The Idea of Moral Socialism

European Lectures on Legal Philosophy

“If we seek an answer for the wavering individual 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.” In this lecture, Lea Ypi reflects on the failures of state socialism and global capitalism in the twentieth century and suggests a new way forward. Her account seeks to revive the Enlightenment critique of technocratic reason and is grounded in a universal conception of freedom as moral agency.

”The lecture is organised by the Department of Legal Philosophy and the Department of Political Science (University of Vienna) in collaboration with the University of Graz and the London School of Economics and Political Science."

Lea Leman Ypi (born 8 September 1979) is an Albanian academic and author. She is the Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and a fellow of the American Academy of Sciences, Academia Europea and the Albanian Academy of Sciences. She recently held the Annual Chair on the Invention of Europe through Languages and Cultures at the Collège de France and was the recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.