Trump is a symptom, not the causeof the trouble experienced by the US.  The talk takes us back to basic democratic principles and argues that we need to understand what has gone wrong with the two institutions which, ever since the nineteenth century, have been considered crucial for making representative democracy work: political parties and free media.  A number of concrete ways to rethink and re-design these institutions are offered.

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Jan-Werner Müller studied at the Free University, Berlin, University College, London, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Princeton University. From 1996 until 2003 he was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; from 2003 until 2005 he was Fellow in Modern European Thought at the European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College. Since 2005 he has been teaching in the Politics Department, Princeton University.

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He is the author of several award-winning books, including Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (Yale UP, 2000; Chinese translation). His history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, Contesting Democracy, was published by Yale University Press in the summer of 2011 (Italian, French, Danish, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, and Serbian translations). Was ist Populismus? was published by Suhrkamp in April 2016; the University of Pennsylvania Press brought out an American version, What is Populism?, in September of 2016; the book has been published or is scheduled to be published in more than twenty other languages so far. Mueller's book Furcht und Freiheit: Für einen anderen Liberalismus was published by Suhrkamp in 2019 and won the Bavarian Book Prize. His Christian Democracy: A New Intellectual History, based on his Carlyle Lectures in Oxford, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press; his Democracy Rules will appear with FSG. His public affairs commentary and essays regularly appear the Neue Zürcher Zeitung,  the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Monde, as well as in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, the New York Times, and Project Syndicate.

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Follow Jan-Werner Müller's work:

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website: https://politics.princeton.edu/people/jan-werner-mueller

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Selected Books:

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Democracy Rules (2021)

What is Populism (2016)

Safeguarding Democracy Inside the EU: Brussels and the Future of Liberal Order (2013)

Contesting Democracy (2011)

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