Thomas A. Metzger was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1990 to 2005. He taught at the University of California, San Diego, from 1970 to 1990. Metzger was born in 1933 and obtained a PhD from Harvard University in 1967.

In both English and Chinese, his publications concern China's intellectual and institutional history, policy issues pertaining to China and Taiwan, and contemporary political philosophy. They include The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy: Legal, Normative, and Communication Aspects (1973), Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture (1977), A Cloud across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between Chinese and Western Political Theories Today (2005), The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel: Essays on Political Philosophy in Our Modern Era of Interacting Cultures (2012), and The Confucian Source of Chinese Modernity: Essays on Chinese Intellectual and Institutional History (forthcoming).

He has held visiting professorships at National Taiwan Normal University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, East China Normal University, Wuhan University, Peking University, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He gave the 1994 Ch'ien Mu Lecture in History and Culture at New Asia College and the Chinese University of Hong Kong; in 2001, he was appointed adviser to the Department of History at Tsing-hua University.