Brianne Wolf is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at James Madison College at Michigan State University. She specializes in the history of political thought with a focus on the Scottish and French Enlightenments, liberalism, moral judgment, and the interaction between economics and politics. She teaches in the first year program, the PTCD field, and the PE minor. She did her undergraduate work at James Madison College at Michigan State University, has an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her dissertation work on the relationship between freedom and aesthetic judgment in the modern age. She has published on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Friedrich Hayek and this work can be found in History of Political Thought, Review of Politics, Polity, The Political Science Reviewer, and edited volumes. Dr. Wolf is currently at work on a book length study of the role of taste in solving problems in the liberal tradition in the thought of David Hume, Rousseau, Smith, and Tocqueville titled “Beyond Rights and Price: Liberalism with Taste.” She is also working on other projects analyzing the connections between the history of political and economic thought.
View Dr. Wolf's CV via PDF.
“Patriotic Exceptions to Free Trade: Adam Smith and Political Judgment” forthcoming. Social Philosophy & Policy.
“Tocqueville and the Moral Economy of Bankruptcy in Nineteenth-Century America” 2023. Political Science Reviewer 47 (2): 161-198.
“Bringing the Family Back In: The Political Economy of the Family in Liberal Theory.” 2023. in Living Better Together: Social Relations and Economic Governance in the Work of Ostrom and Zelizer. ed. Stefanie Haeffele and Virgil Henry Storr. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
“Adam Smith’s Cosmopolitan Liberalism: Taste, Political Economy, and Objectification” 2022, Polity 54(4): 709-733.
“Disciplining the Rich: Tocqueville On Philanthropy in the Democratic Age” 2021. (with Richard Avramenko). Review of Politics 83 (3): 351-374.
“‘The Monetary Link’: Tocqueville on the Second Bank of the US and Liberal Political Economy.” 2020. in Exploring the Social and Political Economy of Alexis de Tocqueville eds. Peter Boettke and Adam Martin. London: Palgrave Macmillian.
“The Silent Role of Emotion in Hayekian Political Economy.” 2018. in Exploring the Political Economy and Social Philosophy of F. A. Hayek. eds. Peter J. Boettke, Virgil Henry Storr, Jayme S. Lemke. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.
“The Economic Education of Emile: Reinterpreting Rousseau’s Use of Robinson Crusoe.” 2018. History of Political Thought. 39 (4); 662-689.
“Beyond the Efficiency of the Market: Adam Smith on Sympathy and the Poor Law.” 2017. In Interdisciplinary Studies of the Market Order: New Applications of Market Process Theory. Eds. Peter Boettke, Christopher Coyne, and Virgil Storr. London: Rowman and Littlefield International Ltd.
Social Coordination and Public Policy: Explorations in Theory and Practice (co-edited with Roberta Herzberg; Gavin Roberts) 2023. New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Political Economy Document Volume. 2021. Ashland: Ashbrook Center.