Kaarish Shah Maniar is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory, with research interests in the history of political, economic, and legal thought, as well as ethical and democratic theory.
His dissertation examines the early modern intellectual history of monopoly. It traces egalitarian arguments against guilds, patents, joint-stock corporations, and other private monopoly powers in England. In contrast to economic-liberal accounts that frame market competition as protection from state encroachment, these anti-monopoly arguments culminated in calls for a normatively “omnilateral” democratic state capable of safeguarding citizens’ economic rights. More broadly, Mr. Shah Maniar’s work recovers lost moral-political anti-monopoly logics to reframe contemporary debates in oligarchy theory and antitrust law.
Mr. Shah Maniar received the 2025 Giancarlo Doria Prize for his paper, “Levelling Monsters: Monopoly, Rights, and the ‘Public’ State,” as well as a graduate research grant from the Columbia Center for Political Economy for archival work. Prior to enrolling at Columbia, he served as a paralegal specialist in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he reviewed Hart-Scott-Rodino Act merger filings and contributed to the United States v. Google litigation. He holds an A.B. in government from Georgetown University.
