Lea Ypi

What Is Moral Socialism? “If we seek an answer to the waverer who asks us whether he should be a socialist or not,” wrote the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer more than a century ago, “we do need Kant’s ethics.” This project offers a critique of capitalism and a defense of socialism that focuses on the Enlightenment idea of freedom as moral agency. Ypi makes a moral case for socialism by exploring the political implications of the traditional definition of the Enlightenment as “the emergence of human beings from their own self-incurred immaturity.” The project focuses on three main themes: the critique of reason as the foundation of a new (post-capitalist) vision of society; the political implications of an analysis of freedom focused on the idea of human beings as ends in themselves; and the importance of a critical philosophy of history for resurrecting hope. Ypi explores these topics from both a historical and an analytical perspective, one that draws on the history of philosophy, contemporary critical theory, and liberal theories of justice, while also re-examining traditional Marxist interpretations of political and economic institutions. She also engages with postcolonial and postmodern critiques of the Enlightenment, showing their limitations for reimagining socialism for the 21st century. Finally, she defends the importance for socialism of a notion of political progress understood as the process of learning from the trials and the failures of the past, suggesting that this effort requires societies to both reflect on the tragedies of state socialism in the 20th century and work on inspiring democracy to overcome capitalism in the 21st.

Lea Ypi will be working on her new book project, titled Indignity, which is under contract with Penguin Press. The book will follow the journey of a woman from Ottoman Salonica to a life under surveillance in post-war Communist Albania. The book explores the moral and political meanings of dignity, individual and collective, in connection to questions of truth and reconciliation, historical injustice and the relationship between fact and fiction.