Raised in Berkeley, California, Matthew Crawford studied Physics at U.C. Santa Barabara, then earned the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in the history of political thought. He continues to reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. Crawford is known for unexpected and penetrating books including the New York Times best seller Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009), Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (HarperCollins, 2020), and The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015). Crawford’s books have been translated into seven languages.

His shorter writings have appeared in First Things, Wall Street Journal, The New Atlantis, The Hedgehog Review, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Esprit, Unherd, Compact, and at his widely popular Substack, Archedelia.

Like Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Crawford delights in the self-reliance of getting ones’ hands dirty, with direct engagement with the world of material objects. Crawford writes that this devotion comes with “some measure of independence—both from purveyors of magic and from cultural despair.” Inspired by Pirsig to “seek his own accommodation with modern life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to technology, nor a naive faith in it,” Crawford wrote a foreword essay for Smithsonian magazine’s 50th anniversary of the novel.

From his perch as a Future of Freedom Fellow at the Independent Institute, Matthew Crawford will continue to reflect broadly on issues of human character, meaning, and technology in his Substack and in other venues. In addition, he heads an eclectic team of writers creating for Independent a collection of essays on the occasion of America’s 250th Anniversary. These forward-looking essays—addressing the fate of liberty in modern technological society—will comprise a special supplement to the fall 2026 issue of Independent Institute’s quarterly journal of political economy, The Independent Review.