Charles H. T. Lesch is a PhD Candidate in Government, with broad interests in the tensions between ethics and politics, political violence, micro-politics, the philosophy of history and memory, and role of religious categories in our political and social thinking. His dissertation investigates the sources of social solidarity in diverse societies, drawing from social and political theory, moral psychology, Continental philosophy, and theories of civil society to ask how citizens become alert to everyday injustices and take moral responsibility for one another. His article, "Against Politics: Walter Benjamin on Justice, Judaism, and the Possibility of Ethics" (American Political Science Review, forthcoming February 2014), situates Benjamin's critique of Kant's juridical thought in the tradition of Jewish political theology, yielding a novel theory of the normative status of politics. A former Fulbright Fellow, Harvard Presidential Scholar, and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale College, he is also the co-author, with Nancy Rosenblum, of the chapter "Civil Society and Government" for the Oxford Handbook of Civil Society (2011).