Morton Schoolman's teaching and research fields are modern political and social theory. He is currently working on a new book entitled Democratic Enlightenment: The Politics of the Image, Memory, and Mass Culture. This work proposes the concept of an “aesthetic enlightenment” and argues that it is based on an "aesthetic" form of rationality that circulates with increasing universality in modern democratic society. Aesthetic reason has a formative influence in the democratic private sphere, where an aesthetic form of individuality is nurtured by democratic institutions and practices, but also in the modern world more generally by assuming a plurality of forms through the ubiquity of the “image” in mass culture. As a consequence of its nature in modern democracy, especially, aesthetic rationality has become the source of a uniquely democratic form of enlightenment. Though a possibility implicit in the first enlightenment of modern times, democratic enlightenment could only be realized with the development of democracy’s aesthetic potential. Beyond the spheres of already established democratic societies aesthetic reason also may be a democratizing force. Parts of this new work have been published in the Journal for Cultural Research and Polity. With David Campbell, Professor Schoolman also is coediting a collection of essays entitled The New Pluralism, in which he authors the lead essay, "A Pluralist Mind." The New Pluralism will be published by Duke University Press in March 2008.
In 2001 his Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality was published by Routledge Press. Other publications include The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse (Free Press), and articles on Marxism and Critical theory, individualism, liberalism and neoliberalism, politics and aesthetics. He is the editor of Modernity and Political Thought, a Rowman & Littlefield series in contemporary political theory that studies major figures in the history of political thought from the standpoint of their contributions to our understanding of modernity. MPT has published twelve volumes to date, with more than a dozen volumes under contract and in progress. In 2007 MPT published books on William James by Kennan Ferguson and Merleau-Ponty by Diana Coole.
He has been the recipient of the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the President's Undergraduate Leadership Award. In June 2006 he lectured in a Fulbright Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia, on "Consumption as Communication." His lectures were entitled "The Aesthetics of Consumption" and focused on Tocqueville, Whitman, Adorno, and Deleuze.
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