Chiara Cordelli is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and affiliated faculty in Philosophy. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at Sciences Po in Paris. She has written on a variety of topics in political and moral philosophy including social and distributive justice, inequality, the normative foundations of the state, the demands of democratic legitimacy, the political theory of the administrative state, the ethics of philanthropy, critiques of capitalism, the privatization of public functions, and the boundaries of religious freedom within pluralistic societies.

She is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 ECPR book prize, and of Privatocrazia (Mondadori, 2022). Cordelli is also the co-editor of Climate Change (New York University Press, 2026) and Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Between 2022 and 2025, she was the editor of NOMOS (the prestigious yearbook of the American Society for Legal and Political Philosophy) and she is currently co-editing Political Philosophy.

Cordelli’s articles have appeared in leading international journals such as the American Political Science Review, Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Review of Politics, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, among others.

For her published work Cordelli has received several awards including The Elizabeth D. Rockwell Prize, The British Academy Brian Barry Prize, the ECPR Political Theory first book prize, The Review of Politics Award, an inclusion in the Philosopher’s Annual, and the UCL “Gay Clifford” Foundation award for women in the humanities.

Cordelli has 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), the University of Milan, LIER at EHESS in Paris (2021-2022), and CEVIPOF at Sciences Po.

Cordelli’s current book project, Ruled by None: A Political Theory of Capitalism, aims to develop a novel normative critique of capitalism and a defense of financial democracy. The book aims to provide 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.