Kaarish Shah Maniar is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory. He specializes in intellectual history, and has particular interests in corporations, markets, jurisprudence, oligarchy, and democracy.
His dissertation—tentatively titled The Monopoly Question: Corporations & ‘Economic’ Constitution in Early Modern England—starts from the observation that corporate consolidation threatens democratic ideals. The book project digs beneath our contemporary bifurcation of the ‘political’ and ‘economic’ spheres to recover a distinctively moral-political language for contemplating economic monopoly power as a problem of private government. This work combines archival methods, legal history, and normative theory to reframe theories of democracy and oligarchy, and to resuscitate questions of individual rights and popular sovereignty in antitrust law.
Mr. Shah Maniar’s work, titled “Levelling Monsters: Monopoly, Rights, and Public Authority,” has received the Giancarlo Doria Prize in 2025 and will appear in Modern Intellectual History. His archival work has been funded by the Columbia Center for Political Economy and Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. Prior to enrolling at Columbia, he served as a paralegal specialist at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division, where he reviewed Hart-Scott-Rodino Act merger filings and contributed to the United States v. Google litigation. He holds an M.A. and M.Phil. in Political Science from Columbia University and an A.B. in Government from Georgetown University.
