Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and public intellectual. From 2008 to 2026 he was Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.

For 14 years, until February 2008, he was the Executive Director of The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank he founded in 1994. He holds an arts degree from the Australian National University and an economics degree with first class honours from the University of Sydney. He completed a doctorate in the economics of development at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.

Clive has held visiting academic positions at Yale University, the University of Oxford, University College London, Heidelberg University and Sciences Po in Paris.

In 2009 Clive was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his contribution to public debate and public policy. Later that year he was the Greens candidate in the by-election for the federal seat of Higgins. In 2012 he was appointed by the Federal Government to the Climate Change Authority, from which he resigned in 2016.

Clive has published on a wide range of subjects but is best known for his books, a number of which have been best-sellers. They include Growth Fetish (2003), Affluenza (with Richard Denniss, 2005), Silencing Dissent (edited with Sarah Maddison, 2007), Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change, (2010) and What Do We Want? The story of protest in Australia (2016). His 2017 book, Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene, examined the philosophical implications of the Anthropocene.

In 2018, his controversial book, Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia, was published by Hardie Grant after three other publishers pulled out citing fear of punishment from Beijing. It became an immediate best-seller, and has been published in Chinese, Japanese and several other languages. It was followed in 2020 by Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, co-authored with German Sinologist Mareike Ohlberg. It too has been published in several languages, including Chinese.

In 2022, Clive’s memoir was published by Hardie Grant as Provocateur: A Life of Ideas in Action. More recently his books The Privileged Few (with Myra Hamilton, 2024), Living Hot (with George Wilkenfeld, 2024) and Negotiating the End of the World: Kant, Schmitt, and the Global Climate Struggle (2026) have been published. His book Gathering Storm: Climate Risk and American Vulnerability will be published in 2027.

This website is now “frozen”. He publishes articles on his Substack.