He is a specialist in European philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries, especially Rousseau, Fichte, and Hegel.
Neuhouser graduated from Wabash College (Crawfordsville, IN), summa cum laude, 1979, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
[2] Neuhouser's focus is on German Idealism and continental social theory.
He has published four books: Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2000), which argues for the centrality of "social freedom" in Hegel's political thought; Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford University Press, 2008); and Rousseau's Critique of Inequality: Reconstructing the Second Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
His latest work Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and Durkheim (Cambridge University Press, 2023) is centered on ideas of "social pathology" in 18th, 19th and 20th-century philosophy.