Steven B. Smith (born 1951) is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University.
He received his undergraduate degree from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and continued his studies at Durham University (St Cuthbert's Society), where he completed an MPhil in 1976, with his thesis written on the social and political doctrine of G. W. F.
He was briefly employed as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin before his 1984 arrival at Yale, where he was granted tenure in 1990.
His areas of expertise are the history of political philosophy and the role of statecraft in constitutional government.
His books include Spinoza, Liberalism and Jewish Identity (1997), Spinoza's Book of Life (2003), Reading Leo Strauss (2006), The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (2009), Political Philosophy (2012) and his latest, Modernity and Its Discontents (2016).