Paul Starr

Notable work and positions

The American Prospect — Co-founder and Founding Co-Editor (1990– )
Princeton University — Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs; Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs

Biography

Paul Elliot Starr, born May 12, 1949, is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, where he holds the Stuart Chair in Communications and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. In 1990, he co-founded The American Prospect, a liberal magazine of politics, policy, and ideas, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, and continues to serve as its founding co-editor. He earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1978, and joined the Princeton faculty in 1985 after being denied tenure at Harvard. In 1993 he served as a senior health policy advisor in the Clinton administration. Starr's book The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1983) won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American History, and his 2004 book The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications won the Goldsmith Book Prize. His other books include The Logic of Health Care Reform (1992), Freedom's Power (2007), Remedy and Reaction (2011), Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies (2019), and American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge From the 1950s to Now (2025).