Richard E. Flathman (August 6, 1934 – September 6, 2015) was the George Armstrong Kelly Professor of Political Science, emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for having pioneered, with Brian Barry, David Braybrooke, Felix Oppenheim, and Abraham Kaplan, the application of analytic philosophy to political science. He was a leading advocate of liberalism and a champion of individuality. He defended a conception of social freedom according to which it is "negative, situated, and elemental."
Flathman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1934. He received his PhD from Berkeley in 1962. He has been a professor at Johns Hopkins since 1975, and was chair of his department from 1979 to 1985. Prior to joining Hopkins, he taught at the Universities of Washington and Chicago, and at Reed College.
With his colleague and interlocutor William E. Connolly, Flathman founded what is sometimes called the "Hopkins School" of political theory. He died on September 6, 2015, at the age of 81.[1]