Chiara Cordelli is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and affiliated faculty in Philosophy. Her main research fields are social and political philosophy, with a particular focus on questions at the intersection of political economy and democratic theory. She is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton University Press, 2020), which provides a normative critique of privatization, grounded on a Kantian theory of the democratic state, and which develops a democratic theory of public administration, including a defense of a partially democratized bureaucracy. The book was awarded the 2021 ECPR political theory prize for best first book in political theory. Cordelli is the co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and the editor of NOMOS, the annual yearbook of the American Association for Legal and Political Philosophy. She is also a co-editor of Political Philosophy. Cordelli’s articles and contributions to symposia have appeared in numerous journals such as the American Political Science Review, Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, among others. She held visiting positions at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in D.C. (2009-2010), the Center for Human Values at Princeton (2014-2015), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2012-2013), the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard (2017-2018) and the LIER center at EHESS in Paris (2021-2022).

Cordelli’s current book project aims to develop a normative critique of capitalism and a defense of financial democracy. The book provides novel accounts of the distinctiveness of capitalism as an economic system; the core wrong of capitalism; the point of democratic socialism; and its institutional demands. The book treats capitalism’s distinctive mode of monetary valuation and investment as its core site of analysis; defends a specific account of social alienation, different from exploitation or domination, as the distinctive wrong of capitalism; argues that the point of socialism should include a process of reconciliation, and presents a normative case for the planning and democratization of investment.