Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Director of the Research Center “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is also Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on questions of justice, democracy and toleration as well as critical theory and practical reason in the Kantian tradition. In 2012 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. He is a Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. 

Important book publications: Contexts of Justice (Univ. of California Press, 2002), Toleration in Conflict (Cambridge UP, 2013), The Right to Justification (Columbia UP, 2012), Justification and Critique (Polity, 2013), Normativity and Power (Oxford UP 2017), The Noumenal Republic (Polity, 2024 – open access). 

Recent Articles: 

„The Rational Critique of Social Unreason: On Critical Theory in the Frankfurt Tradition“, in: Constellations 30, 2023, pp. 395-400 (open access)

„The Method of Insulation: On the Development of Rawls’s Thought After A Theory of Justice“, in: Paul Weithman (ed.), Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at 50, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 140-150.

„Justice: Procedural and Substantive“, in: Richard Bellamy und Jeff King (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2025, pp. 121-135.

„Toward a Critical Theory of Trust”, in: Political Theory, online first 2026, DOI: 10.1177/00905917261416081 (open access).