Research and Publications

Dr. Arnold's areas of specialization are in the History of Philosophy and Contemporary Political Philosophy. At the beginning of his career, his main scholarly interests were in 17th and 18th century philosophy, specifically the writings of Descartes and Hume. His doctoral dissertation was on Hume's theory of knowledge. Although he retains his interest in this period of the history of philosophy, in the early 1980s, Dr. Arnold began to do research and writing in political philosophy, specifically on the capitalism/socialism debate. A research program lasting over 10 years took shape and resulted in the publication of a number of papers and two books.

The first book, Marx's Radical Critique of Capitalist Society, is a reconstruction and critical evaluation of what Marx thought was wrong with capitalist society. This book was written while Dr. Arnold was a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio in the summers of 1987 and 1988 and was published by Oxford University Press in 1990.

The second book, The Philosophy and Economics of Market Socialism, argues that even the most defensible version of market socialism (a form of socialism that Marx could never accept) would be deeply flawed. This book was written during the 1990-91 academic year while Dr. Arnold was a Title VIII Fellow (US State Department) at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and in the summer of 1992 as a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green. It was published in 1994 by Oxford University Press.

With the intellectual and institutional collapse of socialism and communism in the early 1990s, Dr. Arnold turned his attention to more traditional questions in political philosophy, specifically, the question of the proper role of government in modern democratic capitalist societies. This has resulted in two papers and a new book on government regulation, entitled Imposing Values: An Essay on Liberalism and Regulation.  Some of the work on this latest book was done at the Hoover Institution in the summer of 1999 and at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in 2006.  

Dr. Arnold served as a co-editor for an introductory philosophy text, Philosophy Then and Now, which was published by Basil Blackwell in 1998. He is also an associate editor of the new journal, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Abstracts of other published papers are available here.

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