxism and other socialist traditions; and in philosophy of the social sciences, participating in one of several debates about what constitutes ‘rationality.’ He has worked in the history of ideas, in particular on the political thought of Condorcet; has written about political humor and satire, and published a dystopian novel about the ideas of the Enlightenment. From the beginning he has been interested in both moral philosophy, on the one hand, and in the sociology and anthropology of morals, on the other, and in how to reconcile these two seemingly contrasting standpoints. His latest work entitled THE DIVERSITY OF MORALS addresses this question and will be published in 2025.