Antti Lepistö

Antti Lepistö (PhD, Univ. Helsinki, 2019) is an intellectual and political historian specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history. His primary research interests are in the history of political thought, the history of the human sciences, the interplay of science and politics, and the politics of knowledge.

Lepistö's first book, The Rise of Common-Sense Conservatism: The American Right and the Reinvention of the Scottish Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2021), studies the rise of a right-wing populist “common sense” discourse in the context of the late twentieth-century culture wars. It shows how leading neoconservative thinkers of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s reinvented and weaponized the ideas of Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and David Hume, applying them to contemporary American problems such as crime, poverty, multiculturalism, and the family.

Lepistö's current project examines how the arrival of modern public opinion polls - as a new way of knowing, imagining, and defining society - substantively reshaped political battle in the United States from the 1930s to the present day. It analyzes how opinion polls since the 1930s inspired conservative and liberal writers and activists to reimagine the social and political landscape and to build their own, distinct ideas of America. The project sheds new light on the relationship between social science and American political thought, the development of intellectual polarization, and how the new ways of knowing society changed modern American politics.