Peter Berkowitz

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a columnist for Real Clear Politics and director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship.

In 2019-2021, he served as the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department's Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior adviser to the secretary of state during the first Trump administration.

He is a member of the American Academy of Sciences & Letters and a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize.

Berkowitz is the author of Reclaiming Liberal Education in America (RealClear Publishing, 2026); Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America (RealClear Publishing, 2025); Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation (Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War (Hoover Institution Press, 2012); Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1999); and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995).

He is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions published by the Hoover Institution.

He has written hundreds of articles, essays, and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications, including The American Interest, the American Political Science Review, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, Forbes.com, The Free Press, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, the London Review of Books, National Journal, National Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic, Policy Review, Politico, The Public Interest, the Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and the Yale Law Journal.

Berkowitz has led seminars on the principles of freedom and democracy and the American constitutional tradition for students from Burma (Myanmar) at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, at Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, for the senior leadership of Nahdlatul Ulama in Jakarta, and at various institutions in Israel.

He taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at George Mason University School of Law from 1999 to 2006 and political philosophy in the department of government at Harvard University from 1990 to 1999.

He holds a JD and a PhD in political science from Yale University; an MA in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and a BA in English literature from Swarthmore College.