Jan-Werner Müller Archives

Feature

When Sexism Became a Word

1968 and Feminism

March 2, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

A year can only be a snapshot, an image at best partial and at worse distorting of the complex messiness of life. For me, 1968 is indubitably a very important year. I was born in September of that year and have lived my whole life with the lingering question of ...

Feature

Illiberal Democracy and Conceptual Clarity

Report from a Debate

August 4, 2017 • by Ewa Atanassow

This piece is part of the discussion generated by Jeffrey C. Isaac’s piece, Illiberal Democracy. This May 8 in Berlin -- a date and place whose symbolism cannot be mistaken -- the Hertie School of Governance launched the 2017 issue of the Governance Report. This year’s issue is devoted to the topic of ...

Democracy

Illiberal Democracy Belongs to the Hybrid Regimes

Reflections on Jeffrey C. Isaac’s Illiberal Democracy

August 2, 2017 • by András Bozóki

Since the end of the “transition paradigm”[i] which displayed an optimistic belief in political progress, analysts had to accept that the development from dictatorship to democracy could be halted or reversed. General expectations notwithstanding, the democratic upheaval of 1989-1991 did not end in turning all dictatorships into liberal democracies. Not ...

Illiberal Democracy Belongs to the Hybrid Regimes

Feature

Trump’s Gothic Populism

Comparing Trump’s Inauguration Speech to Obama’s

February 15, 2017 • by Michael Ure

Unsurprisingly, Trump hit all the main notes of contemporary radical populism: the Manichean, moralistic distinction between the pure people and the corrupt elite; the anti-pluralist idealization of a common, unified people; and the commitment to a populist leader who directly incarnates the general will: Trump expresses himself as the pure, ...