George Kateb is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton. He is the author of Utopia and Its Enemies (1963, reissued 1972); Political Theory; Its Nature and Uses (1968); Utopia (1971, reissued 2002); Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984); The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (1992); Emerson and Self-Reliance (1994); On Liberty by J.S. Mill [co-edited with David Bromwich] (2003); Patriotism and Other Mistakes (2006); Human Dignity (2011); Lincoln's Political Thought (2015); and Dignity, Morality, Individuality [ed. John Seery] (2015).

Kateb came to Princeton in 1987 after 30 years on the faculty at Amherst College. At Princeton, he served as director of the Program in Political Philosophy and was a member of the executive committee of the University Center for Human Values, of which he also served as director. In 1997, he was awarded Princeton's Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. He retired from the faculty in 2002. Kateb has been president of the New England Political Science Association and vice president of the American Society of Political and Legal Philosophy. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1971-1972. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on editorial boards of leading journals in his field.

Kateb earned his B.A. 1952 (highest honors in government and history; Phi Beta Kappa), M.A. 1953, and Ph.D. 1960 at Columbia University. He was named a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University 1954-1957. He received Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from Amherst College in 1989 and Princeton University in 2008.