David Held was born to industrialist Peter Held and Gisela in Britain where he spent most of his childhood. He took his undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester; upon completing his doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge. He held numerous visiting appointments in the United States, Australia, Canada, Spain and Italy, among other places. Held co-founded Polity press in 1984, which has become a leading publisher in the social sciences and humanities across the world. He was also the general editor for Global Policy, an academic journal started in 2008 that focuses on bridging the gap between academics and practitioners on issues of global significance. In January 2012, he succeeded Professor Maurice Tucker as Master of University College, Durham, alongside his chair in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. Held died in College on 2 March 2019 after suffering ill health. He is survived by his wife, the Psychoanalyst and Filmmaker and their two children Jacob and Zachary Joseph Held. He is also survived by Rosa and Josh Held, the children from a previous marriage to the novelist Michelle Spring.
Research
Since his first book was published in 1980, David Held pursued a multilevel inquiry into the nature and changing form of national and international politics. This approach involved three kinds of work. First, it involved extensive empirical enquiry into the dynamic character, structural elements and governance failures of contemporary society. The empirical dimensions of his work included books such as Global Transformations, Globalization/Anti-globalization, Global Inequality and Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need it Most. These books map the changing global context of politics, how the world has become increasingly interconnected, and how failures of leadership and negotiation at the global level are creating a breakdown of multilateralism and global governance. Second, he was investigating the changing nature and form of the modern state and the locus of the political good. Held examined the question of whether the nation state alone, as typically assumed by political theory, can be the sole home of democracy, accountability and the rule of law. This entailed a critical evaluation of the concepts of democracy, sovereignty, governance and cosmopolitanism, among other concepts. Books that have explored these themes include: Democracy in the Global Order, Models of Democracy, Cosmopolitanism: ideals and realities. The third element of Prof. Held’s work was to explore how and in what ways one can move beyond the crises and dilemmas of politics and governance in the contemporary world. Books such as Global Covenant, Debating Globalization and a wide range of academic articles set out the contours of a multiactor, multilevel democratic politics framed by the fundamental principles of democracy, justice and sustainability. Accordingly, Held’s work explored, on the one hand, the shift in politics from nation states to what he called a world of ‘overlapping communities of fate' and, on the other hand, how democratic standards and cosmopolitan values can be entrenched in the global order. In pursuing this multilevel approach Prof. Held saw himself working within the classic tradition of political theory which has always been concerned with how to characterize the world in which we live, how to develop and reach normative goals such as liberty, democracy and social justice, and how to move from where we are to where we might like to be. Prof. Held’s response to this challenge was to explore the way globalization has altered the landscape of politics, how cosmopolitanism provides ideals that enable one to rethink politics and the political good, and to pursue political stepping stones that could help embed this agenda. He offered a contribution to a pressing dialogue of our times: how to resolve collective action problems, nationally and globally, through institutions and governance arrangements that enhance democracy, social justice and the participation of all citizens in a democratic public life.
Links to Libya
In March, 2011, Held's name came to be linked with the LSE Libya Links controversy. Held was an advisor of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who received his PhD from LSE in 2008.
