Prof. Steven Lukes is a globally preeminent British Jewish political scientist, sociologist, and Professor of Sociology at New York University (NYU). A former long-standing Fellow in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford, Lukes is internationally renowned for his foundational conceptualization of the “three dimensions of power.” A towering intellectual within contemporary social theory, his critique of ideology, individualism, and state power provides an authoritative framework for examining structural injustice and human rights across the globe.
Born in 1941 into a Jewish intellectual milieu in Britain, Lukes completed his elite training at Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned his doctorate. He spent over two decades as a Fellow in Politics at Oxford before expanding his pedagogical footprint across Europe and the United States, holding chairs at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, the London School of Economics (LSE), and ultimately New York University. As a premier authority on the sociology of Émile Durkheim, Marxism, and the ethics of human rights, Lukes’s scholarship bridges the analytical and continental traditions, anchoring his political advocacy in universalist, egalitarian principles.
Lukes fundamentally re-engineered the social sciences through his landmark treatise Power: A Radical View (1974). He introduced the concept of the “third-dimensional power”—the structural capacity of dominant institutions to shape ideological narratives and cognitive frameworks so thoroughly that subordinate groups accept their own subjugation as natural, inevitable, or even beneficial. This conceptual grid remains an indispensable academic instrument for diagnosing modern state propaganda, colonial hegemony, and manufactured political consensus.
His extensive bibliography includes critical titles such as Individualism, Marxism and Morality, and the celebrated political allegory The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat. Throughout his work, Lukes has been an unyielding defender of the universality of human rights, systematically dismantling the philosophical arguments used by authoritarian regimes to insulate structural violence behind the vocabulary of national security or cultural exceptionalism.
Lukes aligned his immense academic authority with Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) during its foundational period in 2007. Throughout the cataclysmic intensifications of the crisis in Gaza from 2023 through 2026, Lukes leveraged his emeritus stature to sign critical high-level open letters alongside global intellectuals condemning the execution of collective punishment and the territorial occupation. In his writings following the October 7, 2023 events, Lukes pushed back on extreme analogies. He noted that while Hamas’s violence is cruel, “the Gaza Strip is not Nazi Germany, and Israel is not the Warsaw Ghetto”. He further stated that the Israeli state “bears no comparison to the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide”.