Academic
Yascha Mounk is a PhD Candidate in the Government Department at Harvard University. His broad research interests span from intellectual history via normative political theory to European politics.
Yascha’s academic CV is available here.
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Projects:
The Moral and Political Significance of Luck
In my thesis, I argue that moral philosophers, political theorists and even policy makers have increasingly become concerned with neutralizing the effects of luck on human life. But the seemingly utopian vision of a moral system or a political society in which the effects of luck have been wholly done away with is actually dystopian. Luck is so constitutive of who we are - so intertwined with our moral, our political and our personal lives - that the ambition to guard against it is theoretically incoherent and normatively undesirable.
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Political Theory, History and Truth (Under Review):
Quentin Skinner has offered persuasive reasons why the study of the past is an important part of political theory. In particular, three “uses of history” - history as antidote, history as archaeology and history as genealogy – can generate insights we would be unlikely to arrive at by means of philosophical speculation alone.
However, the Skinnerian defense of the relevance of history does not posit a necessary link between historical accuracy and contemporary relevance. It leaves open the possibility that we could learn from the past even as we get it wrong. I therefore argue that political theorists can do outstanding work by drawing on historical texts even if they are mistaken about the meaning of those texts.
(To request a copy of this paper, please contact me at mounk [at] fas [dot] harvard [dot] edu.)
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Lies and Politics:
I am currently at work on a paper that proposes a taxonomy of forms of political deception. I argue that we have paid too much attention to the classic lie. As a result, we are led to ask unfruitful questions, such as: did Bill Clinton lie when he claimed not to have had “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky?
My analysis of three ingredients of political deception allows us to understand more subtle, and more dangerous, forms of political action - from Glenn Beck’s fake tears to Silvio Berlusconi’s deliberate debasement of Italian political discourse.
