People

Mark Gould is Professor of Sociology at Haverford College. He has a B.A. in sociology from Reed College and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. He teaches and writes on a range of topics, including the role of capitalist social development in the genesis of the English Revolution; the nature of contemporary racism, culture, opportunity structures and poverty in the inner-city USA; and the jurisprudential consequences of the sociological reconstruction of economic theory—especially for the law of employment discrimination and for the revitalization of fiduciary obligations in corporate law. At Harvard, he focused his writing on how various relationships between the foundational aspects of religiosity resulted in different forms of religious commitment in Islam, Christianity and Judaism that had divergent consequences for the emergence of democracy and human rights. He also endeavored to construct a viable theory of natural law to both criticize contemporary understandings of human rights and to make manifest the universality of “human rights.”