Tuesday, 19. May 2015, 18:30 – 20:00 h
At the University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich, KOL-G-201 (Aula)
The year 1989 not only brought an end to 200 years of ideological conflict. It also opened the curtain on an era that presented the dogma of individual freedom - in politics, in the economy, in culture - as having no alternative. We are still a long way from understanding the profound social change this caused. What's more, we still lack the intellectual ambition to understand the phenomenon: We are therefore living in an age that has become "unreadable".
Mark Lilla was born in Detroit in 1956. Lilla studied economics and political science and then worked as a publicist. From 1980 to 1984 he was an editor at the neoconservative quarterly magazine "The Public Interest". He then taught at Harvard University. Lilla is primarily concerned with the political and religious history of ideas in the Western world. He has been a professor of humanities at Columbia University since 2007 and a fellow at the Institut d'études avancées in Paris from 2014 to 2015.