John Roemer
Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science
John Roemer, A.B. Harvard University, Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley, faculty member at Yale since 2000 after many years at the University of California at Davis: You are a scholar whose work spans the domains of economics, political science, and philosophy, most often applying rigorous analytical models to problems of economy and distributive justice.
You had an unusual childhood. During the McCarthy era, your father, a physician and a member of the U.S. Public Health Service, was under suspicion for disloyalty to the United States due to his previous association with the U.S. Communist Party. That suspicion came to its peak while he was an assistant professor at Yale. Through many twists and turns, your family was forced to leave New Haven and move first to Geneva, Switzerland, and then to Canada, until the peak of McCarthyism had passed and your father could accept a position at Cornell.
From your earliest days, socialism was your conviction and mathematics your passion. As a Berkeley Ph.D. student, you were intensely involved in the anti–Vietnam War movement and were suspended from the university for your political activities. You then taught mathematics in San Francisco secondary schools for five years. Berkeley was wise enough to readmit you—luckily, we hasten to add, for Berkeley, as it otherwise would have lost a graduate of great distinction.
You are a scholar with a restless, creative intelligence who has reinvented himself multiple times and done substantive and diverse work. In book after significant book, you have written about the analytical foundations of Marxist theory and the theory of exploitation, distributive justice, inequality in theory and democratic practice, environmentalism, political competition, racism, xenophobia, among other subjects.
Much of your work is a re-examination of Marxism in light of modern economic theory. You made an extensive and searching investigation of inequality, its origins and causes, ways in which it might be justified, and ways it might be mitigated. You developed an alternative type of equilibrium to the standard Nash equilibrium in economics and proposed what you called a “Kantian equilibrium” based on Kant’s universal imperative—an action is moral if everyone could do it and everyone would be better off—and you gave practical examples, where Kantian equilibrium produces better results than Nash equilibrium.
In all your work, you have brought logical rigor and modeling to your arguments on the weighty, consequential questions with which you engage. But despite grounding your arguments in rigorous technical analysis, you have always worked hard to make your work widely accessible. At Yale, this has enabled you to teach and mentor undergraduates as well as graduate students in courses in economics; Ethics, Politics and Economics; and political science.
John Roemer, your father, left Yale in unjust times under pressures related to McCarthy-era fears. You returned to and served Yale with honor. Now, as you retire, your colleagues salute a scholar of the highest excellence and integrity, who has spent his life bringing his fine intelligence and scholarly rigor to the political convictions that have shaped and compelled him.