John Levi Martin
John Levi Martin B.A. Wesleyan University, 1987
M.A. University of California-Berkeley, 1990
Ph.D. University of California-Berkeley, 1997
Office: Social Sciences 312 Phone: 773-702-7098 Email Interests:

Social structures, political fields and the quantitative study of qualities

Florence Borchert Bartling Professor

John Levi Martin received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was recently a professor, after being a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an assistant professor at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey at New Brunswick.  He is now a professor at the University of Chicago at Chicago, where he enjoys teaching classical theory and writing about himself in the third person.

He is best known for his mathematical modeling of the occupational standing of imaginary animals in a single children’s book; he has also written on, and occasionally researched, the formal properties of belief systems and social structures, the constitutional convention of 1787, the rationalization of infantry war, and the use of race as a conceptual category in American sociology. He recently finished a book that he started ten years ago, and enjoyed it so much that he is seriously considering reading another one again some time in the future.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Selected Publications

In Press. The True, the Good and the Beautiful: On the Rise and Fall and Rise of the Kantian Architectonic of Action. Columbia University Press.

2021 The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press, second edition.

2018 Thinking Through Statistics. Chicago.

2009 Social Structures. Princeton University Press.

Forthcoming (With Benjamin Rohr:) “How (Not) to Control for Population Size in Ecological Analyses.” Sociological Methods & Research.

Forthcoming (with Jan Overgoor and Bogdan State:) “Persistence and Change in Structural Signatures of Tie Formation Over Time.” Social Networks.

2020 (With Alessandra Lembo:) “On the Other Side of Values.” American Journal of Sociology 126: 52-98.

2007 (With Adam Slez:) “Political Action and Party Formation in the United States Constitutional Convention.” American Sociological Review 72:42-67.