Jason Brennan (Ph.D., University of Arizona, 2007) is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research spans political philosophy, business ethics, political economy, and public policy, with a particular focus on democracy, markets, institutions, and ethical leadership. Working at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and business, he studies how political and economic institutions shape human behavior—and how they might be designed to help people live, work, and govern better. He is Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs and an Associate Editor of Social Philosophy and Policy.
Brennan is the author or coauthor of twenty-one books, including Glass Houses: Choosing Grace in a Judgmental World, Debating Capitalism: Social Democracy or Market Liberalism?, Against Democracy, Markets without Limits, Business Ethics for Better Behavior, Good Work If You Can Get It, The Ethics of Voting, and Democracy: A Guided Tour. He is also co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism.
His books have been translated thirty-five times into eighteen languages, and the German edition of Against Democracy became a Der Spiegel bestseller. He has published more than eighty peer-reviewed journal articles and fifty peer-reviewed book chapters, with work appearing across leading journals in philosophy, political theory, economics, and business ethics. His research has contributed to scholarly and public debates over democracy, markets, political competence, work, and the ethics of public policy.
Brennan also experiments extensively with how business and ethics are taught. He created the Ethics Project, an experiential learning program in which students learn ethical leadership by designing and carrying out ambitious projects in the real world. In 2024, Poets & Quants named him one of the world’s 50 Best Undergraduate Business Professors, and in 2022 he received Georgetown University’s Provost’s Innovation in Teaching Award for developing the Ethics Project. In 2025, the Clark Foundation established a $3 million endowment to support the program. His broader teaching philosophy is that students learn best when they are given difficult problems with real stakes, substantial freedom over how to solve them, and responsibility for the consequences of their choices. Rather than treating education as the transmission of answers, he tries to create environments in which students have to exercise judgment, take intellectual and practical risks, and discover what they are capable of doing.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Professor, McDonough School of Business