Public Lecture by Lea Ypi: Freedom, progress and capitalism

About the lecture

In this lecture, Professor Lea Ypi will reflect on the concept of progress. She will suggest that we make political progress not when we approximate an ideal of justice that is always known to us, but when political institutions reflect what we learn from the trials and failures of the past. To outline how these learning processes take place, Professor Ypi will reflect on the ideal of freedom in relation to a particular economic model (the liberal capitalist one) and a particular institutional framework (roughly speaking the one that centres on progress through the nation-state).

About Lea Ypi

Lea Ypi is the Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the LSE and a fellow of the British Academy. A native of Albania, she studied Philosophy and then Literature at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and was a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She is the recipient of many prizes, including the Philip Leverhulme Prize for exceptional research achievement and the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in Political Science. Her last book, Free, was awarded the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2022, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the Costa Biography Award 2021, and the Gordon Burn Prize 2022, and has been sold in more than 30 languages. She contributes regularly to The Guardian and Financial Times. Indignity is her most recent book.

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