Academic Career
Roger Masters has made deep and wide-ranging contributions in social science. The central concern of his career has been how biological circumstances influence individual behavior and social outcomes.
Masters began his career in political philosophy as a student of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. His dissertation and subsequent book (Masters 1968) helped demonstrate the importance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in modern thought. He translated and edited influential new editions of Rousseau’s works (Masters 1964a, 1978), and later co-edited the only complete English edition of his Collected Writings (Masters and Kelly 1990). The role of natural science in early political thought is also addressed in books on Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci (Masters 1996, 1998).
Masters’ investigation of how nature influences human societies led to significant contributions in the field of international relations (Masters 1964b, 1967) as well as human ethology and sociobiology (Masters 1983, 1989, Masters and McGuire 1994). This work included pioneering laboratory experiments in political communication (Masters 1981, Masters et al. 1987). Later, Masters’ research on biology and human behavior led to new epidemiological evidence regarding the behavioral impacts of neurotoxins, first on the consequences of lead poisoning (Masters, Hone and Doshi 1998), and then on the links between a common method of water fluoridation to elevated blood lead and a higher prevalence of violent crime, substance abuse and learning disabilities (Masters and Coplan 1999, Masters et al. 2000).
Masters’ work has pioneered the application of natural science discoveries to the social sciences and government policy. He was a founding member and serves on the Executive Council of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, and leads an ongoing consultancy on biology and politics for the U.S. Department of Defense in collaboration with anthropologist Lionel Tiger and neuroscientist Michael T. McGuire. He served on the 2006-07 “Get the Lead out of Vermont” task force, and is frequently consulted by other government agencies or activists concerned with the behavioral consequences of environmental toxins.
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